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-November 2018 .
A book about interface design for non-designers by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger. They gave tips on how to improve frequency patterns and typical situations on Twitter, and now put it in a simple reminder with templates.
Kinneret Yifrah text writing tips for unsubscribe screens or product use in general. Many try to soften or shame the client, but his refusal is not always associated with the product itself and it is important to show understanding.
A simple and useful reminder on the design of useful service error pages from Alana Brajdic. Checklist with user questions and examples of answers to them.
Insanely cool example of guidelines on motion-design for Fresh Island. A lot of typical situations are shown, and the animation has a corporate character.
Badoo's Cristiano Rastelli talks about exporting icons from Sketch to their Cosmos design system. The company has several products, so the approach supports thematic. Part 2 .
Figma, together with the organizers of the Clarity conference, surveyed 499 designers working on design systems. Their opinions are collected in the report, although the confusion with the concept of “component” continues (naturally, for Figma, this is just a thing in the design template, not a piece of code).
The unified style of illustrations for Slack, which appeared in 2017, is an unconditional hit that half of the companies actively reproduce. It allows in a playful form to combine humanity (people are displayed entirely and in the plots) and to show the key metaphors of the product (objects and parts of the interface). Well, just a typical trend, for which everyone ran, grappled with a train - there are other stylistics that solve these problems.
Alice Lee, who started a wave for Slack, spoke about the work on the project. The starting mindboard, intermediate variations, library of typical objects and a large gallery of results - individually and in detail.
At the end of the article, Alice gives good advice for those who seek their own style. Now several generators of stock illustrations have appeared, which greatly reduce the cost of their creation and make them accessible to more companies (and cloning, of course, kills the diversity and value of one’s own face):
We collect the isometry on the template once or twice.
Of course, it was possible to get a stock result on Shutterstock or Getty Images, they have long been flooded with the Internet. The new generation of designers at least gives the integrity of the approach - it is easier to assemble your plot from finished objects.
Susan Weinschenk describes the principles of the brain during the solution of creative tasks. The speech is not in the alternate work of the right and left hemispheres, but in the principles of three-level information processing.
Therese Fessenden from the Nielsen / Norman Group gives examples of the use of the psychological method of “anchoring” in interfaces. He often justifies a higher price.
Another material on interface design for children from the Nielsen / Norman Group. Feifei Liu gives advice on taking into account the features of different age periods - cognitive abilities and motor skills are limited in the early years.
Daniele Catalanotto's free book on designing services. Written so that to use these ideas do not need a deep knowledge of this difficult subject area. Practically in any service there are low-hanging fruits - problems that can be fixed in a cheap and fast way, but with obtaining a significant effect. This book will help find such fruits. In fact, this is a checklist of typical situations in the design of services with options for their decisions.
The tool allows you to get code for web and native Android and iOS applications from Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop and Balsamiq layouts (on the Figma approach).
A simple and powerful approach to choosing user research methods from David Travis from UserFocus. It is based on the classic 2 Ă— 2 matrices and offers 10 points of view on different tasks.
Paula Barraza shares tips for conducting fast, iterative user interface testing. How to conduct sessions, record the results and communicate with the team.
Gabriella Campagna from IBM talks about an interface complexity analysis method that the team uses to evaluate improvements and comparisons with competitors. On the basis of the checklist, it shows where the problem areas in the script.
Jeff Sauro repeated the study of Fred Reichheld, author of the NPS metric, to verify its validity. In general, everything is so - profit is justified in the past and with a future probability of 30%.
He launched a course on digital product design management at Bang Bang Education. I am working on a book based on my series of articles and have already collected a draft in a new structure. The main idea is to describe the methods and practices of design management in a patterning format, approximately as usual typical interface solutions. In this form, they are easier to use in the right situation - there are step by step instructions and indications / contraindications for use. This means that advanced approaches can be applied even by those who are just starting.
In recent years, the demand for design managers has been growing - companies have pumped up their internal product teams, and there are more designers. It raises the question of how to make their work connected, which organizational structures are better for this, how to raise and motivate them, how to make the quality of their work predictable - and this list is very long.
We have come a good way in Mail.Ru Group and although there is still a lot of work ahead, it’s hard not to notice the changes that have already happened and their dynamics. Many companies are just starting their way - for example, banks and telecoms gradually take design expertise inward, and our transformation began about this 8-9 years ago.
If you want to start or accelerate changes in the design of your company, let's go to the course . Classes start on February 26th.
Interview with Irene Au from the Khosla Ventures Venture Fund about her experience in the development of design in companies of different types and stages of maturity. She actively helps startups and sees many different situations.
Noah Levin talks about the Figma design team's competency map. The format is a popular petal diagram. They published their template for profile card designers .
Taylor Palmer from Lucid Software talks about integrating the design team into a common grocery. How the interaction format changed as the company grew.
Hye-jin Lee, Katie Kahyun Lee and Junho Choi conducted a study on the link between User Experience, Customer Experience and Brand Experience. They also collected a breakthrough of previous works on the topic, so that a useful portal to the knowledge accumulated by the profession will turn out. The article looks great, but a significant part is devoted to the research methodology and can be skipped.
Sarah Gibbons from the Nielsen / Norman Group asked UX specialists about their understanding of design thinking. It turned out a good cut of different meanings that are embedded in the term. They promise more detailed materials in pursuit.
December 9th is the 50th anniversary of the most important technological presentation in the history and history of interfaces in general. Douglas Engelbart arranged The Mother of All Demos , where he showed the basics of modern computers as working-home tools and interfaces. Then they were developed in Xerox PARC, further on their groundwork noobs are attributed to Apple. One of the best articles for the anniversary of Marc Weber , in which he examines the background, the fate of the project and the connection to the Internet.
Since the beginning of the fall, there have been more than one hundred such collections, but these best show where to move in 2019. Good luck in differentiating your brands (and collecting likes on Dribbble).
Have released their annual review of trends. They are, as always, more general technology than design. In the summer I was visiting their London office and Esther Duran told about the work on the report . They collect the opinions of 1000 employees and 85 clients on 5 continents in order to find insights and highlight patterns in a wide range of areas (society, politics, professional industries). As a result, there are about 70 trends, 10 of which are published outside.
The tool turns the interface sketches on paper into fairly neat Sketch layouts. I have been following alpha and beta versions for a long time, an excellent application of the Airbnb idea for a wide range of designers.
Jason Mesut - master of turning any interface concepts into visual models. He collected all his articles on a topic in a single blog. One of the latest describes problems with the interpretation of "empathy" among designers . And an intelligent model to account for all who are important to work on the product.
Erika Hall's fitrid longrid on the topic of design ethics in making product decisions and in general limits of opportunity. She recommends comparing user value and business benefits in the early design stages so that there is no gap between them.
The design management conference DesignOps Summit 2018 from Rosenfeld Media was held in New York on November 7-9. The organizers posted a video of speeches (last digest was a report on it ).
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