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-June 2018 .
The most powerful analysis of the interface reasons why developers actively use the command line and prefer it to the graphical interface. IBM's Micah Linnemeier is working on professional products and wanted to get to the real pros and cons in terms of interaction, not just typical biases.
Rhiannon Jones from Deliveroo describes the company's approach to writing error messages. They divide them into several categories and choose the tonality based on this.
Amber Case talks about the problems of modern screens that emit blue light - it puts eyes and interferes with sleep. Blue light gives off the most energy, so in another article, she and scientists recommend the orange-red ones , which are used by the military and the same BMW.
Luke Wroblewski studied the bike rental applications and compared the steps you need to take before driving. Many unnecessarily complicate the process by asking for too much or abusing learning use.
Experimental laboratory is trying to understand which news formats will be suitable for generation Z. In the first part of the article, Tristan Ferne examines the approaches available on the market. In the second design team made several interactive prototypes .
Jeff Sauro analyzed several major US healthcare companies and compared their usability with the SUPR-Q metric. He cites typical problems for such sites.
Design Systems Conference London will be held November 15-16 in London. So far, local speakers without bright stars have been announced, but the announcement has just appeared. This is the third design systems conference in addition to the Clarity in San Francisco (I attended the program last year, but the program was very hard on 2016) and DSConf in Helsinki.
A chic story by Diana Mounter about the emergence and development of the GitHub design system. Phased development, examples of internal documents and processes.
An intelligent story by Anthony Zhang from Oscar Health about the gradual development of the design system in the company. How to do it without strain, slowly complementing and updating.
Liz Khoo from Salesforce talks about the interaction between the teams working on the design system.
Material design
Review Android Go , a simplified version of the OS for cheap devices based on Oreo 8.1. Many features are trimmed on it and lightweight versions of the main applications are made (and some are based on progessive web apps).
Feifei Liu from Nielsen / Norman Group describes the features of interface design for children. She compares the development of motor skills with age and gives advice on the controls for each of them.
The creators of the domestic tool UXPressia to work on a customer journey map have released version 4.0. There was a joint work and expanded tools in all aspects - the interaction cards themselves, the characters, the card of emotions.
An interesting integrated tool to support design thinking. It has a rich set of features - customer journey map, characters, aggregation of feedback from different sources for finding growth opportunities, linking analytics. And all this is based on a “double diamond”.
Rachel Krause of the Nielsen / Norman Group shows how to create storyboards for use cases. They show a piece of customer journey map, and these two approaches can be combined.
The publisher of Two Waves Books released in June 2018 a book by Jorge Arango “Living in Information” on information architecture. UXmatters publishes a slice of chapter 8 of it.
Another new design tool that plays on the Figma field is the simultaneous work of several designers in the browser. A whole set of modern features is claimed (prototyping, discussion of screens, adaptability, symbols / components). From new ideas - support for several languages ​​in the layout, exporting layouts to code and uploading to the server, quick viewing on the phone via a QR code. Announcement from the creators .
Now styles can be added to libraries. Many small improvements in prototyping and the main interface.
Plugins and articles
Timeline 2.0 : the add-on from Anima has become even more powerful and has focused on interactive components, the code of which can be unloaded (so far naked HTML / CSS / JS, but promise React, VueJS, Angular, Lottie, iOS and Android).
Colm Tuite compares two popular approaches to interface design - work in tools that are heirs of printed design, the results of which are then transferred to development, and visual programming, where there is no such transition. Since last year, he has been working on the Modulz tool, which moves in the second direction and makes it possible to visually work with components on React.
They showed a video of the work of Framer X and its main features. The result was a one-piece design tool and prototyping in the spirit of InVision Studio. True, they didn’t really show a bunch of real components at React - although Framer components themselves were made at React, they aren’t spoken about connecting them to a real design system.
New interface design tool. It is positioned as a visual work based on a code (something similar to Modulz from Colm Tuite) - moreover, it is alleged that you can immediately work with components on React (but not the fact that it uses a real product). Intriguing, but so far from the details there is only an article from the authors .
Marvel
Userflows : The Userflows add-in allows you to automatically generate a conversion map based on the prototype.
Services for working with the base of insights. They help aggregate user research data, feedback, and other channels to find useful ideas for product development among them.
Jim Ross shows how to properly make recommendations for improving the interface after peer review or user research, so that the product team understands them and agrees with them.
I promised not to write DesignOps reviews anymore. But, of course, could not resist. I supplemented and structured my notes on the topic for the last month and posted them in the main blog - the current movement and history will be updated and replenished there. Do not thank / mother.
Alexey Shaikhelislamov described S7 Airlines' UX-strategy based on a speech at the Moscow Dribbble Meetup. The company aims to become more mature in terms of design and has chosen a very systematic approach.
A chic look at the correct understanding and definition of roles in the product team of Peter Lewis from Capital One. They should go from the final result and goal, and not just a set of responsibilities - this provides the result, and gives flexibility in tactics.
Dan Brown from EightShapes gives advice on interviewing decision makers. How and what questions to ask to get the most useful information and successfully complete the project.
Jonathan Courtney from AJ & Smart supposedly offers a second version of the design sprints - they stung the process up to 4 days. True, at the same time they sacrificed the most important thing - time for understanding the problem, so now you can quickly do not what users and businesses need.
Antin Harasymiv talks about optimizing the Google Photos web interface. They found several strong solutions at the junction of design and technology, which made the work with the interface much more comfortable.
On October 17, 2008, the AppStore for iPhone opened, which greatly changed the model of sales and distribution of digital products. By the decade of the store, Michael Steeber collected a history of redesigning ten applications that appeared that day and still live.
The future of voice interfaces is better than that of dust-covered bots. Sales of devices are growing vigorously, and major platforms are rapidly acquiring partnerships and integrations into everything connected to electricity and the Internet. By the end of the year, 100 million devices are predicted ; already 20% of American families have a smart column . Well, domestic highpojors recently stood in line for Alice. Whether you were there or not, studying the topic is useful.
Nielsen / Norman Group conducted a meticulous user research of voice assistants from Amazon, Google and Apple . It turned out a chic analysis of current problems both in the main mode of operation and in the “skills” of third-party authors. This is one of the main articles of the month - in one sitting you can get acquainted with a bunch of pitfalls. Especially a lot of complaints about the skills - they are difficult to find, they are more dumb.
It can be seen that voice assistants have a very long way to go in order to become really useful. On the other hand, smartphones also had a lot of problems about 15 years ago, but were able to become radically more convenient and practical. In general, one of the most useful materials on the topic of voice interfaces.
Rafal Cymerys from Upside is showing the Alexa StarCraft II voice control experiment . It is well suited for operations involving a sequence of several primitive actions, although basic operations are still easier to do through the mouse and keyboard.
In late July, the hackathon on creating skills for Google Assistant ( he spoke in Russian ) was held in the Moscow office of Google. The teams from Mail.Ru Group (Delivery Club, ICQ, Pandao, All pharmacies), Clever Pumpkin, Eora.ru, Heads and Hands, Just AI, Redmadrobot, Restri AO and X5 Retail Group participated in it. The concepts themselves are secrets, but I’ve got the criteria for evaluating a good skill for you. So to say, hot report :) You can experiment yourself through Dialogflow constructor.
A bunch of recent news and relevant statistics can be found on the Voicebot website. But just a couple of relatively fresh articles on the topic:
Several stand-up comedians appreciate the humor of the smart assistants Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. For example, Google has a separate team of writers who provide jokes.
Over the past year and a half, there have appeared many devices like "voice assistant with a screen." In fact, any tablet or smartphone with a docking station can solve this problem. It seems that Google is preparing this mode for Android phones .
This is just a small section of interesting and important pieces for the designer. Keep yourself informed, there is a chance that will soon come in handy.
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