The digest collects fresh articles on interface design, as well as tools, patterns, cases, trends and historical stories since 2009. I carefully filter a large stream of subscriptions so that you can upgrade your professional skills and better solve work tasks. Previous issues: April 2010-December 2018 .
Growth Rock studied 40 of the largest American online stores and highlighted key ordering patterns in their mobile versions. They carried out some A / B tests on prototypes, which looks doubtful. But as a checklist - suitable.
Drew McLellan parses browser support for input fields for different data formats (phone, date, etc.). There is support, but its quality floats heavily and it is often better to make your control.
Kim Flaherty and Kate Moran from the Nielsen / Norman Group deal with the problems of recommender systems that drive the user into the “bubble” of the same content.
Katie Sherwin and Jakob Nielsen continue the story of the new study of the Nielsen / Norman Group on the use of interfaces by children of different ages. In this article, the difference is in the perception of typical interface patterns.
Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy
The application for Mac allows you to insert into the device layout and rotate it in 3D as needed on the fly.
Adobe XD
December update . Cloud storage of layouts and a hint of working together as in Figma. Also promise versioning and organizing a competent library of components for the team.
In December, beta Sketch 53 appeared (and the release was released yesterday). More precise settings for changing character properties and a more convenient interface for replacing them.
Plugins
MakeUI : designer UI Kit for Sketch. You can select the main parameters of the interface elements (colors, rounding radius, etc.), at the output you will receive a library of symbols.
The second version of the tool has been released. Now it’s not just prototyping, but a one-piece design tool with the ability to export code and publish a site. Collaboration is attached.
Another designer promo sites. It is served as AI-based, but apparently it means very simple things. Of interest is the flexible application of themes (you can change the color palette, the font set and the type of controls separately and whole).
A cool online user research tutorial from User Interviews. It describes the basics, exploration methods and validation / testing, selection of respondents, tools and the construction of research teams.
Dropbox's Andrea Drugay talks about the format of regular quick user research sessions. Every two weeks, they invite several respondents who communicate with food teams in the format of “quick dates”.
Erika Hall show the difference between the question of the user research itself and the specific question of the user interview. Product managers and other customers often confuse them and come up with a specific method in their head, although a properly formulated research question may require a different approach altogether.
Kate Moran gives advice on situations where data from different interface studies contradict each other. How to check the data, methods and generally act correctly.
Addy Osmani examines the stages of loading the page of the site and highlights the critical points at which the user expects to see not only the main content, but also working interaction tools. He gives the calculations of the influence of these stages on the conversion.
Classical NPS studies test the effect of a metric on the future profits of a business as usual. Jeff Sauro tried to calculate it for software products. There is a connection (about 40% of the prediction accuracy through NPS and SUS), although there are few examples for sampling.
Design teams in food companies are growing rapidly, which means you need to think about their internal health. One of the main concerns is to provide an understandable pattern of professional growth, so that designers are interested and they feel that they can become stronger. Personnel personnel have long used skill cards and skills (competency cards) that help highlight the strengths and weaknesses of an employee, and then swing them purposefully. The tool is not new, but the designers only read about it a few years ago. I collected examples of maps from Basecamp, Buzzfeed, Coryndon Luxmoore, Facebook, Figma, Lyst, Mail.ru, Ope, Peter Merholz and Zendesk.
InVision offered their design maturity model . These are 5 stages of growing up of a design team - from the performer to the visionary. Gathered other characteristic design maturity models that have appeared in 20 years: Jonathan Earthy, Rosa Wu and Jess McMullin, Jakob Nielsen, Danish Design Center, Forrester, Human Factors International, HIMSS, Mail.ru Group, Keikendo, Macadamian, Nomensa, Infosys, Design Management Institute, Richard Banfield, Natalie Hanson, Sabine Junginger, David Service, Stefan Klocek, Gebruiker Centraal. And this is only the most characteristic of fifty.
Liam Friedland from Respond Software describes their competency map for a product designer. It is quite detailed - it is shown that a specialist at every level should be able to.
Bob Thomas and Jen McGinn share their experience in organizing large-scale mentoring sessions for beginning designers or those who want to make a career breakthrough. They conducted them at conferences.
Erin Woo talks about the format of weekly visits by mobile MS Outlook designers. Colleagues from different cities come together and solve the problems of users who have long wanted to get to.
Jenny Wen from the Dropbox Paper team provides tips on how designers and developers interact. How to simplify the life of colleagues and optimize teamwork.
January 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the legendary Bauhaus School, one of the pioneers of modern design. The official website of the anniversary gathered all the events and materials on the topic.
Comparison of popular sites with versions of 10 years ago. A couple of years ago, they dug up 20-year-old versions, it was more interesting there - in 2009 the Internet was already quite mature and there was absolutely no game.
The annual exhibition of technical coolness and game CES 2019 was held January 8-11 in Las Vegas. As usual, they showed a lot of plague and plague things. The most interesting thing about the interfaces: voice interfaces are embedded in the shower and key chains, the first flexible screen phone can already be bought, a ton of household appliances, car interfaces, wearable devices, virtual and augmented reality, TVs and, of course, odor emitters.
Microsoft offered to add the ability to give commands to voice assistants in a whisper. More precisely, they read the breath during silently pronouncing the phrase. This is great to help in situations where you need to observe silence - they have always been considered a weak point of voice interfaces.
Flexible screens
Concepts and living products is becoming more. And we have not yet come to see the Mobile World Congress on February 25-28, where there will definitely be even more. It seems that an interesting movement will finally begin in mobile interfaces, where everything has become too predictable.
Royole took the title of the first commercial product from Samsung - you can already buy it. It comes with an external folding keyboard, which makes the overall impression even more futuristic. Review .
The presentation of Rupert Platz, though it was published a year and a half ago, is as fresh as ever - it teaches us to separate useless HYIP hacks from really useful methods and best practices. Through this approach, you can drive away any hot topic and understand for yourself whether it is necessary to run after it.
Don Norman and Eli Spencer say that the profession should move towards helping local communities to look for design solutions themselves. Designers in this vision serve as facilitators who teach ordinary people professional approaches and methods.
Viget Curt Arledge speaks about the complexity of implementing design ethics, because our influence on infrastructure and business levels is extremely limited, and most of the problems come from there.
Phase do reviews of how design works in different cities of the world and released a story about the professional ecosystem in Moscow. I put in five kopecks about why we have a fairly mature and strong market and which teams should be watched.
About domestic design is not particularly audible abroad. The market is big enough for companies to work enough for an internal audience, so they don’t have a pressing need to glow globally. As a result, most of the coolness that is happening does not go into the international community, although there are plenty of really strong products and teams. And the most annoying thing is that the domestic designers themselves are making themselves too stinky. Of course, there are enough weak specialists, like everywhere else. But it is more correct to look at the big picture, and it is at a good level.
Advanced PC users have long known about Find UX Events - the best source and knowledge base for design events, where there is data for a couple of years ahead ( their collection ). Unfortunately, the death of the brave was another explanatory directory, Lanyrd .
For a long time, selections based on such directories have been done by Smashing Magazine, but have recently ceased. Banner intercepted UX Collective .
Apparently, the conference lists will be launched more than once. For example, designconf.site has just opened. Not the most complete, but to the heap. The table from which they take data.
I attended a decent number of domestic and international conferences, festivals, workshops and meetings in recent years. I made a conclusion for myself that ** there are two types of content and visiting them is a task:
Mathematical conferences
This is primarily about inspiration, because it is difficult to expect targeted pumping of some skills from the content about everything at once. You will get a good cut of what they are talking about in the profession, and a charge of cheerfulness to keep up with the trends. In this regard, I liked Amuse (Budapest), UXLx (Lisbon) and OFFF (Barcelona). Google SPAN (London) was interesting. From home, the Design Weekend (different cities) and our Mail.ru Design Conference × Dribbble Meetup (Moscow) work well. I have long wanted to go to Awwwards Conference and Interaction.
Highly specialized
Design management, design systems, branding, typography, etc. This is a cool way to pump a specific skill and deepen knowledge in the subject. Here MXConference / LXConference (San Francisco) and DesignOps Summit (New York) on design management, Silver set (Moscow) on typography are well received . Somewhere at the junction between the two formats Future London Academy (London). Strong disappointment - Clarity (San Francisco), allegedly by design systems. This year I’ll go to Brand New (USA) for branding and Leading Design (London) for design management. Therefore, I often answer the question “what conference would you advise?” Depending on what you want to know. I described my approach above.
Separately, I note that it is critical to actively listen and ask questions. Many expect that simply arriving in a beautiful room with chic speakers on them will automatically shed the rays of knowledge. Nifiga, guys - at conferences it is important to carefully listen, take notes and ask questions to speakers. Otherwise, you will just cheer up and bring souvenirs, and then you will be Snuffled, they say, not surprised.
The Design Leadership Summit 2018 Design Management Conference was held on September 29 in Toronto. Published video recordings of speeches.
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