10.15.13 |
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Some excellent hiring advice from designer Paul Adams over at the Intercom blog. I especially liked his commentary on visual design:
Some commenters put forward that visual design is the primary thing that draws people in and is therefore the most important layer. This is not how I think about it. Visual design is certainly incredibly important, but people are also drawn to something with a promise of value – what the product is, what value it could deliver – in other words the work of the higher level design layers. Time and again we have witnessed ugly looking products succeed (for example Craigslist), and beautiful looking products fail.
09.10.13 |
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I have read far too many posts in recent months on how to incorporate responsive web design into a design workflow. Most cover what I already know, but leave it to designer Jacey Gulden to shake things up:
By nature, a mobile device is narrow, and it forces the content to be presented in a single column. The linear display caused by this narrowness forces the designer to give priority and hierarchy to certain pieces of content that is much less apparent when a site is viewed on a wider screen.
Because of this, many designers have started experimenting with a new kind of mockup that involves content hierarchy rather than design layout. Designers give numerical values to elements of content that correlate to where those items might appear in a stacked column layout. This way, design is less constrained, but the content is always presented in the best way possible.
I’ve heard the “content hierarchy first” advice before but rarely in such a clear manner.
09.05.13 |
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UI designer Joshua Porter:
The reality is that Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum. They’ve tested and tweaked the same product page over and over and they’ve optimized it as much as possible. They can’t improve it significantly at this point without making a big change. But they can’t make a big change because the only changes they can make must increase revenue (or some closely related KPI). So any big change is a very, very scary thing when that page is driving billions of dollars in revenue. So it makes sense that Amazon only makes small changes to their product page design.
Early in my web career, like many others I was fascinated by Amazon’s web design and leveraged it occasionally to fuel e-commerce decisions. But when you fast forward to where we are today, it’s positively shocking how little Amazon’s design has evolved. Joshua really nails why.
08.22.13 |
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There’s many web based color picker tools out there, but when you want to learn as much as possible it’s hard to go wrong with Color Hexa. To quote the description:
ColorHexa.com is a free color tool providing information about any color. Just type any color values (view full list here) in the search field and ColorHexa will offer a detailed description and automatically convert it to its equivalent value in Hexadecimal, Binary, RGB, CMYK, HSL, HSV, CIE-Lab, Hunter-Lab, CIE-Luv, CIE-LCH, XYZ and xyY.
08.19.13 |
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Designer Dmitry Fadeyev covers the basics of UI design. One of his last paragraphs really stands out:
The order the three parts are satisfied is important. A beautiful work that is not usable is worth less than an ugly one that does its function well (unless, of course, if its function is to be beautiful). Thus, we must first of all ensure that every element of the interface is clear, then ensure that their relationships are well defined, and then ensure the work has aesthetic unity.
Fundamentally, core functionality comes before aesthetic beauty. It’s a principle that’s missing from so many UI mockups I see on Dribbble, blogs and other sources.
07.30.13 |
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Kathy Sierra:
If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they’re deciding… even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, “Was that the right choice?”
If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn’t helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I’ll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, “wait, did that do what I expected?”.
Every choice is a cost. It’s an utterly simple principle, but it makes me step back and reconsider a lot of design choices made, both professionally and in side projects.
07.29.13 |
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There’s a nice interview over at iMore with Instagram’s former head mobile designer. Given his track record Tim is clearly a talented guy. It was interesting hearing his brief takes on porting Instagram’s design from iOS to Android along with a bit on his overall design workflow. I do wish there was more on his motivations for now jumping over to Dropbox, but I bet we’ll hear more on that at a later date.
07.26.13 |
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Designer Khoi Vinh:
I’m really enjoying Sketch’s more streamlined feature set, and how it is clearly purpose-built for designing user interfaces. Simpler tools are very often better tools.
As noted previously here, Sketch’s focused toolkit has really grown on me. Awesome to see a great designer like Khoi is jumping on the Sketch train as well.
07.16.13 |
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Google product designer Jean-Marc Denis makes a pretty compelling argument why you should seriously think about integrating Sketch into your production workflow. It’s one of the best “why Sketch over Photoshop” posts I’ve read.
While my time is still heavily in development, when I do drop into design, I find that I’m heading into Sketch more and more often. Photoshop still gets the majority of my bulk export work however.
06.19.13 |
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There’s been a lot of debate on the iOS 7 visuals, especially among designers. I myself fall a bit in the middle – there’s some icons I can’t stand, but largely I’m trying my best to reserve judgement until I actually get a stable beta build on my phone. But designer Khoi Vinh correctly identifies one major problem I have with iOS: the typography. Helvetica Neue Ultra Light was never meant to be used this across the board, especially at such small sizes.