CategoryUX

June 15, 2016 — Creating a flexible UI system that is consistent and easy to customize, while also scalable and cost-efficient, depends not only on how it is built, but on how it is designed. A library of components has very little value if every new design is created independently, ignoring established standards and patterns. In this article, Adriana De La Cuadra explains the value of modularity in UI design and how it ties into the process of style guide-driven development, which improves the implementation of flexible and user-friendly applications, while helping designers and developers collaborate more productively. Read more…

June 14, 2016 — Designing a city’s metro map is quite a challenging task, even when there is just one line. In this article, Ilya Birman will cover his design process. It’s going to be detailed, so, depending on your interests, this might be very boring or very exciting. In no way is this meant to be a comprehensive guide to designing a map. Each city presents its own set of problems and peculiarities. But hopefully this gives you an idea of what to look for and what to try if you take on such an assignment! Read more…

June 14, 2016 — The problem with brainstorming is, even if there are great ideas in the room, there is often no clear-cut way to decide on what ideas to take action on. But there is a technique that Jonathan Courtney has been using with all his clients over the past year to release or enhance many successful products. Over the last year he’s found that applied USM is not just a fantastic way to get ideas that nobody would have come up with on their own, it’s also the perfect alignment tool for your client or stakeholders. Let Jonathan show you exactly how it’s done. Read more…

June 6, 2016 — 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…

June 2, 2016 — In this article, Luca Leone and Anders Schmidt Hansen will investigate an alternative to the classic “pages and links” paradigm, a model dubbed “zoom navigation.” Perhaps the reason why zooming interfaces are rare is that traditional HTML linking quickly became the dominant navigation paradigm, and zooming navigation presented problems of implementation, but we have good reasons now in a multi-device world to give zooming navigation another chance and to experiment with ideas and implementations. At the end of the article, they will introduce some prototypes and discuss their technical implementations. Read more…

May 30, 2016 — When we design responsive websites, we tend to see responsive design merely as a collection of slightly differently sized rectangles, with a slightly different layout, sometimes with slightly different content poured into them. In this article, Vitaly Friedman features some of the slightly more obscure design patterns, such as responsive car-builder interfaces, mega dropdown navigation, content grids, maps and charts, as well as responsive art direction. Read more…

May 17, 2016 — An ever-growing number of web users around the world are living with dementia. They have very varied levels of computer literacy and may be experiencing some of the following issues: memory loss, confusion, issues with vision and perception. In this article, Laurence Ivil and Paul Myles will share some lessons they learned along the way about making a dementia-friendly front end on a tight budget. By making websites more accessible to a growing group of users who are so often excluded from the benefits that the internet has to offer, designers are not only supporting people living with dementia, but also those with similar accessibility challenges. Read more…

May 11, 2016 — Systems build on systems, and those simple systems can provide a key to designing for more complex spaces. In the space of digital design, if you ensure that your simplest dynamic systems of content, structure and meaning-making work as intended at a foundational level, then you can lay the groundwork for larger, more complex systems that also work as intended. In this article, Andy Fitzgerald will show you how to use a simple set of open-source tools to introduce real, dynamic content into your prototyping process from day one. This approach allows you to focus on how users understand your content from the very start of a project and to subsequently build structural, visual and technical elements atop that foundation of understanding. Read more…

April 27, 2016 — In this article, Charles Hannon will show you how to wave the structure of jokes into the structure of an interaction, so that the feeling of delight one gets from a joke is re-expressed as a more lasting form of understanding and competence through the interaction. Specifically how the very moment one does or does not get a joke, does or does not understand an interaction. Read more…

April 22, 2016 — In recent years, new prototyping tools have emerged, many for mobile design. The landscape is constantly changing, with some tools losing favor with UX designers (or UXers) and others taking their place. While this article will not serve as a complete paint-by-numbers manual for selecting a prototyping tool, Svetlin Denkov will discuss important factors that influence the selection process. Near the end of the article, the “Resources” section will point you in the direction of more specific comparisons to give you additional context for decision-making. Read more…