Joan is applying for a small loan on all-online-loanzzz.com. She’s becoming frustrated with the number of financial-disclosure forms she has to fill out. She’s thinking about visiting her local bank to ask for a loan instead.
While waiting for a page to load, the application presents a cartoon image of a person wearing a business suit sitting in a jail cell. The image caption says, “Hey, everyone hates disclosures. We know you do, too. We’re doing our best to keep everyone out of jail. Please bear with us for a few more clicks. You won’t regret it, and our loan officers will stay out of jail.” Joan smirks at the image. She might not appreciate the number of forms she has to complete, but she understands the serious nature of applying for a loan.
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Sometimes we tend to think of our designs as if they are pieces of art. But if we think of them this way, it means they won’t be ready to face the uncertain conditions of the “real world.” However, there is also beauty in designing an interface that is ready for changes — and, let’s admit it, interfaces do change, all the time.
One of the things I like most about designing a mobile app is that, from the initial concepts to the time when you are fine-tuning and polishing all of the interface details, this is a process with many steps.
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Many criticize gestural controls as being unintuitive and unnecessary. Despite this, widespread adoption is underway already, and the UI design world is burning the candle at both ends to develop solutions that are instinctively tactile. The challenges here are those of novelty.
Even though gestural controls have been around since the early 1980s and have enjoyed a level of ubiquity since the early 2000s, designers are still in the beta-testing phase of making gestural controls intuitive for everyday use.
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Identifying the places where animation has utility is only half the story. If you’re going to use animations in your designs, they should be built as a natural part of the design process.
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For a few years now, a mild debate has simmered over “delightful” interaction design. For some, features that instill delight, as long as they don’t interfere with the fundamental capabilities of the system, sit with pleasure atop Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as redrawn for interactive systems.
Others don’t really care about such features, or place “delight” alongside “frictionless” and “seamless” as just the latest buzzwords (leaving “scalable” and “disruptive” in their dust). What none of these design partisans gets is the place of delight in a much larger process that everyone can enjoy: the hearing of a good joke.
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Every morning, designers wake up to happily work on their products, be they digital or physical, with an inner belief that people will want to use their products and will have a blast doing so. Perhaps that is a slight generalization; however, as designers, we tend to have a natural desire for each project we work on to be the best it can be, to be innovative and, most importantly, to make a difference.
Here is a little revelation. People are not really into using products. Any time spent by a user operating an interface, twisting knobs, pulling levers or tapping buttons is time wasted. Rather, people are more interested in the end result and in obtaining that result in the quickest, least intrusive and most efficient manner possible. And these are two fundamentally different concepts — usage versus results — which, at the very least, differentiate good product design from poor product design or, on a smaller scale, a good feature from a bad one.
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They’re probably the most familiar interfaces on the planet: the numeric keypads on our mobile phones and calculators. Yet very few notice that the keypads’ design has remained unchanged for nearly half a century in the face of evolving global design norms and conventions.
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Kids spend a lot of time online, and their cognitive and physical limitations present many challenges to them when they do so. Pair that with poorly designed content and dark patterns, and you have a bad mix. As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite.
This article will give you some insights about what kids are like from the psychological point of view, and how this affects the way they use the web. We’ll also cover practical design guidelines to create better web stuff for kids.
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If you’re a UX designer, you’ve probably designed a lot of forms and web (or app) pages in which the user needs to choose between options. And as a designer, you’re likely familiar with best practices for designing forms. Certainly, much has been written and discussed about this topic. So, you probably know all about how best to label and position form fields and so on for optimal usability.
But have you thought about how the design of a form affects the user’s decision-making? Have you ever considered to what extent the design itself affects the choices people make? As always in design, there are a variety of ways to design a form or web page.
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Testing responsive websites is a laborious task. Until now, implementing a stable and maintainable automated solution for cross-browser and cross-device testing of a responsive layout has been nearly impossible. But what if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests?
Upon considering this question, I decided to also look at another interesting side of visual testing. For quite a long time I have been a fan of the test-driven development (TDD) methodology. It helps me in my daily programming work. TDD enables me to formalize the task and to make sure everything is implemented according to the requirements.
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