When we combine the nature of fallbacks, we can start to see how they might help us gather feedback. Feedback is the key to understanding whether what you’ve created is valuable or not. In order to have successful products, we need to understand our users and implement great feedback loops so that we can make good decisions and build great products. Today, Ben Christine will dive into some examples from the wild in which feedback loops are missing from popular fallbacks. Then, he will follow up with ideas of how that feedback loop might look and work in those fallbacks.
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Slack has done a lot to bring teams and partners together online. It’s also done a lot to empower developers to build their own custom apps for it. Until recently, however, developers were limited by how much they could do to customize the design of those apps. That’s changing today with Block Kit. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to talk about Block Kit, Slack’s contribution to building a better collaboration UI.
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Not everything that’s round and stands out is considered to be a button. In this article, Vadim explains how you can create a proper interactive button for your users — one that shouldn’t be confused for anything else.
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It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how you can make your users feel confident of their decisions and why it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from. For example, if someone is making a habit-based decision, do not give them a lot of information, and always limit the number of choices people have to make to one, two or three. If you provide too many choices then people likely won’t choose at all.
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The visual cortex is the part of the brain that processes visual information. Each of the senses has an area of the brain where the signals for that sensory perception are usually sent and processed. Given the way our brains work, there are things you can do that will grab your user’s visual attention. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how the visual cortex of our brains plays a vital role in controlling our behavior.
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An old cliché says that “may you get everything you wish for” makes for a particularly insidious curse. As all the other browsers got easier and easier to deal with, Mat Marquis attempted to convince himself that there was at least still a challenge to quirky old IE. That even became something of a point of pride: he had gotten so good at fixing obscure IE issues that he’d learned to dodge them during the course of my everyday development, leaving nothing to dread come the big “open it up in IE and see what broke” phase. With Edge soon making the switch to Chrome’s rendering engine — well, for better or worse, a bitter wish is coming true.
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It’s not just micro-moment design problems that can cause trouble. Designers often spend a lot of time on macro design issues, and sometimes less so on critical micro-moment design issues. That might be a mistake. Macro design issues can result in massive UX problems, too. In this article, Susan Weinschenk will take a closer look at how to avoid such failures and why they are critical to the UX success of any product.
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A 404 page should do more than apologize for poor navigation on behalf of your website. There are some 404 pages that go above and beyond. Rather than the stark white of a standard 404 error page, these pages take an opportunity to speak to users in a more personal tone. Excellent 404 pages are exactly like getting an unexpected treat from a friendly face. In this article, Shelby Rogers will show you why making an effort with a 404 page could better your website’s chances of people coming back despite the inconvenience, and how to track those errors to reduce how often people see it.
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The mobile web is a booming place right now, which means web designers are spending lots of time trying to figure out how to win over this particular class of users. One way not to do that? Dark patterns. While your company may get some superficial and short-term gains in the process, nothing good will come from it in the long-run.
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Many of us are taught to make sure our sites can be used via keyboard. Why is that, and what is it like in practice? Chris Ashton did an experiment to find out. He hopes to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Chris used the web for a day without JavaScript. Today, he forces himself to navigate the web using just his keyboard.
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