User Interface posts

Trends start everyday: an idea is adopted, passed on and before you know it it’s being discussed on design blogs. However, most trends vanish as quickly as they appeared. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everything will be trendy for 15 minutes. Once in a while, an idea is found to have something so fundamental about it that it thrives, even after the initial clamor dies down. Responsive design was one such ‘trend’ and flat-design looks like becoming another.

Flat design...

The purpose of any website is to get people from your target audience interested in what you’re offering. Whether it be a product or service, 9 times out of 10, someone is going to want to communicate with you further. Because of this, in almost any industry, you’re going to want to create a contact page.

For some, this is that last page on the site map where you just throw a bunch of information. You can leave it up to the person to decide how they want to contact you and what they want to contact you about. For others, this is the last attempt to get your potential customer to give you their business.

The contact page is much more important...

The popularity of shopping for items online is greatly increasing. If you ask me why I like to shop online, it’s because I have pretty solid control over my purchase. I get to have time to open up another tab and read up on reviews from other folks. I don’t have to be forced by sales people to just try it on and see how I like it. And 9 times out of ten, I’m shopping online because I know exactly what I want it. It’s kind of an “in and out” experience.

Whether I’m looking to buy a laptop or a cool shirt, it’s no different. Buying clothes online allows you to see different iterations of certain trends and is often easier to jump from store to store. Not to mention, it’s easier to shop at a place in California from the comfort of my Virginian abode.

For many of these reasons alone, clothing e-commerce shops...

It’s been some time since Facebook made any changes to its News Feed, and like Timeline feature launched in 2011 the News Feed redesign represents a major change to one of the site’s core services.

In the press event announcing the change, Mark Zuckerberg said of the service, “The news feed is one of the most important things we’ve built”. He went on to add that the News Feed was, “the most personalized newspaper,” and that, “the stories around you deserve to be displayed...

We are very visual beings. We like to see it to believe it. And sometimes we don’t trust our brain as much as we trust our eyes. Making decisions is often easier when you see something rather than if you take in a bunch of information about that something. 

Could you imagine trying out a new restaurant without seeing food from their menu? Could you imagine purchasing a shirt online without actually seeing that shirt? How about working with a developer and not knowing what sites they’ve worked on? All these things sound farfetched because we have to see something.

Visuals help build trust in that same vein, that we must actually see it to understand it’s real. Web designs have become very image heavy as of late because we want to do less reading and more seeing. We don’t want to have to make difficult decisions about easy things. Just show us the offering and we can go from there.

Our...

The concept of constraints in design can be defined as the practice of limiting user actions on a system.

Constraints limit the actions that can be performed by the user, thus increasing the usability of the design and reducing the likelihood of operator error.

There are two models of constraint: physical and psychological. Physical constraints decrease the sensitivity of controls and prevent or slow undesired...

Pinterest have just announced on their blog that they will be experimenting with a new look using a small group of people who sign up as testers.

They are not moving away from the gridded style that so many have become familiar with — and so many have tried...

It seems that there has been a line drawn in the sand. A few brave design pioneers have all but denounced skeuomorphic design as yesterday’s news and have voted it off of the proverbial island.

Are we witnessing the turning point of design as we know it, or are these champions...

The key to great user interface design is user confidence. But designing user confidence isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It requires more than correctly labeled buttons and interactions—although that does help. Confidence is important because you don’t want the user to get annoyed at all with the interactions in your websites or apps.

You don’t need users to be proud of themselves for being able to use your interface and to brag to all of their buddies on Twitter, nor do you need them to rank their knowledge...

In a recently published article Jakob Nielsen thoroughly trashes Windows 8.

This is not your typical Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux argument. There are no attacks on the security flaws, stability or even cost of the operating system. This assault is directed at the area for which Nielsen is famous: usability.

Windows 8, he states, is full of, “hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information...

While big data makes for useful applications, it can also stand in the way of clean, usable interface designs. With more and more web applications built upon mountains of data collected in the cloud, how can you deliver all that data without turning the resulting application into a visual train wreck?

Balancing complex data needs with a simple user interface is a challenge for any web application designer today. Stripping away information will simplify the user interface, but less data often means a less functional and useful application. Yet, keeping all that contextual data...