When I start any UX project, typically there is very little confidence in the successful outcome of my UX initiatives. In fact, there is quite a lot of reluctance and hesitation, especially from teams that have been burnt by empty promises and poor delivery in the past.
Good...
How do you know what UI component to choose? 🌳 Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we use and when, we can avoid never-ending discussions, confusion and misunderstanding.
Let’s ...
Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values.
The Many Roles In UX #
Successful candidates must...
You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in How To Measure UX 🍣 — with a live UX training coming up this year. Free preview.
No design exists in isolation. As designers, we often imagine specific situations in which people will use our product. It mi...
The goal of the content design is to reduce confusion and improve clarity. Yet often it’s difficult to pin point a problem as user feedback tends to be not specific enough. But: we can use a few simple techniques to assess how users understand and perceive content. Let’s tak...
Complex data tables are difficult to get right. They always come along with filters, sorting, customization options, batch actions, cell states, pagination, and a huge amount of data. Their purpose is to help people find insights, by comparing data points across rows and col...
Sometimes design conversations take slightly more time and effort than needed. One of the frequent conversations is circling around badges, pills, chips and tags.
How are they different? What purpose do they serve? Which ones do we need in our design system? And how to choos...
So what's the difference between combobox, multiselect, listbox and dropdown? While all these UI components might appear similar, they serve different purposes. The choice often comes down to the number of available options and their visibility.
Let's see how they differ, wh...
Newsletter pop-ups are everywhere. You’ve just landed on a website, yet here it is, a shiny newsletter pop-up, asking for your email address for reminders, updates or an exclusive 15% coupon code. People hate it, businesses love it. But does it work? As it turns out, it’s co...
Why do we see login forms split into multiple screens everywhere? Instead of typing email and password, we have to type email, move to the next page, and then type password there. This seems to be inefficient, to say the least.
Let’s see why login forms are split across scre...
Both hiding and disabling features can be utterly confusing to users. And for both, we need very, very good reasons. Let’s take a closer look at what we need to consider when it comes to hiding and disabling — and possible alternatives that help enhance the UX.
Show What’s N...
As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated. It might feel like every single day you have to fight for your users, explain yourself and defend your work. It’s unfair, exhausting, painful and frustrating.
Let’s explore...
Digital sustainability is often seen as a technical concern for engineers. We speak about optimization of assets, and web performance, and server efficiency. In fact, we rarely explore sustainability from the perspective of design and UX. But what if we did?
Let’s explore a ...
Children start interacting with the web when they are 3–5 years old. How do we design for children? What do we need to keep in mind while doing so? And how do we meet the expectations of the most demanding users you can possibly find: parents? Well, let’s find out.
Embrace P...
So what if you need a bit of inspiration for accordions, or footers, or dashboards, or maps, or perhaps hover states? In this single post, you’ll find all of them — a curated list of design showcases for various design components and themes — from UI components to patterns, ...
When it comes to designing for mobile, there is always quite a bit of confusion between all the different units, guidelines and measurements in iOS and Android. Here’s a quick cheat sheet (PDF) to help you get started with your mobile app design.
Key Takeaways #
For Androi...
Redesigns are often expensive, time-consuming and incredibly risky. Of course sometimes big-bang-redesigns are necessary, yet more often than not they can be avoided with a series of strategic incremental changes. Here are a few things to keep in mind before launching a big-...
So you want to conduct UX research, yet you find yourself constrained — by wrong assumptions and wrong expectations about what UX research actually entails. Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It doesn’t have to be expensive. And it doesn’t have to be disruptive. Let...
Every screen you interact with has multiple personalities: blank state, loading state, partial state, error state and ideal state. How To Fix a Bad User Interface highlights strategies to avoid awkward and confusing UIs with the UI Stack, carefully designing personalities fo...
Good research is always rooted in the past, not in the future. Net Promotion Score has many flaws: in how it asks users to predict their future behavior, the Likert scale and the statistically unreliable score calculation. There are better alternatives.
1. How Net Promoter S...
Often misunderstandings don’t just cause confusion. They bring team members apart, erode trust and produce waste. They often come from wrong assumptions and unrealistic expectations.
Of course every UX task is different. But every task requires a shared understanding about t...
Design decisions are often seen as a matter of opinion or preference. But design solves problems, and so good design decisions shouldn’t be based on hunches or opinions. They have good reasons, they address the problem effectively, and as such, they impact business goals.
We...
Where would you find inclusive, free-to-use photos of diverse people? There aren’t many resources out there, but the ones that do exist are absolutely fantastic. Here are some useful pointers that you might use in your work.
Beautiful, Inclusive, Free-To-Use Photos of People...
Do you actually rely on the well-established Double Diamond process in your design work? Chances are high that you had to cut corners, make tough compromises and keep convincing stakeholders about the right approach to design.
Is there a single, universal, perfect design pro...
That’s a question that seems to fuel never-ending discussions year after year. Do we open external links in new tabs by default? Do we mark external links? How do we deal with links to PDFs, videos and audios? Let’s figure it out!
Below are some practical UX guidelines on ho...
Getting support for accessibility efforts isn’t easy. There are many accessibility myths, wrong assumptions and expectations that make accessibility look like a complex, expensive and time-consuming project. Let’s fix that!
Below are some practical techniques that has been w...
Nearly 1% of the global population is autistic. Yet often it’s not obvious how to consider the needs of autistic people in the design process. Let’s change that.
Below are some general UX guidelines, do’s and don’ts to design better UX — for autistic people and everybody els...
Design tokens represent small, repeatable design decisions. Instead of using exact HEX or px-values, we refer to a token which name describes how and where they are used. It makes it much easier to update the design by changing one value in one place and not breaking anythin...
These books have been kindly shared by the community, with lessons learned by authors for everybody to read and benefit from. A sincere, enormous thank-you to the authors for making their work available to everyone for free. Hopefully you and your friends will find them usef...
Poor color contrast is the most common problem on the web. Here are some useful guidelines for text and buttons, with minimum contrast recommendations for better legibility, a few color contrast tools and useful resources.
How Color Contrast Is Calculated #
In general, colo...
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