In this article, Marco Hengstenberg explains how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
Read more…
There is no winner in the battle between iOS and Android, and we all know that. If a product succeeds on one platform, it will undoubtedly be ported to the other. Sometimes app developers don’t even bother waiting, and release apps for both platforms simultaneously. For designers this means only one thing — they will have to adapt an application’s UI and UX to another platform while ensuring a consistent design language across the product.
There are three different scenarios for UI multiplatform adaptation: retaining brand consistency; aligning with the conventions specific to the platform; and seeking a balance between the two. We decided to analyze these three approaches by looking at the most popular apps out there so that you get some insight into what method might work best for you.
Read more…
How do you write a useful app for the Apple Watch? In what ways does it differ from coding for iOS? And what if you don’t have a Watch on hand to test with? Before the launch of the Apple Watch, our iOS team at myMail (one of the popular alternative email apps for iOS) worked tirelessly with a simulator to create a new Apple Watch app.
We wanted the first buyers of the Apple Watch to have the opportunity to use myMail from day one. What we learned through using the simulator and creating the app — including the Apple Watch’s UI quirks, passing data between devices, and the rigors of simulator-only development — is described below and (we hope) will help iOS developers get to results, faster, and avoid a few headaches down the road.
Read more…
In UX design, few things are more intricate than time and personal time management — only a good arsenal of mobile design patterns and information architecture principles can save you. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calenda tool on Android: Business Calendar. We’ll cover designing systems, interaction design problems, scaling across screens and platforms, research, and big business decisions and their outcomes.
Business Calendar started out as a side project, a one-man show, and is now run by a team of eight in Berlin. The app was very successful right from the time Android entered the mainstream market, and it now has an active user base of 2 million. But instead of modernizing the design and usability regularly, the developers focused on implementing user requests and customization options.
Read more…
In the first part of the case study about Mail.Ru Group product design unification, I described our first approach — a mobile web framework. Aside from creating a unified visual style and interaction principles for a dozen services, we’ve also transformed our design process from the classic “prototype → design mock-up → HTML → implementation” approach for every screen, to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
In this second part I’ll show how we have improved the same technology to embody larger versions of these products and made our “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. In the spring of 2012, our business unit acquired 11 content-based projects: Auto, Events Guide, Health, Horoscopes, Kids, Lady, Moto, News, Sports, TV, and Weather. Many of them are very successful in their market niche in Russia; however, they each have their own history, often with outsourced designs that led to inconsistencies.
Read more…
Web-based interactive experiences are widely used in the modern age for a variety of reasons, predominantly for the advertising of premium high-street products and services. After discovering the little-known clip-path property of CSS, I embarked upon a five-month interactive production journey of my own with a different purpose: to raise awareness of the struggles of 30 similarly little-known endangered species.
This article explores the inspiration for the project and aspects of how different parts were built, and I’ll dive into how you can use this greatly underrated line of CSS for your own projects.
Read more…
Following a recent economic windfall, Brazilians are faced with more choices of how to spend their money. This provides a situation for good UX to make a huge impact and sway customers to buy new products or services. Companies inside and outside Brazil are interested in capturing a part of this new market.
My company, Blink UX, had the opportunity to conduct in-home user interviews in São Paulo on behalf of a Brazilian real estate company called Zap Imóveis. This project provided me with invaluable insider knowledge on how to best conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil and, more broadly, how to conduct field research in foreign countries using the same underlying principles.
Read more…
Design with choice in mind, and always give users control over the page. In this article, Henny Swan shares key principles that will ensure that your products are inclusive and usable for disabled people.
Read more…
Designers are great at producing visual artifacts. We create mockups, images, code and all sorts of other material to document our solutions. But looking only at those artifacts doesn’t account for the actual creative process. In their article “Documenting Design-In-Process,” John Bassani and Carolyn Barnes highlight a potential reason: We view our design approaches as intuitive and emotional, so we have a hard time developing documented, human-focused design processes.
Read more…
This article will discuss the transformation of our design process from the classic Prototype → Design Mockup → HTML → Implement approach for every screen to a modern and more efficient framework-based approach.
Read more…
