User Experience

Have you ever visited a website on a nice, big monitor and thought how easy it is to use while navigating through pages and completing forms with your mouse? Have you ever then visited that website on your mobile or, god forbid, smart TV at a later date and wanted to throw your device or remote out of the window in frustration? Have you ever got tired of long, tedious questions who’s purpose is simply to lead into a larger point? Sure you have!

As you’ve probably heard, a Google update called ‘Core Web Vitals’ (CWV) is coming in May. As a designer, an update like this isn’t usually a concern for me but this one is different. Core Web Vitals is Google’s first major attempt at measuring the user experience of a website and this caught my attention.

Imagine being shoved in a house with a bunch of strangers and being expected to couple up with someone based on little information other than how they look. Chances are after a couple of days you're going to realise that you're not compatible. The same goes for your brand. It's not just about how it looks on the surface or first impressions.

I’m really beginning to dislike the term User Experience (UX) in relation to digital design, it’s overuse and mis-interpretation is not only alarming, but just plain annoying. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important and as the title of this post suggests, I am not against it. In fact I often use it to explain what I do or more importantly what my designs do, but that right there is my point. Good design is good user experience.

The past few years has seen a major rise in the use of the term “user experience” or UX as it is commonly known. It seems to be everywhere, especially in the digital space.

We have recently embarked on a project for our longstanding client Making Research Better. After we originally delivered some print materials and a website, they came to us with the new challenge of individually targeting their Ophthalmology patients.

Since I joined Cargo last year one of my main challenges as a designer has been learning to design for responsive websites. Responsive web design comes with it’s own set of challenges, much of which is well documented over the web.