Finding a hotel and flight is relatively easy, but when it comes to tours and activities, the problem is that late or last-minute bookings are not always available, and the mobile experience can be limited because many websites are slow or their booking process is long and complex. Building a great mobile experience is really hard and time-consuming, but with enough attention to detail, you can succeed. In this article, Einar Þór Gústafsson will present a case study and share observations on the project he designed and built: GetLocal, an online travel-agency and booking platform in Iceland.
Read more…
Most BFA and MFA programs don’t cover traditional business skills, and companies certainly aren’t investing in cross-functional training for creative professionals. McLean Donnelly shares his personal experience.
Read more…
When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table.
Read more…
Taking your app to a new platform requires that you adapt to your users’ expectations and needs in that new medium. When moving from desktop web to mobile interfaces, developers have had to rethink interaction design to work around a constrained screen size, a new set of input gestures and unreliable network connections.
In this article, Bear Douglas and Sara Culver will walk you through their extended UX guide which will let you design a good experience end to end, but here, they’ll focus on identifying basic assumptions about users, considering UI aspects that are specific to messaging platforms, and writing app text for conversation.
Read more…
With the current state of web apps, we can rely on various UI elements to interact with users. With the Web Speech API, we can develop rich web applications with natural user interactions and minimal visual interface, using voice commands. In this tutorial, Tomomi Imura will use the API to create an artificial intelligence (AI) voice chat interface in the browser. The app will listen to the user’s voice and reply with a synthetic voice. Because the Web Speech API is still experimental, the app works only in supported browsers. The features used for this article, both speech recognition and speech synthesis, are currently only in the Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome 25+ and Opera 27+, while Firefox, Edge and Safari support only speech synthesis at the moment.
Read more…
Today, virtually all companies have to grow non-stop. What we call “growth” in the tech world is called “persuasion” in academia. With this article, Akar Sumset will show you why gamification is a great tool for growth and how persuasion science proves that. You will see how the six components of mass interpersonal persuasion relate to gamification, with well-known examples and facts for it to be easier to understand and relate to. Let’s get going!
Read more…
Paul Boag has been working on the web for over 22 years now, and he feels like he wasted many of those years. To help you avoid making similar mistakes and wasting valuable years of your life, in this article, Paul shares his lessons learned and hard truths at the start of his career.
Read more…
In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into the fine details of designing better slider controls for selecting a value or a range of values. A slider is helpful because it allows users to explore a wide range of options quickly. The main point of interaction with the slider is to display options quickly. This means not forcing the user to click on a button to see the outcome or wait until the result is displayed. Feedback should be smooth and continuous. However, sliders are just a bit too difficult to use, require just a bit too much precision, are a bit too confusing to navigate, and are a bit too difficult to grab and move around. After a close look at perfect accordions and date and time pickers, let’s turn our attention to sliders, with do’s and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one.
Read more…
Strong graphic design makes transportation systems more attractive. Graphical language can be so iconic that you can even buy all sorts of souvenirs with its elements: t-shirts, umbrellas, shower curtains. This helps cities get rid of privately owned cars. People spend more time outside, interacting with each other. This gives small businesses a boost and makes cities more pleasant to live in. Today, Ilya Birman will show you how map design works by taking a look at a series of maps as an example.
Read more…
Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out.
Read more…
