CategoryWeb Design

March 14, 2023 — Perhaps more than any other person in history, Leonardo da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are just as applicable to the web today as they were in Renaissance Italy. Read more…

January 11, 2023 — Captioning can be much more than text. Design patterns for better UX of subtitles, captions, video players, transcripts and on-screen text. Read more…

April 6, 2022 — Breadcrumbs UX are often neglected, but they can be extremely helpful when designing a complex navigation. We can improve them with sideways navigation, clearer breadcrumbs paths and accordions on mobile. Read more…

August 5, 2021 — How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? In this article, Vitaly Friedman will take a look to common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix these issues and when disabling buttons actually makes sense. We’ll start from the beginning, looking into when disabled buttons cause more trouble than help. Read more…

July 14, 2021 — Too often the filtering experience on the web is broken and frustrating, making it just unnecessarily difficult for customers to get to that shiny comfortable range of relevant results. When designing the next filter, take a look at some of the common issues that you might want to avoid, and hopefully avoid all the frustration that comes from broken and inaccessible implementations. Read more…

May 19, 2021 — With such a complex multi-level navigation, showing the breadth of options requires quite a bit of space. Think of large eCommerce retailers and large corporate sites, catering to many audiences and having plenty of entry points. Do we need mega-dropdown hover menus in 2021? Probably not. Let’s explore things to keep in mind when designing and building a mega-dropdown, alternatives to hover menus and fine details for designing a better UX. Read more…

May 12, 2021 — They are everywhere. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a disabled submit button that never communicates what’s actually wrong, or tooltips that — once opened — cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. In this new series of articles on UX, we take a closer look at some frustrating design patterns and explore better alternatives, along with plenty of examples to keep in mind when building or designing one. Don’t miss the next ones: subscribe to our newsletter to get updates. Read more…

April 22, 2021 — Sometimes it’s the little things in web life that make us look twice. From carousels to documentation to cookie disclaimers, here are some sites taking the mundane and sprinkling in a little magic. Great ideas in web design come so thick and fast that it can be easy to miss them if you’re not careful. In this article, Frederick O’Brien brings you a small antidote to that, piecing together splashes of inspiration that caught our eye. Read more…

April 21, 2021 — As designers, we are often burdened by the responsibility of producing and managing website content. It’s not our job to write it, but it’s not the client’s either. In many cases a vacuum emerges which ultimately gets filled with poor content. In this article, Matt Saunders will show you that you can avert disaster by including content production in the design process. Read more…

February 24, 2021 — Where to put the label in a web form? In the early days, we talked about left-aligned labels versus top-aligned labels. These days we talk about floating labels. Let’s explore why they aren’t a very good idea, and what to use instead. Some people assume float labels are best because Google’s Material Design uses them. But in this case, Adam Silver recommends using conventional text fields which have the label outside the input (to tell the user what to type), and a distinct border all the way around (to make it obvious where the answer goes). Read more…