While many of us are quite familiar with publications and events surrounding us, we often lack the global perspective on what’s happening in the web industry across the world. What about front-end events in Kuala Lumpur? What about the acceptance of UX-driven processes in Hong Kong? That’s exactly what we want to find out! Today, Vitaly Friedman is happy to announce that we have teamed up with our friends at Mozilla for the Developer Roadshow Asia, so we can connect and learn from designers and developers in southeastern Asia. Together, we’re planning on organizing a series of informal, free meetup-style events for people who build for the web. Do join us, won’t you?
Read more…
When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table.
Read more…
Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out.
Read more…
Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites.
Read more…
Humor is an important aspect of life. It has many positive benefits, like reducing stress, increasing psychological well being and increasing tolerance for pain. Humor is integral and inherent to human relationships. You can use humor in your design to create a positive user experience. We want to develop positive relationships with our users — humor can help make that happen. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you that you can incorporate humor in your design, maintain your brand identity and not look like you are trying too hard in the process.
Read more…
Previously, Bruce Lawson’s tried to make some supply-side improvements to web standards so that websites can be made to better serve the whole world, not just the wealthy West. But there are other challenges, such as ways to get over creaky infrastructure in developing markets, to surmount, and Bruce will also look at some of the reasons why some of the offline billions remain offline, and what can be done to address this.
Read more…
Depending on your browser, you may not be able to see all emoji featured in this article (especially the Tifinagh characters). Also, different platforms vary in how they display emoji as well. That’s why, in this article, Rob Reed always provides textual alternatives. Don’t let it discourage you from reading though!
Read more…
Today, many apps make assumptions about user preferences based on personal data. They use this information to make decisions on your behalf, without any direct input from us. This type of design pattern, where user choice is removed, has recently been coined “anticipatory design”, which leverages data on user behavior to automate the decision-making process in user interfaces. Despite the good intentions imbued in anticipatory design, though, automating decisions can implicitly raise trust issues . In this article, Graeme Fulton will look at how you can give people confidence in the decisions made for them by using “light patterns,” which ensure that user interfaces are honest and transparent, while even nudging users to make better decisions for themselves.
Read more…
Designing with “big data” is a challenging task. Matan Stauber, however, took it to the next level. With an impressive outcome. Having studied Visual Communication at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Israel’s national school of art, Matan realized a very ambitious final project: an interactive timeline of our galaxy’s history — 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to today.
We talked to Matan about Histography, about the idea behind it, and how he managed to bring it to life. An interview about stretching the limits of what’s possible.
Read more…
Considering that most carousel implementations lack many usability details, one can understand why strong wording is often used in discussions about carousels. But there are alternatives to a home page carousel that both perform well and are vastly easier to implement. In this article, Christian Holst will go over the 10 implementation details he’s found that are required to make home page carousels perform acceptably with end users. He’ll outline how and why mobile and desktop implementations should differ and, lastly, suggest a simpler, problem-free alternative to home page carousels.
Read more…
