Blog & resources
We like to share our learnings, thoughts, opinions and ‘how to’ knowledge on different design-related topics.
The importance of continuous discovery for product success
Discover why continuous discovery is crucial for product success. This blog explores how ongoing user research drives informed, evidence-based decisions, highlights key discovery activities and explains how to embed continuous discovery into your development process.
Wireframes vs. UI design deliverables
Discover the difference between wireframes (structure and flow) and UI design (visual styling and branding) in our design process. Learn what to expect at each stage of your project for better results.
How to select the right participants for user research
Discover how to select the right participants for user research by grouping users based on their needs and behaviours, and ensuring a diverse cross-section for more insightful results.
How to manage a phased product rebrand: a user-centric approach for a smooth transition
Rebranding a digital product can be challenging, especially when managing user expectations and technical constraints. In this blog post, we share practical, user-centric strategies for a phased product rebrand. Learn how to ensure a smooth transition that keeps your users engaged while navigating the complexities of legacy systems.
Conducting user research with children
As designers, we are very much aware that effective design hinges on research. However, researching with minors presents unique hurdles, demanding tailored methodologies that honour their developmental stages and ethical considerations. In this blog post, we distil our experience into key insights and practical tips for conducting research with children.
User-centric cyber security is the next big thing for the industry
Effective cybersecurity relies on people at different levels as it’s a complex field with a lot of data and technicalities. Therefore, user-centric design (and UX research) is a key factor in ensuring that once cyber threats, vulnerabilities and other risks are identified, they can be reported and managed as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Dual Track: A better approach for more user-centric product design
When designing products, user needs, business goals and business requirements all need to be considered. Great products are created when all 3 combine, but following conventional development principles means the needs of the user are often overlooked, leading to sub-par products and poor user experience.
Laws of UX for better user experience
Human psychology plays a key role in shaping user experiences (UX) in the digital space. UX designers aim to understand human behaviour and align with pre-existing mental models to deliver experiences that feel intuitive.
User Personas - What are they and why do we use them?
Personas help guide a human-centric perspective into decision-making. By bringing together user preferences, context, and challenges, personas empower product teams to craft solutions that resonate deeply with their audience.
How to run user research for a diverse set of users
Diversity and inclusion should be central to user research, ensuring that all voices are heard and valued. By prioritising these principles, businesses can create products that resonate with a broad spectrum of users.
Bias in user research
The effectiveness of research can be compromised by various biases that can distort data and skew insights. Recognising and addressing these biases is important to ensure accurate insights and positive product outcomes.
Ensuring product success: Product Managers and UX Designers
A Product Manager is responsible for harmonising UX, Tech and Business requirements. While ideas are valuable, executing them is difficult!
User-centred design on a budget: How Fruto can help
Implementing a user centric approach on a budget enhances user experiences and business outcomes.
Why using analytics in your UX process strengthens decision-making
Using analytics to support decision making for better user experience and business outcomes.
Optimising mobile user experience: Key considerations for success
In today's digital era, where mobile devices have become an indispensable part of daily life, catering to mobile users is not just a choice but a necessity. In this blog post, we'll delve into key considerations for creating a seamless mobile user experience that fosters customer satisfaction and retention.
Accelerating time to market: leveraging UX for operational efficiency
In the race to bring products and features to market rapidly, a strategic focus on UX design can be a game-changer.
The role of research in product design & development
Understanding your users is a key element in creating a successful product. Well-executed research projects can be a key driver of success.
Brand health and key metrics to measure it
Discover brand health essentials and learn how to measure the key metrics effectively.
UX Strategy
This short guide covers everything you need to know about UX strategy: from benefits, responsibilities and guiding principles, to how and when to set one.
Scaling UX design capability
UX skills are in high demand, but hiring design talent to improve your product development can be a bit of a minefield. But there are ways to make it easier...
Designing for all: Accessibility 101
What is accessibility and how it can benefit your design work.
Effective user research analysis
Discover how to use a Research Wall to organise your user interview data & capture key insights from mixed sources to create better user experiences. |
Designing medical imaging software
The challenges of designing medical imaging software for devices such as MRI & CT scanners, X-rays and ultrasounds - and the crucial role of user research.
Is a Design Sprint really your best option?
Design Sprints are a great tool, but they’re not the only option. Find out how UX studio Fruto adapts the approach to deliver better design outcomes.
Leading the way in Educational UX Design
Expert speakers discuss challenges and impact of design on digital content and services in Oxford event hosted by UX studio Fruto & partners, Oriel Square.
Understanding the role of design in product development
If product development isn't quite producing the results it needs to, there's a high likelihood you need to get your Design team involved sooner. Here's why...
Brand strategy to improve customer experience
A brand is the perception people have of your business. It's what they think, feel, or say about your business. Planning and executing your brand elements from the beginning will help your business grow and thrive in the long term.
New to UX? Tips for starting a new job
Starting a new job can be daunting at the best of times, let alone straight from university. This blog post gives you tips for starting a new job.
Designing with the Government's Digital Service
Designing with GDS for a government service. This blog outlines the benefits and challenges of working with the GDS design system and a few tips that helped me when working with the design system.
How we deliver our designs
When it comes to UI design we have a huge wealth of experience and expertise at Fruto in delivering highly intuitive, accessible, and visually exceptional interfaces. We can offer page templates, pattern libraries, seamless dev handover, and implementation support during the development process.
Market vs User Research
One of the most common questions we get asked by product teams is “we’ve already done market research; do we really need to do user research, too?". If you’re designing a digital product or service, most likely, the answer would be: Yes - you do need both market research and UX research!
UX Oxford talk: Building a robust design system foundation
In this talk, Carmen takes us through the concept of design systems, the elements that come together to form them and she gives us a practical step by step guide to the creation of a robust design system foundation.
An introduction to Service Design and the Service Blueprint
What is Service Design and how does a Service Blueprint help you understand and design a great end-to-end experience for service users? |
Technology is a wonderful enabler, but it shouldn’t drive design
Improving product experiences when being influenced by conflicting interests is hard. Tech driving design decisions is not the answer. Here's why...
An introduction to the design thinking process
New to UX design? Explore the 6-stage design thinking process that helps ensure your design solutions are human-centred, by putting user needs first.
Remote Brand Strategy workshops at Fruto
This week at Fruto, I ran a series of Brand Strategy Workshops with our whole team, helping us to clarify our internal and external brand.
11 Easy productivity techniques for creative professionals
Tips and tricks for creative professionals to improve their time management skills.
Thoughts on a code of ethics for interaction design
From 'stink patterns' to smartphone addiction: how can we tackle the interactions that make us spend too much time online?
Digital design considerations for child vs adult user groups
A guide to designing better user interfaces for children
Strategic vs Tactical UX
Not sure what the difference is between tactical and strategic UX approaches, or which would be best for your next project? This post is for you.
The UX design process
Learn exactly what a good UX design process entails and why you need one, and download a template of the process we typically follow at Fruto.
Design leadership skills
Expert design practitioner skills aren’t the same ones that you need for design leadership. Here’s what you need to know and learn to succeed...
Design leadership: How to establish a design-led culture
A 7-step guide to establishing a design-led culture, no matter where on the UX maturity ladder you’re starting your transformation journey from.
Giving constructive design feedback
When a designer asks you for feedback on their work, how do you go about it so that the feedback is effective and motivates the designer to improve? Here are is a technique I use...
Designing for healthcare
When it comes to UX design, healthcare has to be one of the areas where it’s most critical that it’s done right. The difference between good and bad design could literally make the difference between life or death. From patient care to the clinical experience, there are many aspects to designing digital products for healthcare...
Product design in educational publishing
We all know that UX is a key factor in customer satisfaction. But knowing this, and actually delivering on it, aren’t always the same thing. And it certainly isn’t always a straightforward process - with internal politics, multiple user groups and external factors all impacting your ability to achieve the perfect user experience...
UX Oxford talk: UI colour palette
In this talk Carmen will take us through a hands-on approach to the creation of colour palettes for UI Design.
Enliven your brand with stickers
Stickers are relatively simple to design and develop. And due to their playful nature, Sticker Mule custom stickers are easy to share and encourage individuals to engage with your brand.
Practical creation and application of a UI colour palette
The goal of this webinar is to offer a hands-on approach to the creation of colour palettes for UI Design. In this webinar we apply concepts to create and successfully apply a UI-focused colour palette to an app interface.
How do you ensure that the website or app you are building is intuitive?
To create an intuitive and user-friendly website or app, there are a few parts to it...
Interview with our MD Mariana Morris on the value of UX
In this interview, our Managing Director Mariana Morris talks about why businesses should consider investing in UX and UI design, what makes a product intuitive to use and the best way to get users' feedback.
Running remote stakeholder workshops
In this webinar, we’ll show you how to get buy-in from key stakeholders, what pre-workshop activities we run to make sure it all goes smoothly, and tips on how to facilitate these sessions.
Miro templates (Miro experts)
We're happy to be featured on Miroverse with our Miro templates.
What is user experience (UX) design?
User experience (UX) design is a process that design teams use to create intuitive and user-friendly products...
What is user interface (UI) design?
A user interface is the point of interaction between the user and a digital product or service...
What’s the difference between UX and UI?
Both terms are related and there is overlap between them but they are not interchangeable...
The UX design fundamentals canvas
This canvas helps you follow a fundamental UX Design process.
Mental model mapping
A mental mod el mapping is a visual summary of the mental states that a user goes through to achieve a goal.
Running remote user research
In this webinar, we'll show how to run remote user interviews and usability tests. We'll show how we've been doing here at Fruto and talk about the best tools, practices and potential pitfalls.
Fundamentals of UX Design: Useful resources
A list of books, articles and tools to get you started in UX Design.
How to prepare and run user interviews
User interviews can help you get in-depth insights on users' needs, behaviours and motivations. This guide is to help you prepare and run user interviews.
A guide to colour in UI design
Colour has a great impact in the world around us and this is no different in User Interfaces (UI). However, it’s not always given the importance it deserves. Sometimes colour is understood as a purely aesthetic element that is completely relative and subjective. Nonetheless, colour plays a key role (on multiple levels) in the user experience of a product, and therefore it is worth our attention as designers.
How to run remote design projects
We are a fully remote UX design team. For the past 3 years, we’ve been testing design and communication tools that can make our work efficient and very collaborative. We think we have a pretty good set up now.
UI design systems
In this blog post I will define these terms and outline how a design system might be beneficial, as well as some of the drawbacks. I will also talk about how important it is to create a system that is customised to your project.
How remote working has made me a better designer
As designers, and more specifically, digital designers, remote working might not only be feasible but beneficial. Remote working is a growing trend and as a full time designer that works from home, I can see why.
From UX to UI to development
In this post I will run through what it takes to go from UX to UI, and finally to development, and I will give some tips that have helped me (as a designer) with these different hand-offs.
Things to keep in mind while doing user interviews
As a UX designer, you will likely be involved in conducting user research as it forms a critical part of the UX process. For any upcoming researcher, engaging with people in real-life contexts and settings may seem like a daunting task. This post is aimed to alleviate some of those very concerns.
Multifaceted designers: The overlooked key skills and attitudes of a good designer
There are many qualities that play a key role in becoming a good designer. These qualities are far from being only technical. A designer must be an innovator, a researcher, a communicator a connoisseur, a mediator, a problem solver and a business thinker.
How to improve the user interface (UI) of your product
UI design plays a fundamental role in the overall quality of your end product. The UI not only supports the UX work, it enriches it and expands on it by bringing together concepts from interaction design, visual design, and information architecture.
How UX can help your business grow
This article tries to address the fundamental question for the business owners and demonstrates how UX and Business growth go hand in hand.
How to improve the UX of your product
Whichever way you look at it, User Experience (UX) has a direct impact on your business. By improving customers’ experience of your product, you improve conversion rates. By increasing customer satisfaction, you keep them coming back for more.
UX for patient referral system
This talk by our MD Mariana Morris and Nick de Pennington, neurosurgeon and medical director of the Oxford Biodesign Programme, was given at the joint DHOx and UX Oxford event on UX in Healthcare at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, in October 2016, talking about how NHS Beta is digitally connecting patients to health services.