All posts from
June 2015

The roots of Minimalism in web design

There comes a time that web design will be part of art history. As a design movement in the early 21st century.

“Many of today’s most popular design trends are influenced by minimalism. This web design movement began in the early 2000s, but borrows its philosophy from earlier movements in the fields of fine art and human–computer interaction.”

(Kate Meyer ~ Nielsen Norman Group)

Sketch in Enterprise UX

As a matter of exception, a tool item in an interesting context.

“There is an old adage that says ‘Use the right tool for the job’. However, with technology and User Experience Design, knowing which tools to use can be a bit nuanced. Often there are many tools for the job, all of which have their strengths and weakness. I’ve been thinking about a recently popular tool, Sketch, and where it fits into our practice of Enterprise UX Design.”

(Jaron Frasier a.k.a. @frason ~ Designmap) courtesy of @BaardAard

The future of UX design

Everything has a future, some bright, some less.

“The future of user experience is growing rapidly and remains strong as designers, developers, and those who hire them realize that user experience is becoming just as important as the product or service in which they are promoting. User experience and its body of knowledge as a whole is being refined and redefined as we learn what works and doesn’t work and how to overall best serve the users in which we design for.”

(Amber Leigh Turner a.k.a. @amberlturner ~ The Next Web)

Design with analytics

In God we trust, all others must bring data.

“When we think of analytics, we think of marketing campaigns and funnel optimization. Analytics can seem a little overwhelming, with so many charts and lots of new features. How can we use analytics for design insights? The best thing about analytics is that they can show us what people do on their own. The worst thing is that analytics don’t tell us much about context, motivations, and intent. Like any kind of data, there are limitations. But that doesn’t mean analytics aren’t useful. Working with analytics is about knowing where to look and learning which questions you can reasonably ask.”

(Pamela Pavliscak a.k.a. @paminthelab ~ UXmatters)

Can we design trust between humans and artificial intelligence?

Get used to it.

“For many years, interacting with artificial intelligence has been the stuff of science fiction and academic projects, but as smart systems take over more and more responsibilities, replace jobs, and become involved with complex emotionally charged decisions, figuring out how to collaborate with these systems has become a pragmatic problem that needs pragmatic solutions. Machine learning and cognitive systems are now a major part many products people interact with every day, but to fully exploit the potential of artificial intelligence, people need much richer ways of communicating with the systems they use. The role of designers is to figure out how to build collaborative relationships between people and machines that help smart systems enhance human creativity and agency rather than simply replacing them.”

(Patrick Mankins a.k.a. @patrickmankins ~ FastCo Design)

The UX of open source content management

I guess open source applications is the second category UX forgot, just like enterprise aqpplications. Crypto apps for example.

“Ultimately, that’s what makes UX in open source content management such a daunting task. The limitless, unpredictable variance in use cases, combined with an ever-increasing demand for multi-language, “easy to understand” interfaces is difficult to keep up with.”

(Blake Callens a.k.a. @blakecallens ~ OpenSource.com)

Toward a culture of integrated practice

UX design more and more involved with UX culture design and change.

“To set expectations properly, while no one’s learnings in six Mondays would approach the equivalent of earning a graduate degree in Anthropology or Sociology, they don’t need to. However, people do experience significant change toward integrating human experience into their work, along with plain speech and good reason. Let’s call that buy-in. Over time, repetition of such experiences converts their conscious acts into mental pathways and muscle memory. This feeds the unself-conscious mind and heightens creativity. While this experiment is clearly an oversimplification, it offers a powerful demonstration of integrating disciplines into actual practice. The aim of the experiment is to lower or even remove the barrier to entry from UX research.”

(Michael Davis-Burchat, Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong ~ UXmatters)

Practical techniques on designing animation

Animated UIs can improve the UX. I said ‘can’.

“Animation, like any other facet of the web, must be designed. As web developers, we think about the effects of typography, layout, interaction, and shifting viewports, but when incorporating animation we have another factor to consider: time. It’s not just an extra aspect to consider, either: it increases the complexity of each of the aforementioned parameters exponentially. Rather than viewing this as a heavy mass of ideas, we can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web.”

(Sarah Drasner a.k.a. @sarah_edo ~ Smashing Magazine)

Why sound is digital design’s fourth dimension

Sound being a great design material, digitally and physically.

“One of the underappreciated repercussions of transitioning from a world more concerned with the movement of electrons than of gears, pistons, and flywheels is the elimination of noise. Sound, after all, is vibration propagated through some kind of medium (usually air), so the fewer moving parts there are disturbing the atmosphere around us, the fewer vibrations there are to reach our ears.”

(Christian Cantrell ~ FastCo Design)

How important is art direction to the success of a website?

Part of what’s called production values in cinematography.

“Today I want to offer more thoughts about art direction. Despite its benefits, is art direction something we need to do for the sites we create? How important is it to the success of the site? I want to address both questions today. I’m not sure I have great answers or even any answers, but I want to share some thoughts to help both of us answer the questions for ourselves.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo Design)

Coping with the big data dump: Towards a framework for enhanced information representation

Big data requires design as well. Perception of data.

“Easy and efficient access to large amounts of data has become an essential aspect of our everyday life. In this paper we investigate possibilities of supporting information representation through the combined use of multiple modalities of perceptions such as sight, touch and kinesthetics. We present a theoretical framework to analyze these approaches and exemplify our findings with case studies of three emergent projects. The results are a contribution to a larger discussion of multimodal information representation at the intersection of theory and practice.”

(Andreas Kratky, Virginia Kuhn, and Jon Olav Eikenes ~ First Monday 6.1)

Crafting a design persona

Anything you can use to stimulate your empathy.

“Crafting a design persona is an intense exercise that requires the the time and involvement of team members throughout your company. While the work may seem daunting, it is well worth it. By investing in your product’s design persona, you are investing in future advocates of your product—and creating a source of design inspiration for your team.”

(Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek a.k.a. @megak ~ A List Apart)