The digest collects fresh articles on interface design, as well as tools, patterns, cases and historical stories since 2009. I carefully filter a large stream of subscriptions so that you can upgrade your professional skills and better solve work tasks. Previous issues: April 2010-February 2018 .
Jeff Sauro conducted a user study of the largest social networks on the topic of trust in them and convenience of work in general. Users are critical to them.
* average NPS - 2%
Baymard Institute Studies
Edward Scott writes about the importance of normalizing data from third-party sites - without this, it is difficult to filter search results, study and compare products.
A small checklist for working with texts in interfaces from Ryan Cordell.
Design systems and guidelines
Among the recent articles on design systems, the positive trend is finally ceasing to endlessly rewrite the basics of the Atomic Design book and finally publish publications about the most complex and important - their management and implementation. Here at once a pack of such:
Nathan Curtis describes the approaches to combining different design systems that could be developed in a company in parallel. This often happens if the organization has many products of different degrees of maturity, and their teams are not related to each other.
Dani Nordin uses the John Kotter change model for the steps of implementing a design system. The details of the process are quite trivial, but the way of organizing thoughts is good.
It remains only to unlearn the design system called UI Kit in Sketch and the market will become mature.
A series of articles by Nathan Curtis on how to describe components in design systems. It turns out a comprehensive guide that works both for beginners and a good checklist for already having a design system.
Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy
Creating maps and charts for interfaces has always been a problem — either a separate tool is needed, which is niche and not always convenient. Or you have to do it with your hands where layouts are usually drawn, and this is not much better. It seems the situation is beginning to improve - Flowmapp and Wireflow appeared last year. And judging by the fact that it was with the tools for creating layouts, animation, and interactive prototypes, expect a big splash. Waited for:
At the end of last week, Figma noisily announced an open API that makes it a platform, not just a tool. The result was an orthogonal response to the plugin system in Sketch and any other desktop tool.
If switching from Photoshop to Sketch gave a tremendous increase in speed and comfort of work, then replacing Sketch with another modern tool is not so straightforward for a large team (unless your main task is to be at the height of trends at any cost). There are pluses, of course - for example, designers on Windows (of which, if anything, an order of magnitude more) have a choice. But there are not many of them to give up everything and again spend half a year or a year on restructuring processes, templates, etc.
One of the main tasks that product design teams are solving is how to improve the quality of design “live” without constant wars with implementation jambs. There is a “silver bullet” - design systems with components at the technological level. But here, too, the crutch - design templates and components in the code live in different worlds, they need to be updated in parallel and with their hands. Airbnb and several other enthusiasts showed last year how to export components to Sketch templates , but this is still a crutch that requires setting up a heap of scripts and services.
So far these are all early experiments that guarantee nothing, and I rather paint my wet fantasies about the future, which does not necessarily happen. Moreover, you will have to solve a lot of problems, including normal variables - now they are not in any instrument; uniform colors, fonts and indentations on the designer’s conscience cannot be exported either (although Design Systems Manager from InVision goes in the right direction and produces some variables in all possible formats). But if you heard about the concept of disruptive innovation, then with the announcement of the platform, Figma begins to look that way.
If a year ago I thought Figma was fashionable, but not necessary, Mulk (it’s not necessary for many teams to work on the layout at the same time), now I believe that in another year it will be possible to think about moving.
The screens can be assembled into interactive prototypes, which is now the absolute standard on the market - InVision processing for entering the territory of the tools for creating layouts, which greatly underscores the need for it ( Alexander Handley noticed this well ).
This has already been supported by Zeplin and Sympli , but so far at the most basic level.
After a quiet fix of bugs between 2017 and 2018, everyone waited in which direction Sketch would move and this is a very strong application.
A tool for creating presentations from the creators of Paper. Recently, it has the opportunity to insert layouts in the device, there are lots of variations.
Irrepressible Meng To continues to spud niche for niche and now he has launched a large catalog of design tools. You can check out again how much good is being done for us.
Jeff Sauro analyzed the topic of the “appraiser effect” - how different are the interface problems found by various experts during a heuristic evaluation or viewing records of usability-session sessions. As always, excellent conclusions based on many good experiments.
Jeff Sauro examines how important it is to accompany the interface questionnaires with several questions so that the results are more reliable. As usual, it depends on the task - somewhere alone is enough. Yes, and questionnaires for a few questions have their own problems.
Philip Walton describes an experimental approach to adaptability for specific blocks of the interface — this is a supposed development of media queries. Translation .
InVision has long been publishing interviews with leaders of design teams about how they work. They took the next step and launched a project trying to compare and sum up the experience of design management. At the start there are materials about Netflix, Slack, Shopify, Pinterest and Capital One. Surely this is due to the recent initiative of the Design Leadership Forum .
Dave Malouf describes three levels of responsibility for the design manager - tradecraft (professional skills), stagecraft (process direction) and statecraft (participation in the development of the company as a whole). It is extremely difficult for one person to combine them, so he examines typical problems in trying to do it anyway.
Daniel Rosenberg describes an interesting concept of market constraints and business models, technologies, finances, and the organization itself that influence the UX strategy.
Airbnb Design Head Alex Schleifer talks about how the design team works and how the company increases user confidence. They also have the largest design team in the world - they work closely with homeowners, so they make a huge contribution to the overall UX.
Sara Zailskas Walsh from Capital ONE gives advice on holding useful working meetings. She has developed a set of formats that are easily combined and used according to the situation.
Forrester commissioned an IBM survey-study of economic emissions from the introduction of design thinking practices. Rainbow numbers. A brief overview .
Design in Tech Report 2018 New John Maeda status report on digital products. It still has enough interesting observations on how companies and the market as a whole are changing, but since last year the focus has shifted to the promotion of its own concepts (including the controversial “computational design”). This still reflects the direction of the market, but the breakthrough discoveries, as was the case in the first two issues, are less and less.
Michael Flarup decided to troll the design community and make a modern reading of the skeporphic calendar design for the iPhone X. True, maybe he talked about it seriously ... Especially since the return of useless decor could end with just that.
Fast Co Design talked to the MS Office team, which was able to deliver the possibilities of algorithmic design in PowerPoint in a human way. They studied the work of personal assistant managers and relied on the gradual building of trust.
A Book Apart has published the book Conversational Design by Erica Hall . A List Apart publishes the first chapter of it. Other materials about voice interfaces:
The last 4 years Javier Cuello travels the world and works remotely - more and more designers practice this approach. He describes the pros, cons and pitfalls.
The Enterprise UX 2017 conference was held June 7-9 in San Francisco. She is dedicated to working on products and managing design teams in large companies. Pabini Gabriel-Petit reviewed the first day with Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner, Laura Klein and Kate Rutter workshops.
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