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-April 2016 .
Patterns and Best Practices
Infinite Scrolling vs.Pagination Nikolay Babich describes the pros and cons of the endless loading and page-by-page navigation. ')
This year will be heavily reworked Android Wear 2.0 . New style of presentation of cards and the principle of operation of notifications, improved battery life without a phone, the development of fitness functions. From the strange - the keyboard, although it will try to use quick answers from the Google Inbox. Video review .
The Unlikely Resurgence Of Vintage Graphics Standards Manuals Meg Miller describes the current trend of reprinting legendary brandbooks and design guidelines. Over the past year and a half, NASA's guides re-released the NYPA metro, British Rail is about to be released, as well as a series of collections. They come from the golden era of corporate identity and despite the fact that they are still available in electronic form, the designers have a special attitude towards them.
Building a Visual Language Karri Saarinen's story about how the Airbnb design team worked on the visual language underlying their DLS design system. Ama with him .
Other materials about design systems:
Updated BEM website . The feed has changed for more visual, added a lot of useful information.
What is the Difference? Ted Karczewski conducted an extremely interesting study - he compared how people describe the concepts of "experience" and "customer experience". It turned out that the first is more personal, includes several people and remains in memory forever, while the second is more utilitarian and concerns only the narrator.
Design for Time Well Spent In recent years, there have been many articles on psychological tricks with which you can more actively engage the user in working with the product. Tristan Harris, a former technology ethicist at Google, launched Design for Time Well Spent, a website dedicated to avoiding these practices. His article on the topic . Translation .
Design In The Age Of The App Icon Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan gives a lot of theoretical calculations that affect the perception of application icons. Everything is spinning, of course, around the new Instagram app icon.
Dyslexic.com The site collects materials, gadgets, articles, useful resources and a lot of everything else for dyslexics. For example, there is a selection of suitable fonts .
Designing A Dementia-Friendly Website Laurence Ivil and Paul Myles write about how to adapt websites for people suffering from marasmus in a medical sense. They interviewed a group of people suffering from this mental illness, and made recommendations for designers.
Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy
Content-First Prototyping Andy Fitzgerald describes an interesting approach to content prototyping. He set up a bunch of Excel and Jekyll static site generator with a couple of technology layers, so that he can quickly get an interactive prototype with real content and update it very easily.
Design and design of interface screens
Usability Heuristics for Bots Kevin Scott adapted Jacob Nielsen's classic heuristics for bots. At the end of the article, he evaluates three real bots.
Very simple color matching algorithm that works. Mikhail Anikin from Yandex describes the color matching algorithm that was used for Yandex.Launcher. It sets a juicy and harmonious background for the application card based on its icon.
Design debugging Interesting thoughts of the Bjango team on how debugging for designers can work. Process, tools, technology.
Sketch 3.8 Sketch 3.8 has been released. Redesigned Sketch Mirror and many small updates. Translation . Other tool news:
May Update of Adobe Experience Design CC May beta released Adobe XD. Added scrollable areas in prototypes and their full-screen viewing, improved work with text and objects. There are more plans for the next release, so, apparently, the development team is slowly picking up the pace. Other tool news:
Zeplin application for Windows has been released. Download .
User research and testing, analytics
Karma Police, Arresting Awesome article by Alyona Lugina from Shopify on how to combine qualitative and quantitative research methods. Very interesting analysis of how and at what points the user's behavior is monitored.
Combining UX Research with Market Research Jeff Sauro talks about how to combine classic marketing and UX research. The article is a good gradation of methods and purposes of their application.
Visualizing Data: Raw vs Difference Scores Jeff Sauro on how to properly visualize comparisons of indicators. It is important to show both the common values ​​and the difference between them.
The Pros and Cons of a Branded Survey Jeff Sauro compares the pros and cons of conducting user surveys on behalf of the company and in an impersonal form.
Measuring your successful return Excellent Content Company article on how to calculate ROI for content on a site. The “set goal → define metrics → measure and improve” approach is not new, but its application to content is interesting.
The Tale of Performance Marketing A well-written article about why it is difficult to guarantee the commercial success of a product without affecting strategy. On the example of performance marketing, but also relevant for interfaces.
UX strategy and management
Paradigm Shift - Reporting on the New Role of Design in Business and Society The most powerful review of key events on the institutionalization of design from Gjoko Muratovski. Using the example of food companies, consulting agencies, venture funds, public and charitable organizations, he shows how design becomes one of the key competencies and, in general, components that are critical for success. For each of the examples, he cites a brief history from design leaders. A lot, but worth it - one of the most valuable materials on the topic of design strategy.
Hyper Island & Teamweek Hyper Island students have made a reference book of teamwork methods that increase engagement. Each has a description, templates and step by step instructions.
Always Show Your Work - Greater Good Studio's George Aye tells you how to build a low-cost workspace for design discussions with mindboards, concepts, and other artifacts. At the end is a list of fittings for assembly.
State redesign.New brand and language Well described case of work on the new portal of state services from the Ministry of Communications of Russia and the company Rocketmind. Many strong third-party specialists and companies were involved in the work, including Maxim Ilyakhov for texts. Other cases of redesign:
State of the Digital Nation 2016 Ustwo's Jules Ehrhardt wrote insanely steep long-read about the current state of the agency business in the context of the transition of design competencies to product companies. He analyzes the reasons for buying studios and the market prerequisites for this, and eventually proposes a model of a modern agency - it continues to do customer work, but also deals with its own products and investments in startups. Reading an hour and a half, but it is worth every minute.
The User Experience of Virtual Reality An extensive collection of articles, books, videos, presentations and other materials on the topic of virtual reality. I do not know how the selection is checked by the curator for utility, but it looks impressive.
The UX of Learning UX is Broken Dan Maccarone and Sarah Doody talk about the problems of modern short-term design education. Short courses stamp semi-raw specialists who are promised guaranteed employment. At the same time, in fact, companies require a more serious level of knowledge and experience.
May 1st Reboot More than 3000 projects participated in the revived # May1Reboot initiative. Many of them are published on the site.
People and companies in the industry
Join an Open Design Critique with Facebook Facebook launches a design criticism initiative for third-party projects. If you publish a work on Medium with an explanation in the format "I am showing [early / mid / late] work around [the problem], because [why it's a problem]. And am looking for feedback around [specific focus for feedback] ”and with the FacebookDesignCrit tag, you can get free recommendations from the company's designers.
Summer intensives on UX / UI at the British High School of Design In the British High School of Design every six months, an Intensive on UX & UI, created by Yaroslav Shuvaev, takes place. This is an 8-day intensive work format in which a group of students is working on an educational project for the web or mobile, listening to lectures and attending master classes by leading local designers. It is aimed at those who want to improve their skills or get an overview of the specialty for further development. As a result, the group receives a project from one of the leading domestic Internet companies in the portfolio and good teamwork experience.
On the June 28-July 6 course, the Mail.Ru Group designers and researchers will talk about how modern approaches to interface design have allowed the company to make a qualitative leap. For example, in recent years, the international brand My.com has been launched, entire product lines are being translated into its own design system, mobile applications constantly fall into the official collections of the best for the year on Android and iOS. We are still in the middle of this path for a large-scale update, but many companies are just starting their way to systematizing the design and our experience will be useful.
Students will learn how to work throughout the entire cycle of creating digital products - researching the target audience and the market, creating and testing concepts, designing and designing the interface, user testing and analytics, and presenting and protecting ideas. On tasks from the largest domestic companies, you will work out the methods and practices of creating UX / UI, try modern prototyping and design tools. As a result, your portfolio will have a close to real project, and in the summary - a new teamwork experience.
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, Yevgeny Sokolov and Anton Oleinik.More and more materials in reviews appear thanks to them.