CategoryBest Practices

June 21, 2017 — Design patterns. An almost mythical phrase that often inspires either awe or resentment. As designers, we tend to think of design patterns as generic off-the-shelf solutions that can be applied to various contexts almost mechanically, often without proper consideration. Navigation? Off-canvas! Deals of the day? Carousel! You get the idea. Read more…

October 19, 2016 — Many apps today, such as Google Now, Spotify and Amazon, make assumptions about user preferences based on personal data. They may even use this information to make decisions on our behalf, without any direct input from us. For example, Facebook tailors your news feed and Amazon recommends products  —  both hiding “irrelevant” information and only showing what they think you will like. This type of design pattern, where user choice is removed, has recently been coined “anticipatory design”. Its aim is to leverage data on user behavior to automate the decision-making process in user interfaces. The outcome lowers the excessive number of decisions people currently make, thereby reducing decision fatigue and improving decisions overall. Read more…

July 6, 2016 — Are home page carousels actually helpful to users? Or are they simply popular because they are an easy tool for solving internal discussions in large organizations about who gets to put their banner on the home page? The short answer is that home page carousels can work, but in practice the vast majority of implementations perform poorly with end users. Read more…

June 13, 2016 — “Be agile; release early; release often.” We know the drill. But is it strategically wise to keep rolling out features often? Especially once a product you’re building reaches a certain size, you probably don’t want to risk the integrity of your application with every new minor release. Read more…

May 30, 2016 — This article features some of the slightly more obscure design patterns, such as responsive car-builder interfaces, mega dropdown navigation, content grids, maps and charts, as well as responsive art direction. Read more…

May 6, 2016 — So how do you sell a design system to the client? How do you establish a shared commitment within the company to put a pattern library on the roadmap? As designers and developers, we often know and see the benefits of an overarching system that radiates consistency throughout the different experiences of a company. But sometimes it’s seen as a very unpredictable investment, and the value isn’t necessarily visible right away. Read more…

March 10, 2015 — Working with text has long been the domain of desktops and notebooks. Yet the screen size, resolution and software of mobile devices have improved in recent years, which has made typing a fairly large amount of text quite achievable. A number of apps and techniques are intended to make this task easier, thus increasing productivity and increasing the amount of text that can be comfortably created or edited on a mobile device. Read more…

October 8, 2014 — Sliders are cool. When they’re done well, customers love to interact with them. When they’re not done well, they can cause a lot of frustration (not to mention lost sales) by standing between your customers and what they want. And getting them wrong is surprisingly easy. In this article, we will present a solution, including the design and code, for a new type of Android slider to address common problems, along with a downloadable Android mini-app for you to try out. It’s a deep dive into sliders based on a chapter in Android Design Patterns. The experimental inventory-based slider we will look at would be at home in any application that asks for a price, a size, or any other faceted input within a widely distributed range. Read more…

April 22, 2014 — Pattern libraries are a great source of inspiration and education for designers. But common practice doesn’t always equal best practice. In this post, we’ll look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement. Read more…

November 10, 2011 — The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries. Read more…