Reactive Design
April 8, 2015A collection of design insights about perceived speed.
Accessibility Wins
April 2, 2015Accessibility is an important, yet way too often overlooked area. Accessibility Wins is a tumblr blog dedicated to showcase accessible user interfaces. Like it!
The user is drunk
March 25, 2015Your 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
A web browser for the Apple Watch?
March 11, 2015On 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.
Styling Elements based on their quantity in CSS
March 6, 2015It’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!
Datedropper
February 21, 2015Last 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.
Pragmatic Redesign for GitLab
February 12, 2015I use git and GitLab for pretty much everything i’m working on, from the smallest experiments to large client projects, everything gets pushed to a remote repository on our server. The last update for GitLab brought some small UI changes which i really liked. They’ve done some great work with this and it’s one of those improvements where you look at it and recognize that something has changed, but couldn’t tell what it is. Like when someone you know has slightly changed their haircut and you notice that she/he looks a bit different, a bit better, but you don’t see what exactly has changed. I like those kinds of iterative, small redesigns. And i fully agree with their statement about the importance of having a clear plan and a set of goals before you start redesigning anything.
Changes to the interface are always stressful. So you shouldn’t even start to redesign without a list of issues you intent to solve. This way, your users get compensated for the changes with improved usability.
Well done GitLab!
URL Rewriting for Beginners
January 2, 2014URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it – lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
A beginner’s guide to URL rewriting, with plenty of examples
A Dao of Web Design – A list apart
November 30, 2013It’s hard to believe this article is 13 years old!
The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all.