For five years now I have been publishing regular reviews of fresh 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-October 2015 .
Patterns and Best Practices
Josh Clark - Designing for Touch Josh Clark a couple of weeks ago released a new book, Designing for Touch, by A Book Apart. On A List Apart is available one of the chapters on how users hold devices . Steven Hoober and Luke Wroblewski have written a lot on this topic, but here they have collected everything at once in one piece.
Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design | Kate Meyer talks about the long-term exploration of flat-design interfaces in NN / g. There are many specific answers to the fear that this style often kills affordans and makes it harder to work with the product. Younger users do have less problems with this and they are more willing to explore design, but even this does not add comfort to them.
Design Principles: Choosing the Right Patterns Gustavs Cirulis that it is important to use patterns intelligently. He cites an example from the experience of Intercom, where they compared navigation solutions and tried on a specific situation.
Mobile Inline Form Validation Three years ago, Steven Hoober described in detail how to validate forms in mobile interfaces . Three years later, he says that error messages are an anti-pattern and it is better not to bring the matter to them at all. Since the writing of the 2012 article, he has practically not used the patterns described in it.
Why We're Addicted To Our Smartphones, But Not Our Tablets Liraz Margalit's interesting ClickTale calculations on why smartphones are perceived as more personal devices, unlike tablets. Besides the fact that they are just more often used, there is also a psychological attachment.
True, the version was buggy and Bohemian Coding had to immediately release update 3.4.1 , and then 3.4.2 . As a result of all this gimp, the developers decided to leave the AppStore . The application will be distributed and updated from the Bohemian Coding website. Other materials:
Better Icon Design in 6 Easy Steps An excellent set of simple rules for creating high-quality pictograms / icons from Scott Lewis from IconFinder. After:
Animaticons - Animated GIF Icons The creators of the Animaticons project went against the trend of trendy formats and launched a library of custom animated icons in the GIF. Not very future-friendly, but cheap and cheerful. After:
T-Shirt, Tank Top and Clothing Mockups Breezi's PlaceIt online service allows you to try prints on clothes quickly and cheaply. The set of layouts is constantly updated and now there are several dozens of good templates.
How We Fixed Our Icon Problem Translation of an article by Bobby Grace from Trello on how the company systematized working with icons in the interface.
Growth hacking is bullshit About why you should look at the metrics system and find a balance between small minor tasks and large strategies. And do not believe in the existence of a "silver bullet".
Hooked on a feeling Presentation by Stephen P. Anderson on the difference between product requirements and experience.
IBM's Design-Centered Strategy to Set the Squares A large and detailed enough story about how IBM turned its attention to design and came to the need to hire 1000 designers. The story about Phil Gilbert, who came along with the purchased company Lombardi Software and, with the approval of CEO Virginia Rometty, began to introduce design thinking practices, improve the overall design culture, and massively hire people. Video
And one more case about online store . The most interesting in this story is the second experiment, when the change of images in the catalog gave a CTR increase of 15.9%. An extra example of the fact that working exclusively with content can get a significant increase in performance. Content optimization is becoming an increasingly relevant topic.
Enterprise Software Design - A Call to Arms Tom Hobbs’s very good philosophical article on how consumer user interfaces have become comfortable and human-loving and how to run the same transformation for enterprise software. Systematically, deeply, inspiring.
Alexis Lloyd of NYT Labs is pondering the future of media publications . Now there is a lot of noise about whether Facebook and Apple will get traffic from publications with the help of their proprietary formats, but these formats are outdated by themselves. He suggests looking towards atomic content and how Wikipedia works.
For general and professional development
Uideo Andrei Yakushev added to his aggregator conference videos an international version with English-language speeches.
Why We Should Really Be Concerned About The Tokyo Olympics Strong material on the philosophy of modern design from Ian Lynam. He examines two stories of Olympic identity (Mexico City '68 and Munich '72) as examples of systematic work on visual language on the scale of an international event and compares them with the failed process around Tokyo 2020, which symbolizes soulless crowdfunding for three kopecks. Not exactly about the interfaces, but it concerns any design applications and affects including digital products.
Relevance is a state of mind Dan Brown from EightShapes reflects on what to do with more mature UX-specialists in order to remain relevant and how not to rage when you hear about the “new methodology”, which has been around for a dozen years. He advises to move towards mentoring, using his wide professional experience.
Jarrod Drysdale - My Designer Is Driving Me Crazy! The book Jarrod Drysdale "My Designer is Driving Me Crazy!" For clients and managers, which teaches them to work properly with designers. Available in alternative formats like video course and mailing.
How Apple Is A Giving Design A Bad Name Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, the legendary Apple designers in the 70s-90s, about the current state of interface design at Apple. About how and why the processes have reached its current state. In the course gets and Google. Don and Tog have not given out such a powerful charge for a long time.
Google SPAN 2015: New York & London Last year, Google held its first design conference FORM, in which it takes place under the name SPAN already in two cities - New York and London.
Fresh links can also be tracked in the Facebook group of the same name or received once a month by mail .Thanks to everyone who also publishes links in it, especially Gennady Dragun, Pavel Skripkin, Dmitry Podluzhny, Anton Artyomov, Denis Efremov, Alexey Kopylov, Taras Brizitsky and Yevgeny Sokolov.More and more materials in reviews appear thanks to them.