Patterns for Promoting PWA Installation (mobile) | Web Fundamentals | Google Developers
Some ideas for interface elements that prompt progressive web app users to add the website to their home screen.
Tags: ux
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Methods - 18F Methods
A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.
A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.
These methods are categorised by:
- Discover
- Decide
- Make
- Validate
- Fundamentals
User interfaces: hiding stuff should be a last resort by Adam Silver
When we hide content, there’s a greater risk the user won’t see it. There’s a higher reliance on digital literacy and it’s generally more labour intensive for the user.
Worse still, sometimes we kill off essential content.
UX Workshop | Trys Mudford
I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!
Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.
Hello, Goodbye - Browser Extension
A handy browser extension for Chrome and Firefox:
“Hello, Goodbye” blocks every chat or helpdesk pop up in your browser.
Performance Budgets That Stick - TimKadlec.com
I like Tim’s definition here:
A performance budget is a clearly defined limit on one or more performance metrics that the team agrees not to exceed, and that is used to guide design and development.
And I agree about the four attributes required for a performance budget to succeed. It must be:
- Concrete
- Meaningful
- Integrated
- Enforceable
The point is not to let the performance budget try to stand on its own, somewhere hidden in company documentation collecting dust. You need to be proactive about making the budget become a part of your everyday work.
Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms | Brad Frost
- Have a dedicated page for login
- Expose all required fields
- Keep all fields on one page
- Don’t get fancy
The ineffectiveness of lonely icons | Matt Wilcox, Web Developer & Tinkerer
When in doubt, label your icons.
When not in doubt, you probably should be.
Creating distraction-free reading experiences — Adrian Zumbrunnen
It’s our job as designers to bring clarity back to the digital canvas by crafting reading experiences that put readers first.
Building a Progressively-Enhanced Site | Jim Nielsen’s Blog
This is an excellent case study!
The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.
It’s What You Make, Not How You Make It.
How did I miss this great post from 2016 by one of my favourite people‽ It’s even more more relevant today.
To me it doesn’t matter whether you write your HTML and CSS by hand or use JavaScript to generate it for you. What matters is the output, how it is structured, and how it is served to the client. When we allow our tools to take precedent over the quality of our output the entire web suffers. Sites are likely to be less accessible, less performant, and suffer from poor semantics.
Four Cool URLs - Alex Pounds’ Blog
A fellow URL fetishest!
I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.
URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.
The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted
These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:
It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?
Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times
Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.
Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert
Shots fired!
I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.
Push and ye shall receive | CSS-Tricks
Imagine a PWA podcast app that works offline and silently receives and caches new podcasts. Sweet. Now we need a permissions model that allows for silent notifications.
Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein
Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.
UX past, present, and future | Clearleft
This long zoom by Andy is right up my alley—a history of UX design that begins in 1880. It’s not often that you get to read something that includes Don Norman, Doug Engelbart, Lilian Gilbreth, and Vladimir Lenin. So good!
AddyOsmani.com - Start Performance Budgeting
Great ideas from Addy on where to start with creating a performance budget that can act as a red line you don’t want to cross.
If it’s worth getting fast, it’s worth staying fast.
Uber, Lyft, Taxis, Design and the Age of Ambivalence + Subtraction.com
Design has disrupted taxis in a massive, almost unprecedented way. But good design doesn’t merely aim to disrupt—it should set out to actually build viable solutions. Designers shouldn’t look at a problem and say, “What we’re going to do is just fuck it up and see what happens.” That’s a dereliction of duty.