This week, we’re looking at customer journey mapping, UX research methods, hamburger icons, toolbars, and "the difference between designing for tasks and designing experiences." What are you reading?

The No-Nonsense Guide to Mapping the Customer Journey

In order to understand the people using an application, it’s imperative for developers to cultivate empathy for them. Producing a customer journey map is a handy method for getting into a user’s shoes and learning about interactions at every potential touchpoint.

Understanding the UX Research Methods

Building customer journey maps is just one of a wide spectrum of user research methods that practitioners can leverage in order to provide optimal user experiences. This article presents an overview of a large number of different user research tools and methods, categorizing the techniques based on whether they are quantitative or qualitative. 

Why It’s Totally Okay to Use a Hamburger Icon

The "hamburger icon"—those three-line navigational elements used on many mobile applications—has been criticized lately because users don’t always understand what to do with it. This post makes the case that a hamburger icon can be best used if it serves users as a secondary navigational element, not as the primary way to get around an application.

Filtering UI: A Horizontal Toolbar Can Outperform the Traditional Sidebar

When designing an e-commerce site, it’s important to make it easy for customers to quickly find what they are looking to purchase. Traditionally, a vertically scrolling sidebar has been the navigation option of choice for this purpose. This article points out that a horizontal navigational scheme may be more effective and efficient for item finding.

More Than Usable

In this fascinating, philosophy-based discussion, author Matthew Reidsma considers the “difference between designing for tasks and designing for experiences.” By designing for experiences, he argues, user experience practitioners can help users recover from the inevitable breakdowns that happen with our devices and applications.

Photo Source (Creative Commons): Jenny Cham.