For six 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-December 2015 .
Patterns and Best Practices
User Onboarding Isn't a Feature Madly cool article by Samuel Hiluck that meeting a new user is not a feature that is launched separately, but a crucial part of the product. The article has many sensible recommendations on how to measure the effectiveness of the interface in this regard.
User Intent Affects Filter Design Katie Sherwin from NN / g gives recommendations on the operation of automatically applied filters to the search results of online stores. The article considers two things - how to quickly apply the filter to the issue and whether or not to scroll the list of results to the top.
Improving Reviews And Testimonials Using Science-Based Design Interesting material Lauren Ventura on the psychology of ratings and reviews. As the formulation of such a request to the user, as well as the time and format of his writing affect the tonality and emotionality.
On the main page on mobile . It is important to give the user an overview of what the online store sells - they often scroll the page back and forth to understand what you can buy here.
The Price Of Not Using Ux Patterns Shay Ben-Barak conducted an interesting experiment in order to understand how much the separation from standard patterns worsens the UX. He took the standard phone dialing layout and made an alternative to it. With a non-standard solution, users coped with the task worse. This, of course, is a rather extreme example, because most of the decisions on which disputes take place have less obvious gaps. But in any case, a useful example.
It turns out that Fantasy Interactive was also attracted to work on Material Design. They thought about how guidelines can be applied on the web ( another example ). This is the third studio, which is known to have been involved in the task besides B-Reel and Huge, Inc.
More Chinese Mobile UI Trends Dan Grover has released a continuation of his epic article about the features of Chinese mobile applications. New interesting patterns, sometimes very specific - for example, comments to the video, flying over the video when it is played.
Beyond Utility: Re-Discovering Product Discovery Dan Brown from EightShapes is writing a book about the research phase of design projects. In a recent article, he describes the overall vision of the process.
Design and design of interface screens
Invision The company went on the warpath - in addition to the recently acquired Macaw, they also bought Relay , which allows us to discuss the design in Slack. This team (they were called Waybury) also made Iconic's promising service for system work with SVG icons. Judging by the statement of the guys, this is more of a acquihire. Not to mention the riot of content marketing initiatives. I wonder if the company has a global plan - to compete with Photoshop and Sketch or to beat a hundred small tools?
In addition, they launched Labs , an experimental team to work on things besides the main product. Their first release of Craft is a Sketch and Photoshop plugin that makes it easy to use real data in layouts. From a file, cloud storage, photo or any web page. In addition, he can clone Comet-like patterns. Overview of its capabilities ( in Russian and some more ). About other Craft features and InVision initiatives:
Adobe Animate CC (Flash Pro) Adobe released Animate CC as a replacement for Edge Animate and Flash Professional, combining the tasks of both tools. Vector animation, whose output is not the deceased flash, and HTML5-code. A little about him .
Invites are slowly being heard and there are already first reviews. About working in a live application, you can listen to the layout podcast ( another release ).
It seems to be the release of the Silver add-in soon, which makes Sketch almost that Adobe Comet. Two articles came out at once in a week with its review - the first and the second ( in Russian ).
Analytics without numbers.We look at the product through the eyes of users Oleg Yakubenkov describes a method for studying user behavior using the analysis of statistics on their work in a product. In a relatively short time, behavioral patterns of 50-100 people can be studied. Some of the problems described are usability testing or calculating metrics, but not all.
High-Impact, Minimal-Effort Cross-Browser Testing A chic reminder of Chris Ashton on testing sites in the zoo browsers. He suggests doing it in three rounds - first catch the most noticeable implementation shoals in the most popular browser, then take up a couple of the poorest, and at the end once again walk into several popular ones.
The Art Of The Intercept - Moving Beyond "Would You Like To Take A Survey?" Victor Yocco describes the user research approach when a team of researchers pulls users out of their natural surroundings (for example, buyers of certain goods right in the store, people at an ATM, or visitors to a zoo). The process, features, pitfalls.
The Demise of User Research? Good thoughts Nalini Kotamraju from Salesforce about some internal crisis of the classic understanding of the role of the UX-researcher. The growth of analytics and quantitative experiments, simplified access to users through remote research, flexible development - all this greatly changes the usual course of work of user researchers.
Noah's Transition To Mobile Usability Testing The Smashing Magazine experiment, in which the case of mobile usability testing was built in the genre of a mini-story. True, it’s not very convenient to consume raw information - regular articles structure the main ideas well, so you can easily scan and find the most important thing, and here you have to read the whole chain without the certainty that there is something new there.
Discuss the limitations of Atomic Design by Nathan Curtis and rent Walton . Ideology describes the modular design well and has a bunch of useful tools for practical implementation. But the classification of components through 5 not very obvious levels sometimes leads to confusion - is this pattern already an organism or another molecule? In this regard, the classification of the same BEM is simpler and clearer - there are basic elements and components that consist of them.
The article by Cas Lemmens , in which, in addition to general philosophical reasoning, is a story about the design principles of Spotify and the initiative of Glue (Global Language and the Unified Experience) on the unification of the company's products.
Turn Your AMP Up To 11: Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Christian Cantrell talks in detail about how the AMP initiative from Google works on presenting news sites on mobile. He also compares its individual moments with similar solutions of Facebook (Instant Articles) and Apple (News).
In progress The Wake service launched the blog In Progress, in which there are very sensible interviews with the leaders of famous design teams. Little water, many interesting insights.
Some of these and other articles on the construction of design teams and design culture:
Efficient Responsive Design Process Smashing Magazine publishes the chapter Bell Callahan from the book Smashing Book 5 about its process of working on adaptive design. There is also a lot about working with the client as a whole.
And what about the Medusa guns? How Medusa synchronizes push notifications in the desktop browser and application, and also selects what to notify the user about.
Story
UX Timeline, back to the past! Site UX Timeline collects different versions of the design of well-known products. At the start there are Deezer, AirBnB, Uber, Spotify, Dropbox, Vimeo, Mailchimp, Shazam.
How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design The most powerful historical information about the emergence of cybernetics as a science from Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro. The article is very long and looks for roots in the early 20th century, linking key names in the history of computer development. In the second half, there are many interesting things about the connection between cybernetics and design, and the appearance of interaction design in general. Getting through the text is not easy, but it is definitely worth those who are interested in the history of the profession.
Matt Hartman has a good mature look on the topic of really useful use of instant messengers . Now this topic is overheated and many people are playing with foaming at the mouth of the famous "There will be no newspapers, no books, no cinema, no theaters, but there will be one continuous television." The article advises to think whether the transfer of the script to the messenger really simplifies the user's work. In addition, there are sensible thoughts on the findability of bots and add-ons, as well as their market as a whole.
Skill for UX Professionals Baruch Sachs lists five professional qualities of a good designer. Ability to adapt, communication, work with conflicts, argumentation and negotiation and authority.
Muzli Design Inspiration The second version of Muzli, a plugin for Chrome, has been released, which replaces the blank tab page with a ribbon of designer sites and communities. What is new .
Panda gets a facelift with Night Mode and Sub sources Now in the Panda plugin, extended filtering options are available for all services by category, and social networks like Dribbble and Behance can be viewed in a single tape.
UX-Wednesday AMA with vc.ru: Golden Krishna Golden Krishna, who worked at Cooper, Samsung and Zappos, answers questions about his sensational and very relevant concept of "The Best Interface is No Interface" and the eponymous book, and in December went to work at Google, where he will be engaged in Android.
The graphical user interface has changed the command line and now dominates - we see screens at work, at home and in the urban environment, develop products for them, so in fact we think of them. But such an interface is often an obstacle to more quickly and efficiently solving user problems with a product. At the same time, taking into account the current context, the use of sensors or accumulated information about the user can minimize the number of interfaces, and thus simplify the work with the product.
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.