Link tags: types

43

sparkline

We’re still not innovating with AI-generated UI.

Prototypes and production:

It looks like it will be a great tool for prototyping. A tool to help developers that don’t have experience with CSS and layout to have a starting point. As someone who spent some time building smoke and mirrors prototypes for UX research, I welcome tools like this.

What concerns me is the assertion that this is production-grade code when it simply is not.

Why I moved on from Figma – No Handoff

A good looking artifact too early in the process gains buy-in too quickly and kills discovery.

Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign

So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

An Archeology for the Future in Space

I really enjoyed this deep dive into some design fiction work done by Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo, and Fred Scharmen.

(Remember when Simone spoke at dConstruct about toasters? That was great!)

The Demo → Demo Loop - daverupert.com

I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.

Paper Prototype CSS

A stylesheet to imitate paper—perfect for low-fidelity prototypes that you want to test.

Build a Better Mobile Input

This is such a handy tool for building forms! Choose different combinations of type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes on input elements and see how that will be conveyed to users on iOS and Android devices.

Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Engineering a better design test ~ @benjaminparry

It sometimes feels like we end up testing the limitations of our tools rather than the content and design itself.

What Benjamin found—and I heartily agree—is that HTML prototypes give you the most bang for your buck:

At the point of preparing for usability testing, it seemed ludicrous to move to any prototyping material other than the one we were already building in. The bedrock of the web: HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Hacks Are Fine / Matt Hogg FYI

If you employ a hack, don’t be so ashamed. Don’t be too proud, either. Above all, don’t be lazy—be certain and deliberate about why you’re using a hack.

I agree that hacks for prototyping are a-okay:

When it comes to prototypes, A/B tests, and confirming hypotheses about your product the best way to effectively deliver is actually by writing the fastest, shittiest code you can.

I’m not so sure about production code though.

share-button-type/explainer.md

If you’ve been following my recent blog posts about a declarative option for the Web Share API, you might be interested in this explainer document I’ve put together. It outlines the use case for button type="share".

Web Typography News #43: Typesetting Moby-Dick, part 2

Great typography on the web should be designed in layers. The web is an imperfect medium, consumed by countless different devices over untold numbers of network connections—each with their own capabilities, limitations, and peculiarities. To think that you can create one solution that will look and work the same everywhere is a fantasy. To make this more than just one nice book website, the whole project and process needs to embrace this reality.

Limiting input type=”color” to a certain palette (from an image) | Christian Heilmann

I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!

Better Form Inputs for Better Mobile User Experiences | CSS-Tricks

Here’s one simple, practical way to make apps perform better on mobile devices: always configure HTML input fields with the correct type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes. While these three attributes are often discussed in isolation, they make the most sense in the context of mobile user experience when you think of them as a team.

This is an excellent deep dive with great advice:

You may think that you are familiar with the basic autocomplete options, such as those that help the user fill in credit card numbers or address form fields, but I’d urge you to review them to make sure that you are aware of all of the options. The spec lists over 50 values!

Rise of the Digital Fonts

A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.

Point, don’t point — I love Typography

A brief history of the manicule, illustrated with some extreme examples.

Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers - Technology in government

Some solid research here. Turns out that using input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric” pattern="[0-9]*" is probably a better bet than using input type="number".

Demos, Prototypes, and MVPs | Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).

I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.

This is a very useful distinction!

A short history of body copy sizes on the Web

A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.

There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).