Tags: design

The Appification of Everything & Why it Needs to End

When your only tool seems like a smartphone, everything looks like an app.

Amber writes on Ev’s blog about products that deliberately choose to be dependent on smartphone connectivity:

We read service outage stories like these seemingly every week, and have become numb to the fundamental reality: The idea of placing the safety of yourself, your child, or another loved one in the hands of an app dependent on a server you cannot touch, control, or know the status of, is utterly unacceptable.

The Ugly Truth about Design Systems

The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:

1. Current design systems thinking limits free, playful expression.
2. Design systems uncover organisational disfunction.
3. Continual design improvement and delivery is a lie.
4. Component-focussed design is siloed thinking.

It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.

SVG Artista

A handy tool for tweaking the animations in your SVGs.

How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson

Six UX lessons from game design:

1. Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
2. Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
3. Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
4. Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
5. Hintiness (Move to new loops)
6. Pacing (Be sure to start here)

Bottom Navigation Pattern On Mobile Web Pages: A Better Alternative? — Smashing Magazine

Making the case for moving your navigation to the bottom of the screen on mobile:

Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. Maybe it’s time for the web design world to start using these ideas on websites as well?

Less… Is More? Apple’s Inconsistent Ellipsis Icons Inspire User Confusion - TidBITS

The ellipsis is the new hamburger.

It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.

Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience| TimKadlec.com

If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.

Online Color Picker From Image - Pick your color

A nice standalone tool for picking colours out of photos, and generating a colour palette from the same photo.

Stop Misusing Toggle Switches

Use a toggle switch if you are:

1. Applying a system state, not a contextual one
2. Presenting binary options, not opposing ones
3. Activating a state, not performing an action

Brendan Dawes - Adobe Alternatives

Brendan describes the software he’s using to get away from Adobe’s mafia business model.

Intentional and Emergent Design Systems | Jordan Moore

This is a really interesting distinction:

An intentional design system. The flavour and framework may vary, but the approach generally consists of: design system first → design/build solutions.

An emergent design system. This approach is much closer to the user needs end of the scale by beginning with creative solutions before deriving patterns and systems (i.e the system emerges from real, coded scenarios).

It’s certainly true that intentional design systems will invariably bake in a number of (unproven?) assumptions.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

1. Obey the Law of Locality
2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
3. Pass the Squint Test
4. Teach by example

AccentDesign/Fractal-Atomic: An awesome starter point for your Fractal UI component library

If you want to use Brad’s Atomic Design naming convention—atoms, molecules, etc.—and you like using Fractal for making your components, this starter kit is just for you:

Keep what you need, delete what you don’t and add whatever you like on top of whats already there.

The 2019 Design Systems Survey by Sparkbox

The good folks at Sparkbox ran a survey on design systems. Here are the results, presented in a flagrantly anti-Tufte manner.

Form design: from zero to hero all in one blog post by Adam Silver

This is about designing forms that everyone can use and complete as quickly as possible. Because nobody actually wants to use your form. They just want the outcome of having used it.

LukeW | “Mad Libs” Style Form Increased Conversion by 25-40%

I was chatting with Rachel at work the other day about conversational forms, and I mentioned that I kicked that whole thing off with the mad libs style form on Huffduffer. Here’s the research that Luke later did on whether this style of form could increase conversion.

Seamful Design and Ubicomp Infrastructure (PDF)

Seams:

Seamful design involves deliberately revealing seams to users, and taking advantage of features usually considered as negative or problematic.

Creating my logo animation - cassie.codes

What a wonderfully in-depth and clear tutorial from Cassie on how she created the animation for her nifty SVG logo!

Also: Cassie is on the indie web now, writing on her own website—yay!

Design tools are holding us back

My main concern about this new generation of tools is that they require a specific toolchain in order to function. “If you just use this version of React and just use this styling library and configure things in exactly this way, your designers can play around with coded components.” It worries me that teams would end up choosing (and subsequently holding onto) specific tools not because they’re the best choices for our users but because the designers’ and developers’ workflow depends on a specific toolchain to work properly.

Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product

Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:

Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.