Category: UX Design
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How do I determine if a UI can be made more simple?
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. An aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein. But how could you determine if the UI you designed could (and should) be made optimally simpler — meaning can still be made more simple than the current without losing anything of value to the users (and while adding more…
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Assistive Technologies
Amplified telephone Font resizing / larger Hearing aid Screen magnification or zoom Cochlear implant Screen reader (e.g, JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, ChromeVox) Cane, walker, guide animal or other walking aid Braille terminal Wheelchair Voice Control / speech recognition Software (e.g., Dragon, Siri, Google Home, Google Assistant, Cortana) Prosthetics Speech generating device Wearable tech (not prosthetics) Speech…
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And yet design and designers
And yet design and designers. I’m a designer, and what I’ve seen is that we are perpetually distressed, perpetually feel threatened by the idea of democratization. As long as I’ve been a designer there’s been talk about the idea of accreditation, about the idea of licensing designers, about making people take training, take tests in…
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Are we doing the right thing?
In their writing, they reflect on their own work, and they’re skeptical about what they’re doing often times. They’re also very skeptical and question the world around them. And that’s something that I think that we can do a lot more as designers, and I know it is not an easy thing to do, because…
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Uncoordinated Stream of Design Deliverables
I have often seen UX designers present bewildered development teams with an uncoordinated stream of design deliverables that define what they need to build—for example, Adobe Photoshop or XD screen designs, Figma prototypes, Confluence documents, and Excel spreadsheets, along with some hand-coded HTML and JavaScript. Plus, UX teams often seem oblivious or uncaring about the…
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Do you consider a “cancel” button secondary or tertiary in UX? Can you think of reasons not to use it in a form? What are the best use cases for/against it?
One thing’s for sure about the Cancel action in a form: it is a negative within the context of Proceed as the positive. Then again, in the context of what the user’s goal is, the positive and negative may be one or the other. For example, in a 5-step interaction to fully complete the user’s…
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The Design of Target Areas
A target area in a website or app is an area that enables a user to interact with the interface through touch or a pointing device such as a mouse. Examples are links, buttons, form elements, etc. According to Fitts’s law, “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of…
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Information Ecology
Users Audience Tasks Needs Information-seeking behavior Experience Content Content objectives Document and data types Volume Existing structure Governance and ownership Context Business goals Funding Politics Culture Technology Resources Constraints References Information Architecture Basics
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Reading About aria-label
Why is text so central to accessibility? Because text is highly interoperable. That is, systems of letters can be translated into code points and interpreted by all sorts of different software. Oh and humans understand text already, of course. Because different machines can all read and write text, information can be interpreted and conveyed to humans…