26 Oct Why designers sketch
Almost every experience we design goes through a hand sketching / whiteboarding phase. ...
Ideas
29 Aug UX Design Myths
The 5 common myths we encounter about UX design. ...
15 Aug User roles vs. personas
If you are in the UX field, you may have heard of both user roles and user personas. But is there a difference between a persona and a role? And...
30 Jul A more intuitive treemap?
We find tree maps an extremely helpful way for people to see a big picture of a situation made up of many granular parts. With skillful application of color palettes, coloring and...
16 May Designing with Startups
As a design firm, we’ve worked with a wide variety of companies, from large enterprises looking to create a new product to very small companies just getting started. By working...
08 May How do UX and AI work together?
At GroupVisual.io, user experience with AI-powered products has been on our minds lately. We want to share some of what we've learned, and put forth some questions for the design...
29 Apr Hooked: Data Visualization and User Motivation
When designing data visualizations, many practitioners focus on what is the right type of chart or visual metaphor to display a particular data set. It certainly makes sense to focus...
31 Mar The Value of Usability Testing
While usability testing requires some extra calendar time and budget, we have found the results to be well worth the investment. For example, when an app is very new and...
12 Jul Rethinking Gamification
I first heard the term "gamification" in 2012, when a friend of mine at design school suggested we incorporate game mechanics into one of our projects. Our project was an...
01 Feb How the Whiteboard Inspired Our New Website
When we started discussions about our website redesign, the challenge was understanding where to begin and how to approach the project. We had a current website to work off of...
03 Sep From Design to Code: Collaborating with Developers
Ever since I joined GVio as a UI/UX designer a little over two years ago, I've had the opportunity to collaborate directly with developers (both in-house and remote teams). During...
13 Aug Learning to Love the Process
At Gvio, we work on a range of projects, from dashboards to mobile apps. Behind each one, we think granularly about every step the user takes—the way they get from...
06 Aug Self-Tracking: Problems and Possibilities for an Emerging Industry
Self-tracking, or collecting personal data to achieve quantitative self-knowledge, is a reoccurring topic of interest both in my work and personal life. I have spent a good deal of time...
15 Jul The Feedback Sandwich
Criticism is good. It helps people improve their work. When a designer is told that the interface they created is not convenient, they improve it and create a better product....
10 Jul Understanding the Journey: It’s All About Context
Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. There are many ways we can...
02 Jul Fitting It All In: Designing For Complexity Within Interactivity
Zillow can be an interesting site to explore. While it's always been a source of data for property values and such, recently they've been expanding their scope into quantifying and...
19 Jun But first, sketch.
Just wave your magic wand and make it look pretty! I can't tell you the number of times this has been said to me. Often, people don't realize that design doesn't...
27 May Why We Adopted Agile Design
Agile methodology has been around for a while, but has traditionally been applied more to development than design processes. When I took over management of Groupvisual.io from my co-founder Angela...
19 Sep Visual Data Input
People abandon surveys for a number of reasons. Too long. Too boring. Too in-depth. Typical survey tools offer a limited amount of complexity for data collectors. Common inputs are multiple...
17 Sep Key Decisions Require Vision
Next-Generation Business Intelligence through Interactive Visual Analysis In business, the best information wins. But today's enterprises are struggling to make use of the volumes and complexity of available data. Next-generation, visual...