Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism
Good to revisit this topic every now and then.
Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism.
Tagged: UX Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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RyRy
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RyRy
Looking Beyond User-Centered Design ∙ An A List Apart Column
Looking Beyond User-Centered Design ∙ An A List Apart Column.
Interesting and measured take on this. It is my opinion that each design project will always have it’s own unique solution.. comprised of various processes and smaller solutions. It’s good to have best practices, but we can’t lose site of what we bring as front-end designers. In other words, we shouldn’t be automatons, churning out generic, indistinguishable work.
“User-centered design has served the digital community well. So well, in fact, that I’m worried its dominance may actually be limiting our field.”
Money quote: “I don’t expect UCD’s pre-eminence to change. Nor do I think it necessarily should. But a design community is most healthy when it shares a respectful variety of opinions.”
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Bobby
Bring designs to life with interactive wireframes
Bring designs to life with interactive wireframes | Feature | .net magazine.
Breandán Knowlton explains how to adapt the wireframing process to include time-based interactions and explores a range of preview techniques
This is an edited excerpt from Chapter 14 of A Practical Guide to Managing Web Projects,published by Five Simple Steps, which went on sale yesterday.
As websites get more complicated and move further away from brochureware, web builders are asked to incorporate more and more time-based interactions, more complicated on-page functions and a more immersive experience.
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Bobby
The top 50 books for web designers and developers
The top 50 books for web designers and developers
The ultimate web designer and developer book list. I have to say I agree a TON with the books on this list. And looks like I have a lot of reading to do…. ugh.
I have to agree with Cameron Moll about reading. To me it’s a chore. It’s something I have to make myself do and I’me a very slow reader but at the end of the day reading books like this only help and I find the subject fasctinating.. still.
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Bobby
Mobile Design Details: Hide/Show Passwords
LukeW | Mobile Design Details: Hide/Show Passwords.
I’m totally on board with this one. I think giving the user the option to show the password on mobile is key to them not giving up on logging in.
Masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.” …and it’s worse on mobile. –Nielsen Norman Group
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Bobby
Inspired UI – mobile patterns
Inspired UI – mobile patterns.
Get Inspired! This site is awesome for mobile appyness inspiration.
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Bobby
How to prioritise usability problems
A typical usability test may return over 100 usability issues. How can you prioritise the issues so that the development team know which ones are the most serious? By asking just 3 questions of any usability problem, we are able to classify its severity as low, medium, serious or critical.
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Bobby
5 Tips for Effective UX Leadership | UX Magazine
5 Tips for Effective UX Leadership | UX Magazine.
#4 says teach and learn.. so…
Somewhere in the world, a desperate user cries out for a UX hero. In the city, a lost tourist is looking for his hotel using a poorly designed app. In a nearby apartment, another man abandons his cart before making his first online purchase. Down the hall, his daughter struggles to complete a research paper using disorganized and unusable websites. An epidemic of unproductive web experiences is sweeping the city leaving a trail of disappointment and desperation in its wake. The world needs a hero. It’s time for each of us to rise up and say, “I am that hero!”
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RyRy
Social Media is a user experience issue | Boagworld
Excellent video post on how to better integrate social in the ux.
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Bobby
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Bobby
Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices
Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices.
Information architecture (IA) is an often-overlooked area of website design. Too often, as designers, we just let the CMS we’re using dictate how content for a site is organized. And that works fine as long as the site fits perfectly into the narrow content formats most CMSs are designed around.
But too often, a website’s content breaks the boundaries of most CMSs. Without a clear understanding of how information architecture works, we can end up creating sites that are more confusing than they need to be or, at worst, make our content virtually inaccessible. It’s a shame, considering that the basics of good information architecture are no more difficult to learn than the basics of good web design.
This guide covers the fundamentals of information architecture for organizing website content. We will look into popular IA design patterns, best practices, design techniques, and case examples.
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Bobby
Nielsen is wrong on mobile | Opinion | .net magazine
Nielsen is wrong on mobile | Opinion | .net magazine.
This is an awesome rebuttal to Nielsens latest controversial statement about how the mobile we should be handled.
For all of Jakob Nielsen’s many great contributions to web usability over the years, his advicefor mobile is just 180-degrees backward. His latest guidelines perpetuate several stubborn mobile myths that have led too many to create ‘lite’ mobile experiences that patronise users, undermine business goals, and soak up design and tech resources.
The notion that you should create a separate, stripped-down version for ‘the mobile use case’ might be appropriate if such a clean mobile use case existed, but it doesn’t.-
greg
always thought he was so stiff. has no sense of creativity.
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Bobby
Usability.gov
This site looks a bit dated but the info in here is priceless and full of useful content.
LIKE:
- a .doc loaded with questions that SHOULD be asked at a kickoff meeting.
- The definition of wireframes (good for new clients not used to the idea)
- Methods
- Basics of usability
and the list goes ON AND ON. It’s a great reference.
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Bobby
“Buttons Were an Inspired UI Hack, but Now We’ve Got Better Options” (Global Moxie)
“Buttons Were an Inspired UI Hack, but Now We’ve Got Better Options” (Global Moxie).
More about this whole Buttons are Hacks debate.
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Bobby
Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
A MUST read. I usually don’t like Jakobs thought process, but I think he’s spot on here. This is some forward thinking that we need to be ready for.
Summary:
Mobile apps currently have better usability than mobile sites, but forthcoming changes will eventually make a mobile site the superior strategy. -
greg
Mobile is amazingly versatile, and design for mobile is about the culture of your audience, the tasks they are trying to complete, and the context in which they are completing them. Design for mobile and therefore mobile standards need to be approached from a human perspective. The primary purpose of mobile standards is the same as if they were created for a more traditional interface. From a business perspective, they are created for two reasons:
Standards save time and money by avoiding duplication of effort by developers and designers across projects and interfaces.
Standards enable the creation of interfaces that are efficient and familiar to users, thereby increasing usability and decreasing the learning curve.
These two benefits should be fulfilled in any guidelines documentation. But with the advent of standardization of mobile interfaces, there are so many other ways guidelines can be expanded to serve the audiences they affect: the developers and designers who implement solutions based on the standards, and the end-users of the products being created.
excellent read at Raising the Bar for Mobile Standards | UX Magazine.
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greg
The Myth Of The Sophisticated User
The Myth Of The Sophisticated User – Smashing UX Design.
Interesting article about the two types of users we most frequently encounter. Definite must-read material…
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greg
An article published in Science Magazine in June…
An article published in Science Magazine in June provides evidence that the Internet has become an “external part” of our memory systems. Rather than remembering information, we seem to have “outsourced” this effortful task to an entity other than ourselves.
On the face of it, this is not an astounding finding in that psychologists have demonstrated for over 30 years that we use outside sources, such as family or team members, to supplement our less-than-perfect memories. What makes this research remarkable, and of interest to the UX community, is that the researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with greater accuracy, where on the bookshelf the atlas is located. These findings suggest that making sites memorable as the repository of information may be the key to gaining return visitors.
There are some excellent points further into the article that speak to single purpose sites and credibility.
read more @ Metamemory and the User Experience | UX Magazine.
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Bobby
How to Design a Mobile Responsive Website | UX Booth
How to Design a Mobile Responsive Website | UX Booth.
Great article about HOW to design a Responsive Website.
To build a mobile site or not to build a mobile site; this is a question at the forefront of many a discussion. There is, however, another option: responsive web design. When, why, and how should you go about designing a responsive website?
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Bobby
Recent / iOS UI Patterns beta
Recent / iOS UI Patterns beta.
AWESOME. UI Patterns for iOS. This will come in very handy yo.
greg is discussing. 
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