There are a few navigation patterns that are often forgotten or dismissed. We can think of them as navigation shortcuts, helping users get where they want to go, faster — without having to use traditional navigation at all. As it turns out, sometimes they are much more effective, especially on large sites with thousands of pages, many of which have been gathering dust over the years. In UX, we can use navigation queries, evaluation journeys, A-Z index and tap-ahead autocomplete to help users get where they want to be, faster. Let’s find out how.
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Storytelling is a powerful tool for any UX designer. It helps create a product and understand the people who use it. In this article, Marli Mesibov takes a real-life example of an app she helped to build in 2017 and explains five steps you can use to help you build a story into your user experience.
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Carousels have plenty of accessibility issues, they often exhibit low click-through rates, can be very disruptive when auto-advancing and people frequently scroll past through them. In this series of articles, we highlight design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. You can find more examples in “Smart Interface Design Patterns”, a 10h-video course with 100s of hand-picked examples, curated by Vitaly.
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Breadcrumbs UX are often neglected, but they can be extremely helpful when designing a complex navigation. We can improve them with sideways navigation, clearer breadcrumbs paths and accordions on mobile.
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You need to help customers explore relevant entries, and to do so, you need to support and speed up browsing through entries. Infinite scroll can be designed well. Best practices and guidelines to improve the UX of infinite scroll with bookmarks, footer reveal and pagination.
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We love seeing what we all can do to make the web more accessible and usable. We also love organizing and attending online events, with our SmashingConf Live last year, and of course, our online workshops are here to stay! After two years when almost everything moved online, 2022 marks the return of in-person conferences. In fact, SmashingConf is back: coming to San Francisco and Austin in June, Freiburg (Germany) in September, and New York in October.
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If users cannot find the answers to their questions or are not exposed to critical messaging, they will not act, and your website will fail. To prevent that from happening, you need an effective information architecture. In this article, Paul Boag provides you with a process to ensure you have precisely that.
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In this article, Steven Hoober shines the spotlight on Fitts’ Law and explains why we should always ask questions and consider what particular guidelines and lessons mean to our users and our products.
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While QR codes have many uses and can be leveraged at many touch points, they are just one of dozens of technologies that can improve the customer’s journey. Stanislav Khrustalev shares his advice with a list of things to keep in mind when using QR codes for your business.
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Administration experience is often assumed or glossed over in software because 99% users never engage with it directly. Yet this is one critical area that, when used effectively, can tie closely to a company’s business strategy and affects the bottom line. In this article reveals how something as trivial as administration in both software and As-a-service can be either a booster or bottleneck to a company’s productivity and innovation. It also provides several design aspects that UX practitioners should evaluate when designing the administration experience.
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