Dammed up inside our heads are creative waterfalls of fresh interactions, transitions, and animations. But how are we supposed to communicate them to our teams, our developers? How do we get them out of our heads? Through a game of charades? Not being able to “show” the interactions and animations that bring our designs to life is one of the common struggles plaguing our industry. Exacerbating the urgency of this challenge is the simple fact that we now design for screens that can be tapped, pinched, swiped, zoomed, and more.
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The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
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In the context of software development, a product is the website, application or online service that users interact with. Depending on the size of the company and its products, a product manager could be responsible for an entire system or part of a system. This is confusing because, in most contexts, a product is a thing you sell to people. Product managers often get confused with category managers, which are the team that sources and merchandises the products sold on an e-commerce website. So, yes, “product” isn’t the best word for it, but it’s what we’ve got, But do companies really need product managers? And, if we can agree on that, what are the characteristics of a good one? Also, where does this role fit in an organization’s structure? Let’s explore these questions.
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Visual-feedback and bug-tracking services are becoming ever more popular, and integrating one of them into their workflow would simplify the communication process of any web developer. Fortunately, today’s web provides various solutions to optimize the communication process. In this article, Lusya Galkina has selected her top five tools and compared their features, functionality and pricing. She hopes that this review will simplify your workflow and speed up communication between your team and clients.
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Depending on how a user browses the Internet, modal windows can be downright confusing. Modals quickly shift visual focus from one part of a website or application to another area of content. This scenario is more common than it should be. And it’s fairly easy to solve, as long as you make your content accessible to all through sound usability practices. In this article, Scott O’Hara has set up a demo of an inaccessible modal window that appears on page load and that isn’t entirely semantic. First, interact with it using your mouse to see that it actually works. Then, try interacting with it using only your keyboard.
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Shocking user interfaces costs companies in productivity, training and even the customer experience. People are fed up with inadequate internal systems. Many of those interviewed had given up on the official software. Instead, they use tools like Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote. Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to fix this.
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In a previous article, Svetlin Denkov briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, he will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn’t feel like a long journey at all. We’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last years about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. In this article you will find a little story about the things that happened on this little website over the last year. Thanks for keeping us reading throughout all these years. It means a lot. You are quite smashing indeed. You should know that.
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To fully realize that creativity, successful developers need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this, but the cost of continually sending your team to workshops and training days can quickly become unsustainable. Within your team lies a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience that can be shared and developed further. With a little effort and using resources freely available on the web, you can increase the technical competence of the team organically, with much lighter demands on time and cost.
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JavaScript-based animation is often as fast as CSS-based animation — sometimes even faster. CSS animation only appears to have a leg up because it’s typically compared to jQuery’s $.animate(), which is, in fact, very slow. However, JavaScript animation libraries that bypass jQuery deliver incredible performance by avoiding DOM manipulation as much as possible. In this article, Julian Shapiro will smash some myths, dive into some real-world animation examples and improve your design skills in the process. If you love designing practical UI animations for your projects, this article is for you!
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