Notes on UX design and web development from some guy doing both
Need an icon for something completely random? Consider one of the free icons from The Noun Project. From the mission page:
The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.
I love InDesign. It might be my absolute favorite Creative Suite tool. (Fireworks comes very, very close for interactive work though).
You may or may not be able to install it on your new MacBook Air, but when you can, MacWorld makes it sound like it’s very worth it.
The login form is a pretty basic and standard aspect of UI design.
At the very least, two form fields and a submit button are all you need: username, password and submit.
Sometime in the 1990′s, we gave Internet users the ability to save their session by storing a cookie on their computer when they click a little “remember me” checkbox near their password field.
This has been pretty standard practice for 20-ish years.
Leave it to Appcelerator (whom Tanner has scolded for other, unrelated reasons) to throw all precedent away by replacing standard “remember me” checkbox with a “reset password” checkbox.
Basically, replacing a standard aspect of login boxes with something that does the exact opposite.
Don’t do this. Stick to standards with your own twist.
PS: I consider “standard location” for a password reset function to be a link placed below the submit button.
Ryan Waggoner apparently has the same idea that I do: no-reply email addresses are crap.
From his article:
Think about your grandparents, or a stay-at-home mom in Kansas who orders something online once a year. These people don’t know what a “noreply” email address is. But they know that when they hit reply and ask a question, they expect to get an answer. When they don’t, they get frustrated, and that reduces their loyalty to the company in question.
Exactly right. Same thing I think about when designing something for others: All of your users are rookies.
I just came across an article on Hacker News about how unskilled most (like 90%, not like 51%) computer users are.
The article included “10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software“. It’s a great read.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned while designing web apps, it’s the old cliche’ that you are not your user.
Have you ever walked through your app from start to finish?
Do it now. It’s unbelievable. But do only what each screen explicitly tells you to do.
Assume nothing. Assume you literally forgot everything you knew before you got to where you were.
Assume you know the very basics of using an web app: left clicking, what a window is, how to open your email.
How usable is that new feature now? Would the proverbial grandma know how to navigate through your app?
Are you talking to your users in a way they can understand?
Whitney Hess is one of the most outspoken proponents of UX online these days. And she’s good at it, to boot!
In an article on 52 Weeks of UX, she basically tells the rest of the Internet ‘ur doin it wrong”:
Most people believe that User Experience is just about finding the best solution for your users — but it’s not. UX is about defining the problem that needs to be solved (the why), defining the types of people who need it to be solved (the who), and defining the way in which it should be solved to be relevant to those people (the how). Yet as a rule, startups are being built on the what.
Design by Committee is the wooden stake to any designer’s heart. But there is a way around it.
The latest post on Six Revisions offers up some opinions on how to circumvent Design by Committee and still actually make something useful.
The entire article is worthy of a read, but in my experience, it’s always been one single phenomenon that makes the design process come to a screeching halt - a lack of direction:
A successful design starts with a well-defined objective that everyone understands and supports. Without one, it’s nearly impossible to complete a design project on your own, let alone as part of a large group.
It’s safe to assume that everyone in the room wants this project to succeed. Get out of the habit of defending why the blue link is underlined “because it just looks better” and into the habit of attaching it to a goal: “the blue links are underlined because one of our goals was better usability, and this is one step towards that.”
Now that LeBronapalooza is over, the world knows one of the greatest players in the NBA is leaving Cleveland and heading to Miami.
Obviously, people in Cleveland are pissed. It seems like their entire economy is tied to that team and this player.
So, if you’re the majority owner of this team and your home-grown star ups-and-leaves for greener pastures, what do you do?
You write a scathing letter. In comic sans.
In the meantime, I want to make one statement to you tonight:
“I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE”
You can take it to the bank.
Typeface selection aside, the letter comes off like a whiney little kid whose upset that Dad took his bike away.
Actually, typeface included.
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I don’t remember where I picked this up from, but everyone could learn a little bit about design before they start managing designers, right?
The other day, I was working to redesign a major part of the crowdSPRING site when I was struck with one of the most annoying design blocks I’ve had in a long time.
While it still hasn’t gone completely away, a site like Visual Bits usually helps.
Curated by Alex Girón, The site is simple, clean, and offers a bunch of different posters, layouts and colors to help break through that stupid, gut-wrenching, inefficient place where you can’t seem to draw anything that makes sense.
