Anastasia Rezhepp: “The industry has started to think less about beautiful buttons”

We continue a series of interviews with leaders of industrial practices and DataArt trends. This time we talked with the head of DataArt design studio Anastasia Rezhepp. We learned what was new in UX, why there were more fonts and discussed the interfaces of the future.

- From the outside, it seems that the industry has started to think more and more about the UX, and less about the beautiful buttons. How true is this?
')
- That's for sure. How does anyone get to think about it is a completely different question, but the fact is: the UX really comes on all fronts. Now almost every major customer comes to us first of all with a request to make a UX. And how their product will look like - the question is often secondary. Some customers formulate requests already quite competently: they are asked to prepare a set of persons, customer journey maps, which just a couple of years ago, no one except specialists knew.

Why this happened is a good question. It seems to me that interested people (and among our customers are many interested in everyone in the industry) understood that UX is important when more and more articles began to appear around, videos that popularly explain how some new feature was not just implemented, but tested, for example. Recently, Facebook has made new likes. So only lazy did not write about it: articles in Wired, Techrunch and so on. And the team itself wrote a lengthy text, how they year - year, Karl! - worked on these likes: studied user behavior in different countries, emotions, collected statistics, tested. All these things are just heard.

- Maybe something has changed technologically? It became possible to measure what was previously difficult to measure? Has UX become a science?

“UX doesn't seem like a very accurate science to me.” Still, there are a lot of psychology, individual reactions. Of course, customers often want accuracy: for example, a slide in our presentation about UX, where we tell you that we have an eye tracker, always causes a lively reaction. But we ourselves at the same time more appreciate the usual testing, focus groups - when you can see the reactions of users live and ask questions if some actions are not clear.

The experience of split testing is not so extensive. On the one hand, it seems to objectively show which element causes the best reaction, and where the KPI is higher. On the other - this tool also has limitations. Let's say that the result was statistically significant, it is necessary that the traffic at the site on which the testing is carried out was high. Otherwise, it may take years to test the best button color.

Of course, the customer’s taste can influence the final result. This taste does not always need to be trusted, but in fact, customers and about UX and UI may have an opinion based on long-term monitoring of the industry, users. If an internal system is being made for a large corporation, it may well be that in two weeks of the research phase we will not collect the full picture, and in some places we will need to rely on the opinion of stakeholders. For example, recently one of our financial clients gave us a lecture on interface features for the financial sector: that all the sophisticated colors and the “air” that designers often try to insert are completely unnecessary when it comes to a broker who in a split second It is necessary to isolate changes in three thousand parameters.

But if the customer’s opinion seems to be totally wrong for you, you need to stock up with arguments: offer the same testing, test the hypotheses in numbers. In addition, you always need to prepare the mindboards, the boards on Pinterest for each specific project - so much easier to agree on.

- Another trend, visible to the naked eye - web designers have begun to pay more attention to typography. Is this due to Google Fonts?

- Google Fonts really significantly changed the appearance of modern web and mobile applications. If you recall, 10 years ago we had to be content with literally three fonts. Now here is complete expanse.

The appearance of multiple retina-devices significantly affects the fonts as well. Among other things, we will probably be able to observe more serif fonts, which were previously refused due to the fact that they are hard to read on the screen. With retina, this is not so important.

Tools began to appear that made it easy to adjust fonts. The work of the font designer is a difficult task, therefore very few people do it on a permanent basis. Now there are more and more tools like Prototypo, which allow changing the serifs, for example, with a simple slider movement. I can not say that I strongly approve of this, but so it is.

It greatly changes the look of the web and the fact that among the available fonts there are more and more decorative, decorative ones. For example, there appeared a fashion for Minty type watercolor fonts, which immediately give the site a very expressive image.

People are increasingly thinking about fonts, and the media are increasingly paying attention to this topic. For example, the fact that Apple released the San Francisco font is now known, if not all, then at least, by a lot of people who have nothing to do with fonts at all.

- Due to the fact that UI / UX now play a major role in design, have any tools emerged that have become new standards in the industry?

- The tools are now just a squall. It’s worth not to read the news for two months - and you don’t already know a dozen of new tools.

Sketch is now used everywhere, including in our studio. Most DataArt designers use it. Sketch is not adequately converted to other formats. Therefore, if one person started working in Sketch, the second one has to continue there. Paired with Sketch is Zeplin, without which now is also not life.

There are still a lot of tools that we don’t use massively in the studio, but the people around have already adopted them. These are tools that allow you to add animations or transitions, especially in mobile applications. Any Principle, Framer or Pixate, which allow you to quickly make an animated prototype out of images.

Tools for prototyping in general shaft. We use standard types like Axure and Balsamiq for the sake of unification, but there are a lot of similar ones. I was very interested in the application Justinmind, praised by Cooper.

Interestingly, almost all voiced tools - under Mac. Until developers decide to release versions for Windows, designers simply have no choice.
And we’ll see what other companies are preparing for us: whether Adobe can seize the initiative from Sketch using Adobe Experience Design, how good Invision Craft will be (and Invision is moving towards self-sufficiency in great strides).

- After the release of the Google library material design lite, there were many predictions that the material would capture the web. But while sites made by all canons, units. How promising is initially material on the web? Do you think it will become massive?

- This is a very interesting question. When the material first appeared, I also thought that now everyone would rush to draw something similar, but this did not happen. Now they are saying that in 2016 material Design should definitely take some prominent place on the web.

The logic is as follows. We abandoned skeuomorphism in favor of flat design, but everybody is already a bit tired of a clean, flat design. Material uses shadows, layers, animation. From this point of view, it is possible that, at a minimum, the material elements will be used more and more.

The material instructions themselves are very convenient. They are so clear in some areas that, it seems, anyone can make quite a decent interface just by using these guidelines: colors are chosen, font sizes for each situation, lists.

- In Russia, the print is dying. In the world - not very, but losing ground in the news niche. In any case, all sorts of cross-platform things get more value. Do you feel the arrival of the former graphic designers on the web? Big pictures? Hero images? New principles of navigation? New tools (such as Stampsy, ReadyMag, WebFlow) that take into account the printing experience?

- Undoubtedly, the look of the web has changed a lot. I'm not sure how much the printers influenced this, but the fact that the web is changing and becoming more and more like real magazines is absolutely certain. It seems to me, however, that the listed changes were more influenced by the increase in the share of mobile devices. Many initially random sites are now immediately made so that on a mobile device it is also convenient and there is no discomfort. And on the phone, of course, it’s convenient when you have big pictures, big icons, information is represented by cards ...

- What do you think will be the interface of the future? Roman Chernyshev, the leader of the medical direction in DataArt, in a recent interview said that the future is for voice interfaces, and touch interfaces are a necessary evil for now. How do you think?

- I agree with Roma. We have been going to this for many years. About 10 years ago, I remember, we had a client who really wanted to do a full voice interface. Then he did not succeed, but now most likely would have.

Virtual reality should also be used more and more. 2016 will be in many ways a year of VR - many important products will be released in this area. Their capabilities will definitely be used. It is worth looking at least at our science fiction, as it becomes clear that mankind has long dreamed of managing interfaces using gestures and voices, and making the working space is not screens, but the space around itself. Now we are very close to this. It is necessary to modify a little bit, take another step.



Well, look at how this video is convenient! This is great when everything around you is an interface.

- What awaits us in design in 2016?

- More attention will be paid to usability. In this case, it is very likely that less attention will be paid to the design as such. We already see that originality in websites and interfaces is less and less. And with this abundance of guidelines and ready-made templates, this may even increase.

The role of adaptive products will only grow. People do not cease to use mobile devices in almost all areas of life.

Greater emphasis will be on the animation and data visualization. Now almost every request from the client can use data visualization. People have more and more data, they need to be able to quickly and conveniently show.

VR is a very promising direction. Surely it will go beyond entertainment points. We now have people who are closely involved in the issue, including exploring the issue of UX with respect to virtual reality.

- Were the tasks set by customers, or the ways in which they formulate these tasks? Have you begun to push mobile interfaces more?

- It depends on the clients and their tasks. If these are very large projects, financial or medical, there is often no emphasis on mobile devices. Just because it is the products that people use at work, that is, almost always the desktop. But in general, requests for mobile designs have become a lot. Five years ago this, of course, was not. We are waiting for requests for design for hours. So far, it seems, there has not been a single real project, but we have already done enough work for the exhibitions - both for Motorola and for iWatch. And to any mobile application we make an offer to add something for hours.

- Do they initially ask for mobile sites and applications or adaptive sites?

- Most applications come to us startups. They usually want some new social network or something. In general, everything is always discussed. You need to look at business goals, at the audience, and decide on the basis of this. Such that the client came and clearly said: “I need a desktop and a native iOS application!” - and we would not understand, listen and go to draw, does not happen. We are all discussing.

It happens that clients deliberately refuse adaptive sites: when it comes to quickly releasing MVP, we often start with a fixed version, and then expand it in other directions.

- What are the most interesting design solutions you can remember over the past year? From our practice and not only.

- If we talk about the web - many amazing things can be seen on the Awwwards website. We go there for inspiration regularly. It is rarely possible to do something worthy of Awwwards due to the specific needs of our customers, but it is always useful to look at examples of animation or an interactive menu.

For us in the design studio the most interesting are large enterprise projects that are not particularly spectacular in appearance. Right now we are doing several such complex systems, mainly in the areas of finance and health. Say, a system that helps in testing new drugs. And another, which helps financiers trading bonds. We also design several pieces of a complex system for rating agency analysts: huge amounts of data, visual links that need to be simplified to make it easier to use. In this system, we pay a lot of attention to accessibility, so that people with limited abilities can also use it. All these works will never get to Awwwards, but they are very complex and therefore interesting.

We do all sorts of fun things, however. For example, in the summer they made an application for a large exhibition that helps children not to forget about important medical procedures. Everything was built around the character - the squirrel, which jumps, giggles. It was possible to wear hats on it, stars fly around. Pure fun, lots of fun! In general, it is good when there is a balance of big serious projects and small, but pleasant ones.