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Smart Interface Design Patterns

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UX design tips and resources brought to you by Vitaly Friedman.

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Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Name Design Tokens in Design Systems

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...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Free Books For Interface & UX Designers

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...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Color Contrast Cheat Sheet PDF

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...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Practical Guide For UX and Design Managers

Things To Avoid as a Design Manager # Most managers don’t give enough feedback. Don’t “sandwich” feedback — critique with humility. Never do your team’s work; help them do their best work. Don’t mandate decisions from the top; explain them. Don’t be a silent voice in the...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

A Guide For Designing For Older Adults

Avoid Wrong Assumptions # Don’t assume that older adults struggle to use digital. You don’t need to strip the design to bare minimum. Avoid general stereotypes and assumptions about elderly people. Most users are healthy, active and have a solid income. How To Write...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Design For Users With Colorblindness

Too often accessibility is seen as a checklist, but it’s much more complex than that. We might be using a good contrast for our colors, but then if these colors are perceived very differently by people, it can make interfaces extremely difficult to use. Depending on our colo...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Where to Take Your UX Career?

An example of anin-house ladder, ranging from junior designer to design director. From 10 Directions To Take Your Next Career. There is no universal career path that works for everyone. In fact, the best path is the one that feels right to you. But there are some thing...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Six Ways To Speed Up Navigation

In some interfaces, navigation feels extremely slow and frustrating. Users seem to be running in circles, heading through multiple pages, sections and sub-sites, being re-routed and redirected multiple times — often without a clear path forward. How can we boost the speed of...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Design For Users With Dyslexia

Dyslexia can take different shapes. Different people are in a different place on a continuum, but for some dyslexic users reading might take longer, especially if text has many large uninterrupted blocks, italics, words written in uppercase and flashing images. It’s difficul...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Write a Great Design Case Study

How do we write a great design case study? I’ve put together some practical guides, examples and do’s and don’ts on how to stand out. Key Takeaways # Think of a case study like a magazine feature. Keep a case study digestible, thorough and a story. Choose a customer that r...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Five Tips To Boost UX Maturity In Your Company

Do your design initiatives clash against the company culture? Do you struggle to boost the role of UX in your organization? If you also struggle to convince your colleagues or stakeholders about the impact of UX, the action points below might help. We’ll also dive into the i...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

30 UX Interview Questions To Ask In a Job Interview

When talking about job interviews for a UX position, we often discuss how to leave a good impression and how to negotiate the right salary. But it’s only one part of the story. The other part is to ask questions and to listen carefully — to discover red flags early, and figu...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

What’s The Perfect Design Process?

Design process is messy. You might be following a structured approach, but with all the last-minute changes and overlooked details, too often it takes a life of its own. And before you know it, you are designing in a chaotic environment, full of refinements, final-final-deli...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Sticky Menus: UX Guidelines

We often rely on sticky headers to point user's attention to critical features or calls to action. Think of sidebar navigation, CTAs, sticky headers and footers, “fixed” rows or columns in tables and floating buttons. We've already looked into mobile navigation patterns in S...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Mobile Accessibility Target Sizes Cheatsheet

Rage taps are annoying and frustrating. These wonderful occurrences in our interface when we need to tap twice, or sometimes three times to continue our journeys. Of course sometimes they happen because the website is too slow, but sometimes it’s the target size of interacti...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Drag-and-Drop UX: Guidelines and Best Practices

Drag-and-drop is not a trivial user interaction. It’s messy, inaccurate and comes in plenty of flavors — from design states to interaction modes. Yet when we think of drag-and-drop, we typically think of a simple drag’n’drop file upload — which is only one of the many contex...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

The Best Handoff Is No Handoff

Many companies organize their workflows around projects and departments. Especially in large companies, work often travels from one place to another, often getting stuck between emails and Slack messages, and often “refined” on its never-ending journey between design and eng...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Avoid Bias in UX Research

Recently I stumbled upon the article How To Avoid Bias in UX Research, with pointers on how to anticipate, identify and overcome biases in your research by being more strategic about how you ask questions and how you run the test. A concise write-up by Genís Frigola. Here ar...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Red Flags To Check In Your Design Interviews

Red flags to check in your design interviews. Photo by Carson Masterson. I’ve recently stumbled upon Red Flags To Check In Your Design Interviews, a quick guide on how to work out if a team is right for you, and what it's going to be like to work in that company, or wi...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Navigating The UX Team Of One

Are you the only designer on the team? Navigating The UX Team Of One is a very honest article about the things to keep in mind in the open waters of technology-driven teams. Written by Jamie Ryan. Document everything, from your work to org charts. Ask a lot of questions,...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Five Simple Steps For Better Autocomplete UX

Autocomplete! Their design seems to be almost obvious at first, yet there are some common usability issues that appear over and over again, preventing users from using them effectively. Let’s fix that — by exploring 5 autocomplete UX details where the design pattern can be i...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier In My Design Career

Too often, our individual goals and plans are left far behind the company’s goals and product development roadmaps. That’s not right. Below are some of the tips around design career that I wish somebody had told me earlier in my career, and that I hope will be useful for you...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing A Time Zone Selection UX

Designing a time-zone selection is hard. Not only are time zones difficult to scan and understand; they also change over time, with or without daylight saving at different times, and there is no universal way of organizing and displaying them. Time zones are hard, a wond...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Seven Fantastic Design Systems

Nobody is surprised by design systems these days. A novelty just half a decade ago, they have become an established part of the design process, helping teams bridge the gap between design and code. I'd love to share with you some of the useful features of design systems that...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Better Meetings

Meetings can be utterly exhausting and frustrating, but also valuable and productive. Here are some of the formats and guidelines that seem to be working slightly better, especially in large organizations. Best Practices For Meetings # There should be no surprises in a mee...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Useful Miro Templates For UX Designers

Miro

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Frequently Asked Questions UX

Barely any website can escape the curse of the FAQ section. Even seemingly simple products eventually grow roots as the user base expands. Sadly, the web is not a particularly friendly place, and so users have all kinds of doubts, objections, questions and concerns — and the...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Design KPIs

Imagine that you’ve just received an invite to a new meeting. The description is a bit vague, but the title is sitting right there, with its heavy weight, making you a bit worried: design KPIs. Now, what do you think the meeting is going to be about? It wouldn’t be surprisin...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Better Breadcrumbs UX

Nobody gets particularly excited about breadcrumbs. Those tiny little crumbles that illustrate where a user currently is in the intricate hierarchy of the website. They might be unnecessary on smaller websites, but they can make a difference on complex websites. When users c...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

We Don’t Need Hamburger Icons

There are many flavors of hamburger icons out there. From chocolate cakes and hot dogs to fries and veggie burgers. They all hide navigation, oftentimes critical navigation that users need to comfortably use the site. Hamburger icons come in many flavors. Designed by Ale...