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-July 2016 .
Patterns and Best Practices
Mixed Parts Mixed Parts community that collects articles, presentations, tools, and interface animation examples. ')
Here's What May Sound Like a Crazy Idea Kevin Goyena's interesting thoughts on how hardcore solutions of old command line interfaces can help modern products. He refers, among other things, to ancient ticket booking services, where the operator had to remember the short but complex request format. Similar ideas will be useful to speed up the filling of complex forms, provided that the operator does this often.
Does Improving Website Navigation Pay Off? Jeff Sauro reflects on whether it is possible to estimate the return on investment in site navigation. Many focus on the checkout process, but the user still has to walk to it.
5 Design Principles for eHealth Brett Warren gives you five tips for working with healthcare interfaces. Users do not always have the opportunity to learn how to work with the product, or it happens a few months before use, you need to pay special attention to information design and decision-making assistance.
Product vs Marketing Illustration Chic article by Meg Robichaud from Shopify on the difference between product and marketing illustrations. She examines the five main categories of illustrations and how they are useful in both types.
Why design principles shape stronger products Jessie Chen shows an example of the description of design principles for a CRM system. They are tied to a pyramid similar to the model of Maslow.
Android Wear
Luigi Notaro parses changes to the guidelines in Android Wear 2.0 . Google revised the color palettes - they became darker in order to save the battery and not distract the user once again. A rather interesting formula is used to calculate colors relative to the main one.
The size guide! Updated detailed crib on the size of graphic elements on social networks from Adsvise. They also added templates for Photoshop and Sketch.
Understanding the user
39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes Insanely cool article by Kennedy Elliott about the features of the perception of different types of infographics. For each item, she refers to good research and gives recommendations on when and where to use them.
The Six Minds of UX Design Sheena Lyonnais excellent review article on six UX factors to consider when designing interfaces. This is a job in visual presentation and attention, orientation, memory and semantics, language, emotions, and decision making.
Designing Desirable Experiences Arindam Roy talks about the advantages of products, the interfaces of which are not just utilitarian, but desired by users. Often, the sensations from using such products are better in comparison with full functional analogues, but less attractive.
User Memory Design - How To Design For Experiences That Last Viget's Curt Arledge is not the first to write about the psychology of user experience, but it turned out to be more useful for practice. He shares how the event was experienced and what remains in the memory. And gives advice on improving products with this in mind.
Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy
The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice A good reminder of the Nielsen / Norman Group for choosing the tone of interface texts. They offer 4 grades: cheerful — serious, formal — easy, respectful — frivolous, enthusiastically — dry.
Making a case for a letter case Dropbox's John Saito from the English language interface examines situations when you need to write a headline with capital letters. The language rules say that headers should be capitalized, but iOS and Android guidelines say different things.
Design and design of interface screens
C4 Studio New tool C4 Studio to work on the interface animation. So far this is an alpha version, but they promise to import layouts from Sketch, and the code in Xcode is output. The product has a clever promo video about communication designer and developer troubles.
Pixel-Perfect Specifications Without The Headaches Nikolay Babich compares in detail the tools for transferring layouts and resources to developers. It describes the interface and capabilities of Avocode, Sympli and Zeplin.
Compare Adobe Illustrator to Affinity Designer and Sketch in 2016 Detailed comparison of Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Design and Sketch from the perspective of the icon designer. Iconfinder did the same comparison a couple of years ago, but since then the tools have been greatly updated.
Pattern Pattern application for prototyping on iPad. Interesting solutions, although the process itself looks worn out with respect to plain paper and pens.
Planning usability testing My colleague Natalia Sprogis wrote a detailed instruction on planning usability testing. The formulation of questions and the choice of methods, the definition of metrics, the preparation of tasks and features of the conduct The second part .
Going Beyond the Obvious Excellent article by Philip Hodgson from UserFocus on how to put questions for user research. This will help to find really valuable insights, and not just tick off the project phase. Philip refers to the book of the zoologist Niko Tinbergen, who put forward four principles of observing animals - they are applicable to the study of human behavior.
13 Things to Consider When Offering Survey Incentives Jeff Sauro gives advice on paying for the time of user research respondents. Although the specifics of many different from domestic, they will still be useful.
Trym - Beautiful Small App for MacOS Application for viewing, optimizing and converting SVG files. After installation, it becomes the default SVG viewer. Depending on the color of the icon, the interface theme changes between light and dark (standard viewers show a white image on a white background). Icons can be optimized to reduce the size (for example, Sketch leaves a lot of garbage when exporting), and also to change the size and in one click convert to PNG in different sizes for web, iOS and Android. Other tools for working with SVG:
The future of UX design Topical issues of UX development as a direction, and of every professional who thinks about development.
Methodologies, procedures, standards
Refinement of the professional standard "Graphic and User Interface Designer" The professional standard “Graphic and User Interface Designer” is being actively developed and the initiative group is conducting a survey - to understand what is the responsibility of UX-professionals in Russia and the CIS countries. The survey is anonymous, it will take about 15 minutes. His results will be published.
Cases
Are Successful App Redesigns Even Possible? Daniel Sands conducted an interesting study of reviews of the latest mobile app redesigns. It doesn't matter if the team did a good job or not, users are always unhappy. But it turned out that after a few weeks the hype subsides and the estimates are returned, and later.
Nielsen / Norman Group conducted WeChat usability testing . The interface is rather mediocre, the bots are not particularly clever, and in general it is often not a dialogue in natural language, but a walk through the menu. It is popular due to the integration of everything and everything, as well as the ease of payments.
Unity's Greg Madison debunks three big virtual reality myths . He is skeptical of films, used for long-term work and the use of classical input methods like a mouse and keyboard, and generally believes that with time everything will turn into augmented reality.
Symbol For Context Joe Blau offers a universal icon to indicate the context in which the computer takes over part of the user's actions. With the proliferation of personal assistants, unmanned vehicles and other products that perform a more active role, it is important to show that the computer has taken over the control.
For general and professional development
Graphic means A Graphic Means documentary on how designers worked in the pre-digital era and how work changed after the advent of computers was being prepared for release. The authors interviewed a couple of dozen well-known specialists like Tobias Frere-Jones, Ellen Lupton and Dan Rhatigan. They promise by the end of the year.
UX Chat - Daily UX Bear UX Conversations The uxdesign.cc blog team and Adrian Zumbrunnen have launched a bot that tells product design news. It is based on the recent concept of the personal site Adrian.
Font for state AIC, together with Artem Geller's laboratory and the ParaType team (at the design development stage - represented by Alexandra Korolkova), is starting to work on a font for the state. We need our own font, which can become the basis of a single ecosystem of all official Internet resources. Modern, free, public. The whole family of fonts with different parameters, which is in the public domain.
Artyom Geller asks the community to answer a few questions:
What character should the font have for government systems?
Should it be as official as the state itself?
The project to improve digital interaction with the state is initiated by people for people, and the team wants to reflect these aspirations. The result of the first discussions and a cursory analysis of state fonts of different countries: the basis is taken by the modern Dutch grotesque - humanistic and friendly. Like Peter I - take an example from the Dutch masters.
Practical ux design Scott Faranello's book Practical UX Design was released in April. UXMatters publishes the second chapter of it, devoted to the open and closed state of the designer's work.
Design.blog The design team Automatic (created by WordPress) has launched a blog with the ingenuous title Design blog. The initiative came largely thanks to John Maeda, who recently joined the company from KPCB . His position is “global head of computational design and inclusion” ( what exactly it will do ).
UX STRAT 2015 Report on master classes at the conference, which was held on September 8-10 in Athens, Georgia (USA). It is dedicated to the design strategy and gathers a powerful composition of thematic speakers.
AIC Design School AIC opens a set of online school. Design and tools in the digital environment are developing rapidly - it is only necessary to describe the trends and rules as they become obsolete. The only way to learn is to plunge into the environment of the leading studio and understand the principles in practice. The site is already possible to enroll in the school.
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, Evgeny Sokolov and Anton Oleinik.More and more materials in reviews appear thanks to them.