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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

Infinite Scroll UX

We all have our opinions about infinite scroll, and usually not very good ones. This has a number of good reasons. With infinite scroll, the sheer number of options is often overwhelming. There is no easy way to navigate between the “old” and “new” segments in the list. We d...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Complex Filters UX

Dealing with complex filters in enterprise environments can be quite a challenge. Usually we know where to place them, but not necessarily how to show them. What if you have literally hundreds of these filters? Showing them all at once might be quite intimidating, to say the...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Useful Copywriting Tools and Resources

Copywriting is difficult. Staring at the blank screen can feel daunting, but so does finding just the right words for that landing page. Let’s take a look at some copywriting tools that you might find useful in such situations. 1. SpeakHuman.Today # SpeakHuman.Today is a gr...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Better Design Critiques

Design critiques often undermine trust and crush team spirit. But they don’t have to. Here are a few helpful strategies, templates and articles that I found helpful to run better design critiques. Key Takeaways # Explain the problem before showing any work. Review previ...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Design Metrics and KPIs

Many organizations focus primarily on data coming from their analytics. This usually includes beautiful dashboards with data points and graphs on bounce rates, exit rates, time spent on site, navigation funnels and most used features or pages. Design KPIs are driven by numbe...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Disabled Buttons UX

Admittedly, there might be very good reasons for making buttons disabled by default, but there are also scenarios when disabled buttons turn out to be a disastrous design pattern. Let’s look into common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix them, and when disabl...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Error Messages UX

When we design interfaces, we rarely think about error messages first. But a strategic and thorough design of these messages can be critical for businesses — especially if they struggle with high abandonment. Error messages can make or break the experience in situations when...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

How To Improve Time Estimates For Designers

To get better at estimates, we need to know just how much productive time we have, and how much work we need to complete. Both need a lot of planning to avoid surprises down the line. There are many unknowns that shape your timing: we need to discover them first. Illustr...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Filtering UX

Filters are everywhere. They are used in pretty much every interface that features more than a handful of data points. It’s not necessarily just the sheer amount of data that is difficult to make sense of though; it’s the complexity and lack of consistency that the data usua...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Language Selector UX

Imagine that you’ve just arrived to Tokyo. Full of impatience and excitement, you are just about to hit the road, yet there it comes: an urgent warning from your mobile provider, nudging you to top up your dwindling balance. There isn’t anything cryptic on Stripe, with a...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Better Links UX

Too often, links on the web don’t get the attention they deserve. Their appearance often follows the brandbook, and interaction seems to be so obvious that it doesn’t even come up in design discussions. Let’s fix it — and explore how we can make links better. 1. Link Underli...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Multi-Lingual UX

If you ever had to design a multi-lingual website, you probably know the drill. Usually it’s not just a matter of translation. Eventually, labels get too lengthy to work everywhere, and we need to dedicate a lot of attention to currencies, dates, different word order, plural...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Never Hide Critical Navigation On Mobile

Every usability study reveals the same story: hiding important navigation is harmful, especially on pages where people tend to navigate a lot. In fact, digital experiences typically have two kinds of pages: navigation pages and content/task pages. Navigation pages are t...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Onboarding UX

You've just signed up for a service, yet here it comes — the disruptive, annoying, attention-demanding onboarding tutorial. It’s right there, asking for attention; yet chances are high that you will never find out what it was all about because you’ll be swiftly dismissing it...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

What Do PMs Do?

Let me ask you a simple question: what’s the role of a PM? Or more specifically, what’s the difference between product managers, product owners and program managers? And how are they different from project managers or technical leads? If you know the answer, you can probably...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Reviews And Ratings UX

When we make purchasing decisions, we often rely on expertise from people like us who have already purchased that item. And so we seek user ratings, often looking for a high enough review score and a good number of reviews. In fact, 95% of users rely on reviews to make their...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Right Timing Matters

Imagine a shiny newsletter pop-up. A pop-up making its splendid appearance on an eCommerce site just as you are about to make your way to a product page. You didn’t even have a chance to explore a single product yet; nor did you have a chance to learn about prices and materi...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Navigation Queries UX

Gerry McGovern once rightfully suggested that more people have been on the top of Mount Everest than have been to the 10th page of Google’s search results. This is probably true, yet usually our interfaces provide long lists of options, rather than a guidance to where the an...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Pricing Plans UX

We often dismiss pricing plans as if they were quite straightforward to design. In fact, how difficult can it be? We just have a few options with a few features marked as available or unavailable, the pricing, and a few CTAs along the way. Problems occur at latest when we th...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Back Button UX

There aren’t many things in usability testing that keep showing up over and over again. One of them is the anxiety people experience when they have to go back. Users generally don’t have much trust in the browser’s “Back” button, and for a good reason. We’ve all been in a si...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Usability Pitfalls Of Carousels UX

Carousels don’t have a good reputation, and rightfully so. They have plenty of accessibility issues, often exhibit low click-through rates and people frequently scroll past through them. Add to it small progress dots with tiny tap areas, barely visible labels and a bit of pa...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Designing Better Mobile Navigation UX

Vertical Split Navigation # Many mobile navigation menus show only one level of navigation at a time. You might have seen page takeovers and slide-in menus, overlays and bottom sheets. Often this experience is slow and disorienting. Often users have to go back to move forwa...

Smart Interface Design Patterns Valid
• Vitaly Friedman

Inline Validation UX

Undoubtedly there are major advantages of inline validation in forms. Most importantly, if an input expects a particular type of content, we can flag issues immediately, so users can fix these issues rather than operating under a wrong assumption. Inline validation works...