Product Design Digest, December 2014
Since 2010, I publish regular reviews of recent articles on the topic of interfaces, new tools and collections of patterns, interesting cases and historical stories. From the tapes of several hundred thematic subscriptions, approximately 5% of the worthwhile publications are selected that are interesting to share. Previous materials: April 2010-November 2014 .
IBM Design Language
IBM released their own visual language, very, very, very coolly described, structured and filed. Many interesting details, approaches to the description of guidelines. Although these are rather principles, there are almost no concrete practical applications. No specific numbers in the interface and typographic grids, only the principles of their construction. For a company of their scale - the staff of designers should reach up to 1000 people, and the number of products is endless - this approach gives flexibility while respecting the general spirit of design. Recently some more guidelines appeared:
There is no fold
Welch Canavan has gathered together many well-known publications, debunking the myth that users do not scroll pages. Recently, a high-profile article appeared in a blog of Huge Inc about their research on the topic . Although the myth itself that users are afraid of scrolling has been debunked many times, what they did in Huge raises a lot of questions.
')
My colleague from the usability laboratory, Ksenia Sternina, describes the problems: “The article is completely unscientific, the respondents did not understand which ones, the test was carried out incomprehensibly as, the incentives presented to the respondents are unclear. Some results have turned out, maybe something like this is in reality, but the testing has been done amateurishly. Below are the details.
It has been confirmed that it has
Here it is not clear, yet these users, who are they? Maybe it's babies or pensioners, or miners, who are they after all? In scientific studies they never take "some kind of broad cohort." They take very specific people who can be attributed to a particular segment, and then look at the result, if they all show the same result, then we can already say that in such and such segments the same result. And in order to test "all", then all-all is necessary and tested.
For a long time, we’ve been able to maximize the timeline.
Very strange promise. Are they trying to get results or test methods? Usually, if you test a method, you don’t use the results specifically, because in the process you experiment and the results will be invalid.
Users over 3 days
Who are these people, age, gender, what devices they use, what experience with different sites?
We tested four design versions
And the pictures on the page were the same? If yes, then the person will already guess what the trick is, if not, then the content itself can affect. Typically, test objects are mixed among other “control” objects.
X% scrolled immediately
What is it like? In a second, half a second? Some people have not scrolled. Why, I wonder, maybe these people have something in common?
The test procedure is not described at all. It is written that deleted tests, but how were they performed? Contact people and send links? Or one link? What instructions did people give? This is very important because all this greatly influences the behavior of people. ”
Earlier this year, the best article on pseudo-science in design from MJ Parnell was published. It is extremely sad that the study of Huge, Inc. has spread throughout the Internet and published by all who can. Yes, the myth that people do not scroll is false and many times refuted. But specifically, this article makes conclusions completely unprofessional.
Review your app
Circa's Matt Galligan talks about an unobtrusive way to get app evaluation from users. Instead of almost always inappropriate popup, they display a polite block in the interface with the question “did you like the app?”. Continuing the theme:
Designing Great Organizational Services
Laura Keller describes the principles of creating good interfaces for internal corporate tools, which, as a rule, have a very pale appearance.
Design Explosions Issue # 1: Mapping on iOS
To cartographers and designers of geo-oriented services note. Serious immersion and detailed analysis of native Google and Apple maps for iOS. Patterns, areas of interaction, tagging mechanisms, marking of application areas, routes and navigation ... Very vigilantly dismantled "for parts" and described to the last detail.
E-Commerce Checkouts (Required and Optional) Fields Explicitly (Only 9% Do So)
According to the results of their recent research, Baymard recommends explicitly marking both mandatory and optional form fields.
Empty States
The Empty States collection has moved to a separate domain.
Stars and Stripes and ISO Codes
Antoine Lefeuvre about the intricacies of design when switching messages on multilingual sites and applications. Continuing the theme:
Can designers steal the best pricing techniques from restaurants?
Interesting calculations from a pair of pricing studies in restaurants and the web. If there is no currency next to the amount, people are more willing to pay.
Android vs iOS Start Experience
Luke Wroblewski compares the initial setup processes for the iPad and Android tablets. Continuing the theme:
The Highlight 2014 - UI Animations
A selection of the best interface animations according to the Beautiful Pixels version. Many examples are very controversial, but the patterns themselves are interesting.
Design Features in Asia
Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design
Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport talk about fieldwork. The process is described on duty, but the article contains a huge amount of cool stories from large companies, how they found insights and changed products.
The uncanny valley is uncanny
Professor Nicholas Bowman about the effect of the "sinister valley" in the UX: in games, for Siri, in NUI.
Facebook Science Has Another Problem - It's Not Exactly Science
In continuation of the story with the sensational Facebook research on managing emotions. They say such studies are completely unscientific.
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase
The new service as part of Think with Google collected anonymous (aha, of course) web analytics data from 42,000 sites (everyone who’s privacy doesn’t allow Google Analytics allowed to swallow) has made an excellent tool for exploring the user's purchase path in different segments, markets and countries. Quick start guide in PDF form .
How to Use Customer Experience.
A memo from Demian Farnsworth on creating experience maps.
Resonator
The new extension for Photoshop, which helps to collect, store and "cut" for developers icons and any other graphics. The extension supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Retina. Now it is distributed by invitations, but, from personal experience, they are invited quite quickly. It will be useful to all mobile, some web and in general to all those designers who are tired of the constant manual cutting of graphics for transfer to developers. A little more about the transfer of design to developers:
Paperproto
A new approach to the templates for paper design. In addition to convenient breakdown of standard sheets on the screens, it is attached to the phone model for a 3D printer, into which you can drive the sketches drawn on paper.
New to Sketch
New about Material Design
New for Android Wear
Apple Watch New
New about mailing letters
Tizen UX Guide
The guidelines of Tizen mobile OS, which Samsung and Intel are developing on the basis of MeeGo closed a couple of years ago, have been seriously updated. Samsung is constantly threatening to invest in it the main forces, but so far only a few devices have been released.
7 tips for designing awesome animated GIFs
7 tips from InVision to create gifs with interface animation. And then - instructions for creating animated illustrations in conjunction with Illustrator and Photoshop .
New for iPhone
New for iPad
Android templates
New for Marvel App
New to Adobe Fireworks
Duet display
Another option to quickly display the Mac screen on the iPhone and iPad. The application will be useful for quick viewing of layouts on the device via cable.
UX Check
A cheap and fast way to carry out an expert assessment on Nielsen’s key heuristics. This is a plugin for Chrome, which opens a panel with a list of heuristics, allows you to make notes on the page and export it all to a Word document.
3 Ways to Select the Method for your Research Goal
Indi Young has created its own method of selection of research methods. Everything depends primarily on the purpose of the research: are we looking for new ideas for our product or are we evaluating existing functionality? Research can also be directed either to the product itself, or to users, their behavior and sensations.
Lead studies
How Speeders Affect Online Research
Jeff Sauro is trying to understand how effective ways to cut off unscrupulous survey respondents, primarily checking the fill rate. Everything is not so simple - except for quite obvious fake cases, the speed affects the quality is not very clear and you just can not cut off such respondents.
Revisiting the Pile-Sort Method of User Research
Hang Guo, Khasfariyati Razikin and Muhammad Hatib on variations of the card sorting method.
Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research?
A good analogy is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research on the Mozilla blog.
The 7 Deadly Sins of User Research
David Travis on the 7 deadly sins of user research.
Redesigning Your Website? Don't Ditch Your Old Design So Soon
Hoa Loranger of NN / g on competitive usability testing, when, in addition to your own product, several products from closest competitors are being tested.
Fuse
A new tool for creating interactive prototypes and translating them into code for Android and iOS. Unlike most recently appeared tools, Fuse Tools was initially focused on a close connection between a designer and programmer. The interactive prototype that you make with the tool is, in essence, a well written application in native platform code.
Plexi
Another new tool for designers, this time in the browser. It is made by Colm Tuite and it is still in the alpha state, but you can already try it. Demo functions of the object states .
Prototyping with Form for the first time
A rather detailed instruction for working with a Form, Origami-like tool for interactive prototyping, which was recently purchased by Google.
New visual content editors
New scripts
Work with SVG
Typecast is Now Free
Relatively recently, Typecast has been updated - a tool for creating a visually attractive and semantically built design, checking for readability, correctness of rendering in browsers and general harmony - it has become free for designers working alone. This announcement opens a branch about web typography: techniques, scripts, tools, tutorials and much more:
How to Implement Color Search
Elif Ceren Dik talks about the experience of creating a good pick of colors for users of the JotForm service according to the theory of color. Many are faced with similar problems, so that in this thread will be collected materials on algorithmic color matching solutions. Continuing the theme:
Creating Animations and Interactions with Physical Models
Ralph Thomas examines the physical model of animation in detail and with vivid interactive examples. The project is available on GitHub for your own experiments. Continuing the theme:
Tumult Hype Pro 3 (Beta)
There was a beta tool for designers Tumult Hype Pro 3. Promise interactive reusable animated objects with a physical model and adaptability for sites, iBooks, advertising.
Noodl beta
Beta Noodl, a recently announced tool for the whole prototyping cycle: animations, interactive interactions and the whole process of working with a prototype, has appeared. It can be installed as an extension for Chrome.
Some thoughts on "designing in the browser"
Stephen Hay that both parties to the popular in recent years, the discourse of "whether the designer must know how to impose" should not rush to extremes.
New for Framer
New to Quartz Composer
New to Bootstrap and Foundation
Tool Reviews
JavaScript for designers
Training articles for JavaScript designers by Dmitry Poyarkov. For designers, however, conditionally - this is just a simple training manual for beginners. Other non-developer beginner tutorials:
Touchstone.js
Framework for building hybrid applications for the iPhone.
UX Leadership, Part 1: The Nature of Great Leaders
Jim Nieters and Pabini Gabriel-Petit open a series of articles about UX-managers and leadership. Very sensibly, although the preliminary article was less systemic. Continuing the theme:
The 5 Most Common Design Mistakes
Julie Zhuo from Facebook about major product design mistakes. Too severe restrictions on the initial study of the space of problems and solutions, too early detailing of one of the solutions, taking a good performance for a good product, bias towards style instead of meaning, focusing not on those details.
How to collaborate with your product manager
Ondřej Válka describes the formats of interaction between the product designer and the product manager. This is one of the densest bundles in the team.
Wonderful Client Feedback
Memo for customers on the theme of design criticism.
Making User Experience
Column UXMatters on the topic of integrating UX with a business strategy.
Defining data
Pamela Pavliscak continues a series of publications on working with analytics data when designing interfaces. The second part is devoted to the definition of terminology.
Pendo
The beta version of the Pendo product analytics tool has become available. It helps to assess the relevance of the functions of a web product and communicate with users who use the service right now.
Segment Analytics Data Using Personas
Aurora Bedford of Nielsen / Norman Group writes about using characters to segment analytics data.
Designing for Harmony
One of the coolest cases of design restructuring in large companies. Like Intuit, a leading software maker for personal and corporate financial accounting, he rethought himself, built a design culture and created the Harmony ecosystem.
Data Driven Products Now!
A very interesting presentation by Dan McKinley from Etsy about how the company came to a pro-active data analysis when launching new functions and services. In the second part, detailed ROI calculations are made for a couple of features that they planned to launch.
https://speakerdeck.com/mcfunley/data-driven-products-now">Data Driven Products Now!
93% of users are happy with the design: how we designed Septim
My colleague Andrey Sumin talks about the process of launching the new version of Mail.Ru Mail, which became available to all users this year. Details on all the steps of gradual roll-out for an increasing number of users with a bunch of numbers and statistics. It is useful for everyone who deals with products with a large established audience - how not to lose it.
How to Design for Everybody
Another clever case redesign gos.saytov. Rachel Haot talks about the new NY.gov and how it works. Her blog on Medium has other stories about this launch.
Our GDS user research lab is 6 months old
About the first 6 months of existence of the GOV.uk usability laboratory. Many interesting findings, recommendations and feedback from managers.
The Numbers Game - Behind the Scenes at Microsoft's Xbox Playtesting Labs
How to conduct research on players in the usability lab of Microsoft Xbox.
Designers "Yandex Browser" on how not to interfere with people
Konstantin Gorsky and Gennady Lakhtin talk about the work on the experimental interface Yandex. Browser, which was introduced in late November. A few more of their answers to questions about the product .
How Lumosity Spiked Active Users 10% with Complexity, Not Simplicity
An interesting case of the team of the Luminosity training service, in which they talk about experiments with the process of the first approach of the user. They added a few questions like the test in onboarding and it turned out that this not only does not drop the conversion, but increases the involvement. It seems that Evgenia Zhadyaeva told about the similar experience of LinguaLeo.ru on UX-Wednesday .
How we automated the work of the editorial board and what it led to (speech by Alexei Ametov and Roman Khudonogov)
Speech by Roman Hudonogov and Alexei Ametov on the internal editorial processes in the LAM. Slides They are thinking about making the Arcticle a publicly available product, and if everything grows together, the announcement will be in the spring.
New cases of redesign
Uninvited Redesigns
Designing a mobile interface for older people
Tomáš SlavĂÄŤek on the principles of design of mobile interfaces for the elderly on the example of the application KoalaPhone. Other design stories for people with disabilities:
UX Maturity: Intuition
Dirk Knemeyer writes a brief history of the formation of the UX in 6 parts. Part One: "80s: Design based on intuition." Continued:
New about web history
A brief history of web design for designers
Another GIF article from Froont with a clear history of web design approaches.
Fjord Trends 2015
The publication of forecasts for 2015 trends has begun. Fjord describes its nine design and innovation concerns. Other predictions:
Working with phablets
Banks Are Each Other For Your Attention
On the experiments of large American banks with new interaction formats. Continuing the theme:
Car Interfaces
Indie interfaces
Interesting interface concepts and indie products on Kickstarter and Indiegogo are now also grouped together. Unlike what the internal research laboratories of Microsoft, Google, PARC, IBM, Disney, AT & T, the MIT Media Lab and other companies are doing, these pieces can be sponsored and touched after six months or a year.
Enhancing User Experience With The Web Speech API
An overview of the capabilities of the new voice API that is starting to appear in browsers. It allows you to recognize speech and voice texts on pages and is in the early stages of W3C development.
Designing For the Slow Web
Ben Rowe on the concept of Slow Web / Fast Web, an analogy of the concepts of Fast Food / Slow Food. In Slow Web, the user himself manages his time and attention. No need to hurry anywhere, no one distracts without cause. Basic principles of Slow Web:
Wearable electronics
Interfaces to the cinema
An End to User-Based Thinking - Biological Perspective
Alena Lugin proposes to consider obsolete the concept of "user". It forms the process of working on a design in such a way that it is an object for which scientists in white coats create solutions in the laboratory. While it is better to create interfaces with people in co-design format.
DesignX - A Future Path for Design
Don Norman proposes the concept of DesignX, describing methods, approaches and specialties for solving complex social problems. His answers to questions .
Design's (Dis) Orders & Transition Design
Cameron Tonkinwise on design philosophy and levels, as well as Transition Design. Understands many models of design.
Discover Design - Study design trends on your phone
Interesting tutorial mobile design that works only on the phone. Based on materials from well-known industry experts like Luke Wroblewski, Khoi Vinh, Paul Adams and others.
Designers: Watch
The site is a collection of key designer films with links to online viewing services. People, historical processes, directions. Russian version .
UXMas 2014
UX Mastery - UXMas. 24 . Continuing the theme:
Great Digital Products Don't Happen By Accident
David Gillis Teehan+Lax .
32 myths to be dispelled
32 UX.
What's a Pixel?
Sebastien Gabriel, .
The Urban Dictionary Of Design Slang
Fast CoDesign , . Continuing the theme:
« »
« » ( , — «Designing with the mind in mind»). .
Screeny — Let's find those space consuming screenshots
Screeny iPhone , , . , , , .
-
The Utopian UI Architect
BMW Medium Special Project has released an article about what Bret Victor is doing now.
AMA: I'm Nicholas Felton (aka Feltron), an information designer in NYC
Q & A session with Nicholas Feltron on Designer News.
Design education is "tragic" says Jonathan Ive
A detailed synopsis of Jony Ive's performance at the London Design Museum.
Upcoming Web Design Events (Dec. 2014 - June 2015)
The main European and American events UX and web design of the first half of 2015.
Warm Gun 2014
Video of speeches from the conference Warm Gun 2014, which was held on December 4 in San Francisco, USA. Speakers on which you should pay attention: Kim Goodwin, Dey Traynor, Christina Wodtke, PJ McCormick, Leah Buley, Samuel Hilick.
Gain - AIGA Design and Business Conference 2014
At the end of October in New York, the Gain 2014 conference from the AIGA association was held on the topic of business redesign. Video speeches .
Fresh links can also be tracked in the Facebook group of the same name. Thanks to everyone who also publishes links in it, especially Gennady Dragun, Pavel Skripkin, Dmitry Podluzhny, Anton Artyomov, Denis Efremov and Evgeny Sokolov. More and more materials in reviews appear thanks to them.
Patterns and Best Practices
IBM Design Language
IBM released their own visual language, very, very, very coolly described, structured and filed. Many interesting details, approaches to the description of guidelines. Although these are rather principles, there are almost no concrete practical applications. No specific numbers in the interface and typographic grids, only the principles of their construction. For a company of their scale - the staff of designers should reach up to 1000 people, and the number of products is endless - this approach gives flexibility while respecting the general spirit of design. Recently some more guidelines appeared:
There is no fold
Welch Canavan has gathered together many well-known publications, debunking the myth that users do not scroll pages. Recently, a high-profile article appeared in a blog of Huge Inc about their research on the topic . Although the myth itself that users are afraid of scrolling has been debunked many times, what they did in Huge raises a lot of questions.
')
My colleague from the usability laboratory, Ksenia Sternina, describes the problems: “The article is completely unscientific, the respondents did not understand which ones, the test was carried out incomprehensibly as, the incentives presented to the respondents are unclear. Some results have turned out, maybe something like this is in reality, but the testing has been done amateurishly. Below are the details.
It has been confirmed that it has
Here it is not clear, yet these users, who are they? Maybe it's babies or pensioners, or miners, who are they after all? In scientific studies they never take "some kind of broad cohort." They take very specific people who can be attributed to a particular segment, and then look at the result, if they all show the same result, then we can already say that in such and such segments the same result. And in order to test "all", then all-all is necessary and tested.
For a long time, we’ve been able to maximize the timeline.
Very strange promise. Are they trying to get results or test methods? Usually, if you test a method, you don’t use the results specifically, because in the process you experiment and the results will be invalid.
Users over 3 days
Who are these people, age, gender, what devices they use, what experience with different sites?
We tested four design versions
And the pictures on the page were the same? If yes, then the person will already guess what the trick is, if not, then the content itself can affect. Typically, test objects are mixed among other “control” objects.
X% scrolled immediately
What is it like? In a second, half a second? Some people have not scrolled. Why, I wonder, maybe these people have something in common?
The test procedure is not described at all. It is written that deleted tests, but how were they performed? Contact people and send links? Or one link? What instructions did people give? This is very important because all this greatly influences the behavior of people. ”
Earlier this year, the best article on pseudo-science in design from MJ Parnell was published. It is extremely sad that the study of Huge, Inc. has spread throughout the Internet and published by all who can. Yes, the myth that people do not scroll is false and many times refuted. But specifically, this article makes conclusions completely unprofessional.
Review your app
Circa's Matt Galligan talks about an unobtrusive way to get app evaluation from users. Instead of almost always inappropriate popup, they display a polite block in the interface with the question “did you like the app?”. Continuing the theme:
Designing Great Organizational Services
Laura Keller describes the principles of creating good interfaces for internal corporate tools, which, as a rule, have a very pale appearance.
Design Explosions Issue # 1: Mapping on iOS
To cartographers and designers of geo-oriented services note. Serious immersion and detailed analysis of native Google and Apple maps for iOS. Patterns, areas of interaction, tagging mechanisms, marking of application areas, routes and navigation ... Very vigilantly dismantled "for parts" and described to the last detail.
E-Commerce Checkouts (Required and Optional) Fields Explicitly (Only 9% Do So)
According to the results of their recent research, Baymard recommends explicitly marking both mandatory and optional form fields.
Empty States
The Empty States collection has moved to a separate domain.
Stars and Stripes and ISO Codes
Antoine Lefeuvre about the intricacies of design when switching messages on multilingual sites and applications. Continuing the theme:
- Julia Rozwens on the intricacies of the site localization process. Process, tools, cultural features .
Can designers steal the best pricing techniques from restaurants?
Interesting calculations from a pair of pricing studies in restaurants and the web. If there is no currency next to the amount, people are more willing to pay.
Android vs iOS Start Experience
Luke Wroblewski compares the initial setup processes for the iPad and Android tablets. Continuing the theme:
The Highlight 2014 - UI Animations
A selection of the best interface animations according to the Beautiful Pixels version. Many examples are very controversial, but the patterns themselves are interesting.
Understanding the user
Design Features in Asia
Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design
Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport talk about fieldwork. The process is described on duty, but the article contains a huge amount of cool stories from large companies, how they found insights and changed products.
The uncanny valley is uncanny
Professor Nicholas Bowman about the effect of the "sinister valley" in the UX: in games, for Siri, in NUI.
Facebook Science Has Another Problem - It's Not Exactly Science
In continuation of the story with the sensational Facebook research on managing emotions. They say such studies are completely unscientific.
Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase
The new service as part of Think with Google collected anonymous (aha, of course) web analytics data from 42,000 sites (everyone who’s privacy doesn’t allow Google Analytics allowed to swallow) has made an excellent tool for exploring the user's purchase path in different segments, markets and countries. Quick start guide in PDF form .
How to Use Customer Experience.
A memo from Demian Farnsworth on creating experience maps.
Design and design of interface screens
Resonator
The new extension for Photoshop, which helps to collect, store and "cut" for developers icons and any other graphics. The extension supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Retina. Now it is distributed by invitations, but, from personal experience, they are invited quite quickly. It will be useful to all mobile, some web and in general to all those designers who are tired of the constant manual cutting of graphics for transfer to developers. A little more about the transfer of design to developers:
Paperproto
A new approach to the templates for paper design. In addition to convenient breakdown of standard sheets on the screens, it is attached to the phone model for a 3D printer, into which you can drive the sketches drawn on paper.
New to Sketch
- IPhone 6, 6 Plus, Apple Watch templates .
- Template for prototyping .
- Plugin allows you to add layers to favorites .
- Plug-in for commenting artboards .
- Sketch forum . True, not that strong.
- Plug-in that allows you to quickly use photos from Instagram as pictures for the layout . The Instagram team uses a similar solution to automate part of the work on sample screens .
- Sebastien Gabriel, Jearn-Marc Denis and Philippe Hong about their experiences with the transition to Sketch .
- Fun company in the spirit of PSD → HTML, only for layout layouts from Sketch .
New about Material Design
- Axure UI Kit .
- It turned out that another piece of work on the new ideology was done by outsourcers. Huge Inc made the Google Design site and helped to structure all the work on guidelines .
- CSS framework
- Powerful website with examples of material design interactions .
- Agency Five is experimenting with Material Design. They came up with 4 of their own types of materials: chewing gum, marshmallow, lollipop and marmalade .
- Linux based OS with material design .
- Color generator in the palette of material design .
New for Android Wear
- Studio ustwo about his work on the dials for Android Wear .
- Case dials on the site ustwo . There are also templates for design in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Sketch, as well as paper sketches.
Apple Watch New
- David Hoang about his Apple Watch app design strategy, before they go on sale .
- The official resources for designers added templates for Sketch .
- Why most modern smart watches and bracelets are useless to change behavior .
New about mailing letters
- Service to turn your design layouts into working HTML for emailing .
- How and why to embed video in emails .
- 100 best mailings of 2014 according to the Campaign Monitor version .
Tizen UX Guide
The guidelines of Tizen mobile OS, which Samsung and Intel are developing on the basis of MeeGo closed a couple of years ago, have been seriously updated. Samsung is constantly threatening to invest in it the main forces, but so far only a few devices have been released.
7 tips for designing awesome animated GIFs
7 tips from InVision to create gifs with interface animation. And then - instructions for creating animated illustrations in conjunction with Illustrator and Photoshop .
New for iPhone
- Another pack of iPhone 6 Plus templates for Photoshop from Pixeden .
- IPhone 6 Plus templates for Photoshop from UI Fest .
- Screenshot template for Michael Flarup’s AppStore (unofficial).
New for iPad
Android templates
New for Marvel App
- Marvel has received another round of funding and will be developing .
- Appeared application for Android .
New to Adobe Fireworks
Duet display
Another option to quickly display the Mac screen on the iPhone and iPad. The application will be useful for quick viewing of layouts on the device via cable.
User research and testing, analytics
UX Check
A cheap and fast way to carry out an expert assessment on Nielsen’s key heuristics. This is a plugin for Chrome, which opens a panel with a list of heuristics, allows you to make notes on the page and export it all to a Word document.
3 Ways to Select the Method for your Research Goal
Indi Young has created its own method of selection of research methods. Everything depends primarily on the purpose of the research: are we looking for new ideas for our product or are we evaluating existing functionality? Research can also be directed either to the product itself, or to users, their behavior and sensations.
Lead studies
- Jeff Sauro about rapid remote testing, organized and conducted in 6 hours .
- UserTesting's Stef Miller on how this remote testing tool made it possible to understand the relevance of the company's by-product during the day .
How Speeders Affect Online Research
Jeff Sauro is trying to understand how effective ways to cut off unscrupulous survey respondents, primarily checking the fill rate. Everything is not so simple - except for quite obvious fake cases, the speed affects the quality is not very clear and you just can not cut off such respondents.
Revisiting the Pile-Sort Method of User Research
Hang Guo, Khasfariyati Razikin and Muhammad Hatib on variations of the card sorting method.
Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research?
A good analogy is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research on the Mozilla blog.
The 7 Deadly Sins of User Research
David Travis on the 7 deadly sins of user research.
Redesigning Your Website? Don't Ditch Your Old Design So Soon
Hoa Loranger of NN / g on competitive usability testing, when, in addition to your own product, several products from closest competitors are being tested.
Visual programming and browser design
Fuse
A new tool for creating interactive prototypes and translating them into code for Android and iOS. Unlike most recently appeared tools, Fuse Tools was initially focused on a close connection between a designer and programmer. The interactive prototype that you make with the tool is, in essence, a well written application in native platform code.
Plexi
Another new tool for designers, this time in the browser. It is made by Colm Tuite and it is still in the alpha state, but you can already try it. Demo functions of the object states .
Prototyping with Form for the first time
A rather detailed instruction for working with a Form, Origami-like tool for interactive prototyping, which was recently purchased by Google.
New visual content editors
- Qards - another tool for creating promotional sites, this time from Designmodo. It is, in fact, a visual editor for WordPress pages.
- Guidelines and layouts design The Grid .
New scripts
- The script allows you to change the perspective of images .
- Nice script for photo galleries .
- Interesting effects of popup hiding / hiding .
- A set of components with simple implementation and easy customization for the web developer .
- Elastic menus and buttons on SVG .
- Simple modern text WYSIWYG editor .
- Calendar on pure CSS .
- Another WYSIWYG text editor a la Medium .
- How to work with Chartist.js library for dynamic infographics .
- Tape new scripts on the site Front-End Front .
- Script for animating headers with CSS .
- What an animated SVG has come to .
- Visualization of particle flow in three-dimensional space (WebGL) .
- A service that scans the top 1,000,000 websites for the use of Javascript libraries and / or well-known scripts . For example, out of 600+ thousand out of a million, use jQuery.
- An interesting implementation of the burger menu, something like Jolla .
Work with SVG
- Evil Icons - a set of free SVG icons for websites and web applications. Node.js package and Ruby-gem for developers, .ai and .sketch for designers .
- Features SVG rendering in Chrome and Safari .
- Parsing techniques for working with SVG sprites .
Typecast is Now Free
Relatively recently, Typecast has been updated - a tool for creating a visually attractive and semantically built design, checking for readability, correctness of rendering in browsers and general harmony - it has become free for designers working alone. This announcement opens a branch about web typography: techniques, scripts, tools, tutorials and much more:
- Adam Beres-Deak describes techniques for loading custom fonts without twitching using localStorage .
How to Implement Color Search
Elif Ceren Dik talks about the experience of creating a good pick of colors for users of the JotForm service according to the theory of color. Many are faced with similar problems, so that in this thread will be collected materials on algorithmic color matching solutions. Continuing the theme:
Creating Animations and Interactions with Physical Models
Ralph Thomas examines the physical model of animation in detail and with vivid interactive examples. The project is available on GitHub for your own experiments. Continuing the theme:
- Analysis of the basic principles of CSS-animation from ThoughtBot.
Tumult Hype Pro 3 (Beta)
There was a beta tool for designers Tumult Hype Pro 3. Promise interactive reusable animated objects with a physical model and adaptability for sites, iBooks, advertising.
Noodl beta
Beta Noodl, a recently announced tool for the whole prototyping cycle: animations, interactive interactions and the whole process of working with a prototype, has appeared. It can be installed as an extension for Chrome.
Some thoughts on "designing in the browser"
Stephen Hay that both parties to the popular in recent years, the discourse of "whether the designer must know how to impose" should not rush to extremes.
New for Framer
- Not that useful, but an amusing gallery of experiments in Framer .
- A browser without controls that is great for viewing prototypes from Framer .
- A new benchmark in mobile interface prototypes is the use of real and current data . Using the Parse cloud service, this can be done relatively easily and cheaply. Such prototypes were made before, but it was expensive and a long pleasure.
New to Quartz Composer
- Alexey Solomatin released a collection of Quartz patches for animating interfaces for TV applications . Subscribe to GitHub .
New to Bootstrap and Foundation
Tool Reviews
JavaScript for designers
Training articles for JavaScript designers by Dmitry Poyarkov. For designers, however, conditionally - this is just a simple training manual for beginners. Other non-developer beginner tutorials:
- Capable FAQ from Roman Shamina on whether you need to know how to design a designer .
- Good, easy-to-follow video tips supported by exercises on your own web platform . As a rule, the first hour or two classes (first chapter) are free, then subscription. Designers can start with javascript or html / css, a subscription of $ 29 / month.
Touchstone.js
Framework for building hybrid applications for the iPhone.
Management of interface projects, processes and teams
UX Leadership, Part 1: The Nature of Great Leaders
Jim Nieters and Pabini Gabriel-Petit open a series of articles about UX-managers and leadership. Very sensibly, although the preliminary article was less systemic. Continuing the theme:
The 5 Most Common Design Mistakes
Julie Zhuo from Facebook about major product design mistakes. Too severe restrictions on the initial study of the space of problems and solutions, too early detailing of one of the solutions, taking a good performance for a good product, bias towards style instead of meaning, focusing not on those details.
How to collaborate with your product manager
Ondřej Válka describes the formats of interaction between the product designer and the product manager. This is one of the densest bundles in the team.
Wonderful Client Feedback
Memo for customers on the theme of design criticism.
Making User Experience
Column UXMatters on the topic of integrating UX with a business strategy.
Product management and analytics
Defining data
Pamela Pavliscak continues a series of publications on working with analytics data when designing interfaces. The second part is devoted to the definition of terminology.
Pendo
The beta version of the Pendo product analytics tool has become available. It helps to assess the relevance of the functions of a web product and communicate with users who use the service right now.
Segment Analytics Data Using Personas
Aurora Bedford of Nielsen / Norman Group writes about using characters to segment analytics data.
Cases
Designing for Harmony
One of the coolest cases of design restructuring in large companies. Like Intuit, a leading software maker for personal and corporate financial accounting, he rethought himself, built a design culture and created the Harmony ecosystem.
Data Driven Products Now!
A very interesting presentation by Dan McKinley from Etsy about how the company came to a pro-active data analysis when launching new functions and services. In the second part, detailed ROI calculations are made for a couple of features that they planned to launch.
93% of users are happy with the design: how we designed Septim
My colleague Andrey Sumin talks about the process of launching the new version of Mail.Ru Mail, which became available to all users this year. Details on all the steps of gradual roll-out for an increasing number of users with a bunch of numbers and statistics. It is useful for everyone who deals with products with a large established audience - how not to lose it.
How to Design for Everybody
Another clever case redesign gos.saytov. Rachel Haot talks about the new NY.gov and how it works. Her blog on Medium has other stories about this launch.
Our GDS user research lab is 6 months old
About the first 6 months of existence of the GOV.uk usability laboratory. Many interesting findings, recommendations and feedback from managers.
The Numbers Game - Behind the Scenes at Microsoft's Xbox Playtesting Labs
How to conduct research on players in the usability lab of Microsoft Xbox.
Designers "Yandex Browser" on how not to interfere with people
Konstantin Gorsky and Gennady Lakhtin talk about the work on the experimental interface Yandex. Browser, which was introduced in late November. A few more of their answers to questions about the product .
How Lumosity Spiked Active Users 10% with Complexity, Not Simplicity
An interesting case of the team of the Luminosity training service, in which they talk about experiments with the process of the first approach of the user. They added a few questions like the test in onboarding and it turned out that this not only does not drop the conversion, but increases the involvement. It seems that Evgenia Zhadyaeva told about the similar experience of LinguaLeo.ru on UX-Wednesday .
How we automated the work of the editorial board and what it led to (speech by Alexei Ametov and Roman Khudonogov)
Speech by Roman Hudonogov and Alexei Ametov on the internal editorial processes in the LAM. Slides They are thinking about making the Arcticle a publicly available product, and if everything grows together, the announcement will be in the spring.
New cases of redesign
Uninvited Redesigns
Designing a mobile interface for older people
Tomáš SlavĂÄŤek on the principles of design of mobile interfaces for the elderly on the example of the application KoalaPhone. Other design stories for people with disabilities:
- What do you learn by making an application for people with low income .
- On creating a phone for paralyzed people .
Story
UX Maturity: Intuition
Dirk Knemeyer writes a brief history of the formation of the UX in 6 parts. Part One: "80s: Design based on intuition." Continued:
- Part 2: "90s: laying the foundations . "
- Part 3: “Beginning of 2000s: becoming” .
- Part 4: "2007 and beyond: mobile . "
New about web history
A brief history of web design for designers
Another GIF article from Froont with a clear history of web design approaches.
Trends
Fjord Trends 2015
The publication of forecasts for 2015 trends has begun. Fjord describes its nine design and innovation concerns. Other predictions:
Working with phablets
- Pocket, in his blog, describes the trend in the use of tablets due to the release of smartphones with a large screen . If in the case of the iPhone 5 / 5s, the distribution of reading time between it and the iPad was about half, now the tablets have dropped to 20%. Falling iPad sales figures confirm this picture. So the triumphant march of the Post PC concept is somewhat different than it’s been.
- A small review of Sailfish OS by Lukas Mathis, in which he presents the interface solutions as an example of solving the problem of large screens . I also have Jolla and although there are few chances to shoot at the platform, there are plenty of interesting interface solutions - one of the richest in gestures platforms.
Banks Are Each Other For Your Attention
On the experiments of large American banks with new interaction formats. Continuing the theme:
Car Interfaces
- The concept of autonomous machines from IDEO as mobile offices . True, this approach eats up the last free time.
- Good video comparison of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay .
- BMW unveiled a demo of automatic parking running smart watches .
Indie interfaces
Interesting interface concepts and indie products on Kickstarter and Indiegogo are now also grouped together. Unlike what the internal research laboratories of Microsoft, Google, PARC, IBM, Disney, AT & T, the MIT Media Lab and other companies are doing, these pieces can be sponsored and touched after six months or a year.
- A very interesting Flow controller that uses several control methods at once - gestures, touch, torsion.
- How the Flow controller was designed .
- The law of Fitts or why Flow is more convenient than program sliders for design work .
- Universal Flic button on Indiegogo .
Enhancing User Experience With The Web Speech API
An overview of the capabilities of the new voice API that is starting to appear in browsers. It allows you to recognize speech and voice texts on pages and is in the early stages of W3C development.
Designing For the Slow Web
Ben Rowe on the concept of Slow Web / Fast Web, an analogy of the concepts of Fast Food / Slow Food. In Slow Web, the user himself manages his time and attention. No need to hurry anywhere, no one distracts without cause. Basic principles of Slow Web:
- It is better to have less functionality, but with better interaction.
- No notifications unnecessarily.
- No sense of urgency unnecessarily, let users relax.
- Do not hold users online unnecessarily. Send them to the real world.
- Respect for the user, finally.
Wearable electronics
- The story of Amanda Parkes, which is tightly engaged in smart clothes .
- Fast Co continues a series of publications on the topic .
Interfaces to the cinema
An End to User-Based Thinking - Biological Perspective
Alena Lugin proposes to consider obsolete the concept of "user". It forms the process of working on a design in such a way that it is an object for which scientists in white coats create solutions in the laboratory. While it is better to create interfaces with people in co-design format.
DesignX - A Future Path for Design
Don Norman proposes the concept of DesignX, describing methods, approaches and specialties for solving complex social problems. His answers to questions .
For general and professional development
Design's (Dis) Orders & Transition Design
Cameron Tonkinwise on design philosophy and levels, as well as Transition Design. Understands many models of design.
Discover Design - Study design trends on your phone
Interesting tutorial mobile design that works only on the phone. Based on materials from well-known industry experts like Luke Wroblewski, Khoi Vinh, Paul Adams and others.
Designers: Watch
The site is a collection of key designer films with links to online viewing services. People, historical processes, directions. Russian version .
UXMas 2014
UX Mastery - UXMas. 24 . Continuing the theme:
- 5 .
Great Digital Products Don't Happen By Accident
David Gillis Teehan+Lax .
32 myths to be dispelled
32 UX.
What's a Pixel?
Sebastien Gabriel, .
The Urban Dictionary Of Design Slang
Fast CoDesign , . Continuing the theme:
« »
« » ( , — «Designing with the mind in mind»). .
Screeny — Let's find those space consuming screenshots
Screeny iPhone , , . , , , .
People and companies in the industry
-
The Utopian UI Architect
BMW Medium Special Project has released an article about what Bret Victor is doing now.
AMA: I'm Nicholas Felton (aka Feltron), an information designer in NYC
Q & A session with Nicholas Feltron on Designer News.
Design education is "tragic" says Jonathan Ive
A detailed synopsis of Jony Ive's performance at the London Design Museum.
Conference proceedings
Upcoming Web Design Events (Dec. 2014 - June 2015)
The main European and American events UX and web design of the first half of 2015.
Warm Gun 2014
Video of speeches from the conference Warm Gun 2014, which was held on December 4 in San Francisco, USA. Speakers on which you should pay attention: Kim Goodwin, Dey Traynor, Christina Wodtke, PJ McCormick, Leah Buley, Samuel Hilick.
Gain - AIGA Design and Business Conference 2014
At the end of October in New York, the Gain 2014 conference from the AIGA association was held on the topic of business redesign. Video speeches .
Fresh links can also be tracked in the Facebook group of the same name. Thanks to everyone who also publishes links in it, especially Gennady Dragun, Pavel Skripkin, Dmitry Podluzhny, Anton Artyomov, Denis Efremov and Evgeny Sokolov. More and more materials in reviews appear thanks to them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246739/
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