It’s not enough to simply design something and meet a goal. Finding your principles will help you find the right place to work and to do your best work. Giving your products a soul will make them better, more engaging products. The next time you’re designing, ask yourself what would make someone find your product useful, and what would make them care about it more than another product? In this article, Joshua Mauldin would like to share how he found his principles and regained a sense of fulfillment.
Read more…
If there is one thing that will stand the test of time, it’s thumb placement on mobile devices. This makes consideration of the “thumb zone”, a term coined in Steven Hoober’s research, an important factor in the design and development of mobile interfaces. In this article, Samantha Ingram will share the knowledge she’s acquired about the thumb zone and how to apply its rules to navigation, cards and swipe gestures.
Read more…
Every $92 the average company spends attracting customers, a meager $1 is spent converting them. Real conversion optimization is rooted deeply in psychology. In this article, John Stevens will analyze seven psychology studies that date as far back as 1961. Each experiment raises principles that will help you boost conversions on your website. Effective conversion optimization goes beyond simply changing a button’s color or making a few tweaks here and there. The trick is knowing the fundamental principles that make people act the way they do. Hopefully, the psychology studies reviewed in this article will provide you with some practical insight to boost your conversion rates.
Read more…
Every time the browser has to recalculate the positions and geometries of elements in the document, a reflow happens. This happens when new DOM elements are added to the page, images load or dimensions of elements change. There are many solutions for avoiding the jump effect on page load, and implementing all of these techniques would take some time, but it is totally worth it — until scroll anchoring is supported in more browsers. In this article, Michael Scharnagl will share techniques to minimize this content shifting.
Read more…
Documentation easily gets misplaced, and we find ourselves hunting around for it. Even once we have our hands on it, locating the test details can be a challenge. Some gateways seem to love providing multiple PDF files, all mysteriously titled, with the test card details buried deep within one of them. Andy Carter has found himself working with a lot of different payment gateways over the years, from the more familiar ones like PayPal and Stripe to some lesser known ones. Here are the test card numbers for some of the major payment gateways and a few lesser known ones.
Read more…
Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found that are required to make home page carousels perform acceptably with end users. He’ll outline how and why mobile and desktop implementations should differ and, lastly, suggest a simpler, problem-free alternative to home page carousels.
Read more…
Passwords are written off as inconvenient and unavoidable, but due to a combination of sensors, encryption and seasoned technology users, authentication is taking on new (and exciting) forms. In this article, Drew Thomas will show you that it’s OK to rethink common password habits, and it’s acceptable to use common sense and due diligence to create usable, secure and error-free authentication – passwords or otherwise. Most other interaction patterns have been updated over time, but no one wants to mess with password authentication. It’s time to change that!
Read more…
Can you improve your user experience with real-time features such as in-app notifications, geo-location tracking, collaboration and data visualisation? Real-time technology is fast becoming an integral part of our everyday lives; it’s in many of our favourite apps and it’ll soon be a big part of the smart homes of the future. Remember: expect today’s attractive feature to be tomorrow’s must-be. Should you be using real-time features in your product? In this article, Lauren Plews will look at the reasons why you should consider real-time.
Read more…
Pagination is still the most popular way to load new items on a website. However, the usability test sessions found “Load more” buttons combined with lazy-loading to be a superior implementation, resulting in a more seamless user experience. In this article, Christian Holst will present Baymard Institute’s usability research findings for both “Load more” buttons, infinite scrolling and pagination, including for both mobile and desktop. He’ll see how search results need to be implemented differently from category navigation, along with several pitfalls with implementation and examples from leading e-commerce websites.
Read more…
This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine — using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons learned that a traditional article would have provided. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will take you through the story of Noah, the “UX guy” for the corporate office of a regional fast food restaurant, that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allow patrons to customize their meals, place orders and earn rewards.
Read more…
