Mobile-Friendly Sign Up Posted April 26, 2016 by by Samuel It may seem like a small improvement, but displaying the right keyboard to a user can help ease friction on sign up, and make the whole process faster and more pleasant. Ever notice your mobile phone’s keyboard varying from one that displays an ‘@’ sign beside the space bar and one that doesn’t… …or, one…
Vertical Rhythm in Your CSS Posted February 23, 2016 by by Samuel Typography and typesetting form the foundation by which your whole user interface stand on. For a designer, everything else—color, art direction—is relative to the intention of the product owner. It’s very malleable. The one thing that should be unbendable is the system by which the letters are laid out on the page. If it’s not…
The Viewport Size Is Rarely Equal to the Screen Resolution Posted January 13, 2016 by by Samuel It’s an easy pitfall to fall into for a designer to consider a screen resolution when designing and testing instead of an actual browser viewport size. After all, even that community that develops standards to help web designers and developers make better decisions about these things (w3schools.org) provides that sort of data. Even with shiny new…
Important User Experience Considerations Posted December 14, 2015 by by Samuel Designers are known to be dreamers. It takes a lot of experience for a designer to ground one’s self to the realities of designing a product. It’s easy for an inexperienced designer to overlook these parts of the user experience and get fixated on innovative ideas. When these small user engagements fail because of oversight, they…
Microinteraction—Think Small Posted November 4, 2015 by by Samuel Common knowledge’s understanding of design doesn’t usually go farther than what the eye sees, but a cultural icon of invention said: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” —Steve Jobs Most of the time, when a user is asked why they like a product that they often…
2 simple rules to keep in mind when designing a report Posted September 7, 2015 by by Alain Graphical excellence is that what gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. I read this quote in different variations over the years, and you can see that it is old as it refers to ink rather than pixels. Nevertheless, it is very…
5 Principles to Help You Achieve Visual Clarity In Your UI Posted August 13, 2015 by by Samuel Humans are allowed a finite amount of time each day, and with all the demands of post-postmodernist day life, a designer must come to realize that an application’s users only have small attention span to allocate for such things. That is what separates these tools from humans: they shouldn’t demand a long amount of attention as most…
9 Tips to Speed up Your Web Application Posted August 12, 2015 by by Alain “The results indicate that web pages that were downloaded faster were perceived to be more interesting than the slower ones.” Another conclusion from the same study: “The results show that satisfaction decreases with increases in response time.” The latter quote does not only apply for web pages, but also for desktop applications or mobile apps. The…
13 User Behaviors Your Applications Need to Support Posted August 10, 2015 by by Alain Have you ever noticed that most, if not all, ‘next’ and ‘confirmation’ buttons of programs and wizards are usually located on the right-side area of the user interface? There is a reason for that. A good interface design starts with understanding your user. The better you understand your user the better your interface design, and…
How patient are you? Posted August 5, 2015 by by Alain 4 time-frames every developer should know Users will navigate away from your website when it takes more than 4 seconds to load. This is a very bold statement that I read somewhere online not too long ago. Although I have little doubts that this is true in some countries, the user’s patience is highly affected…
Why UI Patterns? Posted July 2, 2015 by by Samuel Charles H. Duell, once the commissioner of the US Patents and Trademarks office, said, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” A lot of people now would probably disagree with him, especially that we have the Internet, thinking and evolving non-organic things, and such. While the question of where invention ends and where innovation begins…
The Prize of Running the UX Sprint Posted June 10, 2015 by by Samuel How does one eat an elephant? For obvious reasons, one cannot eat it whole. It’s too big to fit in a human mouth. I can’t even imagine how one can cook a whole elephant. If ever it was possible—and I looked it up online—one would have to “cut it in edible chunks”. It’s just unimaginable…