From Designing Products with Sound by Amber Case and Aaron Day:
Sound eases cognitive burdens.
Sound is also a powerful brand differentiator.
Sound is emotional.
Finally, sound impacts productivity.
But also:
Not every product needs sound design.
Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.
He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.
This article about a specific security flaw in voice-activated assistants raises a bigger issue:
User-friendliness is increasingly at odds with security.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Don’t make me think” is a great mantra for user experience, but a terrible mantra for security.
Our web browsers easily and invisibly collect cookies, allowing marketers to follow us across the web. Our phones back up our photos and contacts to the cloud, tempting any focused hacker with a complete repository of our private lives. It’s as if every tacit deal we’ve made with easy-to-use technology has come with a hidden cost: our own personal vulnerability. This new voice command exploit is just the latest in a growing list of security holes caused by design, but it is, perhaps, the best example of Silicon Valley’s widespread disregard for security in the face of the new and shiny.
An interesting idea from Ruth—using subtle sounds to augment inline form validation.
There aren’t any extremely established best practices for this stuff. The best we can do is make tasteful choices and do user research. Which is to say, the examples in this post are ideas, not gospel.
James gives—if you’ll pardon the pun— hands-on advice on making sites that consider motor impairment:
Far from being a niche concern, visitors with some form of motor impairment likely make up a significant percentage of your users. I would encourage you to test your website or application with your less dominant hand. Is it still easy to use?
The videos from UX London 2017 are available for your viewing pleasure.
If you thought Vitaly’s roundup of date pickers was in-depth, wait ‘till you get a load of this exhaustive examination of slider controls.
It pairs nicely with this link.
In which I have a conversation with a polar bear.
Very well-mannered species …I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.
With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.
This really resonates with me.
One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.
Terrific post!
Here’s to two more years.
I really like this “evil” design exercise that Jared has documented on Ev’s blog.
I broke them up into small groups of three, spreading each role across separate groups. I then asked each person to grab a sheet of paper and make their own list of ways they imagined the product’s user experience could be made worse.
This looks like a sensible way to detect if the user is offline, and provide appropriate feedback, like making certain links or forms inactive.
So many folks spend time on their CSS and their UX/UI but still come up with URLs that are at best, comically long, and at worst, user hostile.
Vitaly’s been bitten with date-picker fever. Here’s his deep, deep, deep dive into one interface element.
If you’ve never been to UX London, this short video communicates the flavour of the event nicely.
I’ve added these to my collection of design principles:
- Provide comparable experience
- Consider situation
- Be consistent
- Give control
- Offer choice
- Prioritise content
- Add value
Truly awful interfaces …made real.
This was my favourite talk from this year’s Interaction conference—packed full of insights, and delivered superbly.
It prompted so many thoughts, I found myself asking a question during the Q&A.
A collection of interface patterns for granting or denying permissions.
It’s a bit finger-pointy but this blog should be useful for anyone working on internationalisation.
This blog has two general aims: to show the fundamental flaws in using flags to represent languages and how to create good experiences when dealing with multilingual and multi-regional content.
A few straightforward steps for improving the usability of credit card forms. The later steps involve JavaScript but the first step uses nothing more than straight-up HTML.