Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs.
I have another word for that sort of thing: useless.
Source: Color in UI Design: A (Practical) Framework – Medium
When it comes to creating prototypes, so many tools and methods are out there that choosing one is no easy task. Which one is the best? Luckily for you, you don’t need a sixth sense or any other superpowers in order to choose a prototyping tool. There are other, more objective means of choosing one. It all depends on your current priorities, so let’s just look at this giant list.
Find the Prototyping Tool You Need. Compare tools and find the one that fits all of your design needs.
Check out Prototyping Tools
Browserhacks is an extensive list of browser specific CSS and JavaScript hacks from all over the interwebs.
check out Browserhacks
WordPress security is often an area in WordPress left neglected or done incorrectly.
A couple of weeks ago Sitepoint held a webinar with Chris Burgess on SitePoint to discuss WordPress security and how users can start making their site more secure. Some of the topics covered include:
Check out the link below to listen to the complete talk. Lots of great tips.
Source: Head Slapping WordPress Security with Expert Chris Burgess
This is great. Need to get back into this stuff. I miss playing with wp
We all see the world through our own unique filters. These filters are based on our personal experience, culture, context/environment, and our frame of mind. And they come with an unintended side effect that most of us aren’t aware of: they cause us to falsely believe that other people see the world the same way we do.
Human beings have a natural tendency to overestimate the degree to which other people will agree with us, think like us, and behave like us.
It’s your job to protect your team from falling victim to this bias.
Keep your focus on the users. And be rigorous about identifying and challenging the assumptions your team is making about who they are and what they need.
Source: Cognitive psychology for UX: how to avoid the false consensus effect | UserTesting Blog
User on-boarding is a once in a user’s lifecycle experience that—when done well—bridges a delicate journey between your sign up page and your user’s first value gained from your product.
We refer to this moment of value as a user’s Wow or Aha! moment—Aha like, “Wow this is awesome!” Or “Aha! Now I get it!”
On-boarding experiences often include welcome messages and product tours to get users acclimated. These experiences incorporate common UI patterns that overlay or augment the app’s true interface with annotations.
We Categorized 327 User Onboarding Experiences Into 9 UI Patterns (Find Out Which You Should Use)
Download free printable device templates for UI & UX designers. Each sketch sheet contains a blank and dotted-grid version in in .png and .pdf formats
Source: Printable device sketch sheet templates for UX & UI designers
What do you notice about the website above? It doesn’t have a navigation bar. The text links are floating in space and obscured by the background image.
** This is one of those ‘lightbulb’ kind of articles. One that makes you think of something that may have previously been overlooked or even taken for granted.
-g
read more @ The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It – UX Movement
Have you ever walked into a friend’s house and realized that he has completely rearranged his furniture? Or gone to your favorite grocery store, only to find the aisles have been reorganized, and your produce, pasta sauce and preferred snacks are no longer in the same spot?
It’s a jarring experience, one that can feel temporarily shocking and strange. This isn’t how I remember things! you might say to yourself. This isn’t right!
Human beings are creatures of habit, and once we have a model for how a certain space should look in our head, finding that model flipped on its head can disorient us.
As UX evolves our solutions become more refined, but the challenges get tougher. Jerry speaks to designers to pinpoint the 3 persistent UX mistakes of 2015.
Sporting goods retailer announces that FieldandStreamShop.com is now live, selling the outdoors goods of its growing Field & Stream retail chain.
…
Dick’s operates FieldandStreamShop.com in-house, as it does for its Golf Galaxy chain. The company has been working to operate all of its ecommerce functions in-house as it continues to pursue an omni-channel sales strategy.
Source: Dick’s Sporting Goods launches ecommerce site for Field & Stream – Pittsburgh Business Times
When Apple finally released the Apple Watch this past spring, they launched a series of commercials touting how useful the device could be in our lives. One of the commercials depicted a young tourist on a trip to Berlin. While dancing at a club, she glances at her Apple Watch to read lyrics to a song that the DJ is playing. The use case was such a stretch that if I had significant cash reserves, I would be compelled to short sell Apple stock. This was the clearest evidence yet that despite the very strong importance of and interest in great experience design, the UX industry is about to endure a thorough shakedown.
Source: Saying Goodbye to the Great UX Design Bonanza of 2004-2016
the best part of this article… which is awesome from start to finish by the way:
Brand “digital storytelling” or whatever every agency wants to call it is an overhyped wonder pill to realize market differentiation
I wish it weren’t true. After all, who doesn’t love a good story? The concept of brand storytelling is indeed critical, but the notion that digital/UX plays a significant lead role is exceedingly rare. And deploying a parallax effect for long scroll narrative pages is the hipster beard of web design. Which brings me to the next point.
..[S]tyle guides are particularly important in web projects. They are often the only way to get a consolidated overview of all the components of your site in a single place. That is why this article is designed to be a crash course in style guides for web design.
Unless you are designing just for the joy of it – or you are one of the fabled ‘unicorns’ who can do EVERYTHING – at some point you will encounter (and probably lock horns with) someone tasked with taking your pretty little pictures and turning them into a real world product. Like cats and dogs, these relationships are historically known for being… strained.
Top 6 frustrations developers have with designers | Web design | Creative Bloq
A Good User Interface has high conversion rates and is easy to use. In other words, it’s nice to both the business side as well as the people using it. Here is a running idea list to help you out in your next project.
Source: GoodUI
An interesting set of suggestions and a lot of good information in this article. We have all heard of the standard color psychology ideas but the author has some new bits of information – like rounded corners on buttons drawing the eyes inward.
Source: 5 Practical Ways to Increase Conversions on Your Website
It is often thought that user experience is a fancy synonym for design. This is not the case. User experience doesn’t start with design, but with the knowledge that informs the design process. Before someone is a user of a product they are an individual, and it’s this prior active engagement of the user that is key to imagining and designing a product that will fit their needs and deliver an experience that meets or exceeds expectations.
Excellent article that puts terms to some wireframing techniques that I’ve done for previous client work. Especially helpful with very content-heavy sites that are more focused on content curation than attraction through marketing.
Content wireframes block out general content categories and force you, as Stephen so beautifully put it, to design from the content outwards.
It really isn’t complicated. In fact, it involves two steps:
- Create a content inventory.
- Create a visual hierarchy of the survivors of that list.
This is an important aspect of job growth and training that I don’t think is done enough. Hearing about developers getting PSDs that are 300dpi and filled with unnamed, ungrouped layers – shameful.
When working in teams made up of designers and front-end developers, there can be a lot of frustration and confusion when it comes to handing assets over from one team member to another. These might be design mockups or icons or high fidelity imagery for banners and the like. Regardless of the content of these handovers, there can always be improvements to this process.
Depending on the project, developers will often require certain materials in order to make development as smooth as possible. So, I’d like to review a couple of steps that designers might take in order to alleviate these pressure points.
Read up on some best practices @ The Asset Handover | CSS-Tricks
Placeholder Images for every case. Webdesign or Print. Just put a custom url in your html and you receive a proper placeholder picture
Be sure to check out the Placeholder Generator for plenty of fun options for your next group of FPO images!
Bobby 10:42 am on January 30, 2017 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I struggle with Color Theory too. good read. thanks.