Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it.
You can’t test that. I’ll do it for you.
WHAT: I’ll get very drunk, and then review your website. I’ll send you a document outlining where I thought the website needed help, and a screencast of me going over the website.
HOW MUCH: $150 per site.
There are some ideas in this world where you cannot tell if ridiculously stupid or simply genius. This is one of those.
"Design is how you treat your customers." – Yves Behar
— Christopher Stark (@digimgmt) March 21, 2015
interaction15 is a three day conference held by the Interaction Design Association in San Francisco. Mike Monteiro gave another fantastic talk about selling design, which should be mandatory for every designer. It’s a little over an hour, but definitely worth every minute.
Maybe you’ve seen this awesome animated SVG Polylion from Dennis Gaebel. Just saw that he wrote an article on CSS-Tricks where he shares how he built it. Hope i find some time soon to play around with this technique and with SVG’s in general.
On this weeks Keynote Apple revealed some more infos about the Apple Watch. The one thing that interested me most as a web designer (and would have made a very good reason to justify buying one) is if there will be some form of a real web browser. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of information about that and i cannot remember Apple saying a single word about it.
Peter Paul Koch mentioned in this article back in September 2014 that there will be Apps with WebViews, but nothing like a full featured browser, which still seems to hold true. He speculated that the reasons behind this are mostly hardware and user experience.
It’s possible that the current Watch hardware isn’t yet powerful enough to run a full browser, and that Apple will make sure that any app using the WebView doesn’t do anything heavy such as running JavaScript or animations. Even if that’s the case right now, the problem will go away as hardware matures, and I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason why the Watch doesn’t have a browser.
Instead, consider the user experience. How do you enter a URL on your Watch? How do you fill out a form? You don’t, as far as I can see — there may not even be enough space on the display for a Back button.
I quite agree with him, the technology/hardware side will mature fast and won’t be the problem here. But to be able to solve the UX of web browsing on smart watches will take some time, because we just don’t know yet how people will react to new ways of interaction. Will “Force Touch” enable useful new ways of interacting with a website? Will speech and motion recognition play a bigger role in tomorrows web design? We don’t know yet, but it’s completely imaginable that somewhere in the future we won’t even need to manually enter URL’s or filling out forms anymore.
It’s a situation we all know too good: You have that beautiful design turned up into a living prototype, media queries take care of all those different viewports and everything works just perfectly together. And then the client realizes that he needs two more items in the main navigation and suddenly your nice navigation starts to break apart and you start tweaking everything again and again. At least thats how i did it before. Not very flexible.
Heydon Pickering just wrote a great article on A List Apart about Quantity Queries for CSS which will make all of the above a thing of the past.
The
@mediaquery is the darling of responsive web design because it allows us to insert “breakpoints” wherever one layout strategy ceases to be viable and another should succeed it. However, it’s not just viewport dimensions, but the quantity of content that can put pressure on space.Just as your end users are liable to operate devices with a multitude of different screen sizes, your content editors are liable to add and remove content. That’s what content management systems are for. This makes Photoshop mockups of web pages doubly obsolete: they are snapshots of just one viewport, with content in just one state.
With a clever combination of of nth-child() and first-child() pseudo-selectors he achieves to count elements in CSS. This makes it possible to apply different styling to navigation elements, when there are equal to or more than what you specify. If you haven’t read this article yet, you seriously should do that right now!
Useful Mac is a new blog by Garret Murray about tools and tricks for mac users. Here’s what he has to say about it:
And so, dear reader, I look forward to sharing some of this experience with you. I fancy myself someone with good taste, a discerning eye for excellent user experience and design, and someone who loves sharing interesting or useful information with others. Let’s take a journey together toward a prettier, more powerful, more Useful Mac.
I just learned about this tool called Bartender to de-clutter my menu bar, which is really cool. Looking forward to more such things.
As a follow-up to the article i shared before, here’s another interview with Jonathan Ive.
Apple’s Jonathan Ive in Conversation with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter
Finally found some time on this lazy Sunday afternoon to read the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker which gives some very inspiring insights into the way the design team at Apple works. Also, i really enjoy the way Ive seems to be obsessed by the geometry of rounded corners. It’s exactly that obsessive attention to detail that separates Apple from most other product companies.
“At the risk of sounding terribly sentimental, I do think one of the things that just compel us is that we have this sense that, in some way, by caring, we’re actually serving humanity,” he said. “People might think it’s a stupid belief, but it’s a goal—it’s a contribution that we can hope we can make, in some small way, to culture.”
One of the things that resonated with me is this idea that good design is first and foremost about respect. Respect for the person that will eventually use what you build. Not about the style and look of something, not about selling something but about deeply caring how to best solve a problem. I honestly never really thought about design that way before reading “Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek a while ago. Which by the way is one of the best books about design and you should read it right after this article. But i digress.
Won’t spoil you with any more quotes. It’s a very long read, but totally worth it. Grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and read the whole thing.
Last week this jQuery Plugin popped up a lot on different channels. First: Yes, it looks pretty! But quick and easy? Not really.
I could imagine something like this could work for simple select fields, where you have just a handful of options to choose from. Maybe for the order quantity in a checkout process or something like that. But for a date-picker it doesn’t cut it.