The User Experience of Creative Sprints (Helene Sears)

Creative sprints are typically multiple day processes that get a whole team together to define the challenge, come up with a lot of ideas, build the best ideas and test them out. Pioneered by Google Ventures for small start-ups, we have modified them for a company of the Guardian’s size. (theguardian.com)

Material Design is Different, Not Better (Meng To)

When Material Design was announced, I was impressed with Google’s efforts to raise their game in the design field. It’s something that Apple had always been ahead. Not anymore. I remember complaining a lot about Android design’s inconsistencies, lack of documentations, unattractive dark theme and overuse of the ambiguous Hamburger menu. Material Design solved a lot of that. It now offers a consistent design language that is lighter, more colorful, backed by solid guidelines that are well-considered. (medium.com)

Spatial Interfaces (Pasquale D’Silva)

I think spatially, and so do you. Can you scratch your left ear without looking? Pick a booger out of your nose, without poking your brain? Remember where you left your keys? Can you type, without looking at your keyboard? Know which pocket your phone is in? Which way is up? Do you know where the bathroom is? Of course you do! We imagine multi-dimensional models in our minds, to help understand the complex world around us. We can also leverage this powerful way of thinking, to process more abstract information. (medium.com)

Why everyone is a designer… but shouldn’t design (Marcin Treder)

“Design is everywhere, inevitably everyone is a designer,” says Tim Brown of IDEO. That’s something we’ve heard time and time again. Because if you’re a problem solver, you’re a designer. Even Don Norman, who coined the term “user experience,” says that everyone is a designer... (thenextweb.com)

Wenn Webseiten den Gürtel enger schnallen: Performance Budget

Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything. (…) By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets. (designbrief.de)

Hermeneutics for Designers (Sjors Timmer)

Hermeneutics is a clever framework for understanding the big picture by way of the details. Whether the big picture is a UX project or something as simple as reading a book, Sjors Timmer offers a process to uncover valuable - and sometimes surprising - insights. (uxbooth.com)

Why Care About Design? (Jordan Koschei)

Why care about design? Even as a professional designer, I ask myself that sometimes. There are days when my work feels inconsequential. After I’ve spent an hour agonizing over a button’s pixel alignment, or vacillating between two indistinguishable shades of gray, I find myself wondering: will anyone even notice? (theindustry.cc)

12 About Us Page Examples That Are Probably Better Than Yours (Lindsay Kolowich)

When you’re building a website, it’s tempting to get distracted by all the bells and whistles of the design process and forget all about creating compelling content. But having awesome content on your website is crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business. (hubspot.com)

Infographic: "History Recap: 30 Years of Windows" (Singyin Lee)

The latest version of Windows will be released near the end of this month in nearly 190 markets around the world. Windows 10 is something many are keeping their eyes on: will it or won’t it redeem Windows for what it put users through in Windows 8? (In case you missed it, one of our own, Thoriq Firdaus took a run at Windows 10 in the Windows Insider program.) (hongkiat.com)

4 iOS Rules to Break (Nielsen Norman Group)

Following style guides is almost always recommended. But there are some cases where the “official” design does not work well in practice. Nonetheless, for reasons unknown—maybe the recommendation was a trade-off, it wasn't thoroughly researched, or it seemed to be the best possible a solution to a very difficult design challenge—it still made it in the style guide. (nngroup.com)

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How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create The PC Industry (Benj Edwards)

In April 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rented a booth at the formative industry conference for the personal computer, the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. They were there to launch Apple's first breakthrough machine, the Apple II. (fastcompany.com)

Brainstorming UX Design Strategies with Toy Bricks (Gokul Rangarajan)

A great team is all the time humble and have the ability to listen to everyone, facilitating freedom to communicate each member’s thoughts and perspectives irrespective of hierarchies, which in turn would help build a great product. UX should not be a single designer or design team’s concern, but the complete development team needs the understanding of why, what & who they are developing this product for. Rather, now adays UX is conceived and misinterpreted as a Tool driven deliverable or look and feel improvisations. Instead the entire team with all stakeholders on board should be involved in solving major UX problems. (medium.com)

Web Design: The First 100 Years (Maciej Cegłowski)

Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about airplanes. In 1981, my mother and I flew from Warsaw to New York City in this airplane, an Ilyushin-62. (idlewords.com)

Well-designed interfaces look boring (Matthew Ström)

3 billion people used the internet for the first time in the past decade. Can you imagine what that was like? When I began using the internet, the web was pretty much just text. Interface design required finagling websites from knots of spreadsheet-like tables, and even the most sophisticated designs couldn’t do much more than blink and display images. Now, 37% of the world has the internet literally at their fingertips, allowing them to manage their finances and healthcare, communicate in real-time using pictures and videos, and purchase everything from hamburgers to houses. Complex functions require complex interfaces; so how has interface design changed to accommodate? (medium.com)

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The rise of the “Full Stack” Designer and the tools he uses (Eden Vidal)

When I had just started as a web designer, I already had some experience with front-end development. So instead of treating web design as coloring pages for kids (which sometimes young designers do), I wanted to take part in the entire process — from concept to design to actually solving world problems (first world..) — and I wanted to code it on my own, as I could. (medium.com)

Meaningful Design for Apple Watch (Peter Lewis)

LIKE EVERY OTHER Apple-loving, early-adopting tech nerd, I’d set my alarm for 3:00am EST, April 10. It was pre-order time, and just a few more weeks until I could finally try out my new Apple watch. I was skeptical; it was their first major new product category in 5 years, and the first without Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over it. I was concerned by reports that Apple had first decided wearables would be important, and then tried figure out what they could be useful for. But as a designer, I wanted to understand from firsthand experience where it fit in my life, and how to design for it. So there I was in the middle of the night, feverishly refreshing the Apple store app, tapping in my credit card information. By 3:03am the model I’d selected was sold out. (medium.com)

Dropdowns Should be the UI of Last Resort (Luke Wroblewski)

All too often mobile forms make use of dropdown menus for input when simpler or more appropriate controls would work better. Here's several alternatives to dropdowns to consider in your designs and why. (lukew.com)

8 Common Design Mistakes That Drive Visitors Crazy (Marie)

Web design has changed significantly over the past 10 years. Some design techniques that were considered the norm in the past are now considered a deadly mistake. As a result of these changes, there are many common design mistakes that some design companies may make if they have not kept up with recent developments. Here are 8 of the most common design mistakes... (designreviver.com)

How To Use Video Throughout The Buying Journey To Boost Conversions And Engagement (Michael Litt)

The play button is quickly becoming the most compelling call-to-action on the Web. Odds are you’ve been drawn in by that shiny triangle just begging you to click it. While many marketers have started to see the power of video to engage audiences and educate potential customers about their brands, I still see way too many who create a broad introductory video and then call it quits. That, my friends, is a huge missed opportunity. (marketingland.com)

Designers: Use'em or Lose'em! (Alina)

Design is hot. Companies have realized that good design is good for business, that technology alone isn't enough to get customers excited, and that today's consumers have come to expect a smart and delightful experience in every product they touch. Designers are a hot commodity these days. Companies are going all-in, scooping up talent so their competitors won't. The stakes have never been higher. (zurb.com)

Don’t Be Forever Branded as a Cheap, Low-End Designer (Addison Duvall)

How many of you know the proper way to approach a diet? Many people don’t, which is why they fail to work. There’s a specific mentality you need to have in order to get through a diet successfully, and it has to do with what you believe about the permanence of your current situation. When starting a design project, whether for yourself or for a client, there will inevitably come a time when it will stop being as fun, and you’ll have to rely on a form of willpower to see you through to the end of it. (speckyboy.com)

Infographic: Tips For Building the Perfect Checkout Page (Singyin Lee)

Online shopping and e-Commerce is a multi-billion dollar industry that spans the globe, and many manufacturers and sellers would like to have a small piece of that massive pie. One of the biggest problems facing designers for e-Commerce sites is how to prevent cart abandonment. Here’s where this infographic by VWO can help. (hongkiat.com)

The Risky Business of Onboarding (Rick Pastoor)

Introducing potential new users to a product can be tricky. Visitors are just passing by, only willing to interact if they can immediately see a new product’s value. And even if they do sign up, they may not come back. It’s not enough simply to capture an email address—you have to thoughtfully design a process that gets and holds attention, turning new visits into repeated engagement. (alistapart.com)

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Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design (Nikkel Blaase)

When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a matter of fact, features are merely a small, fragile part of the product. They are only a few of many thinkable solutions for a user’s problem the product tries to solve. Thinking in products means thinking in specific user’s problems, in jobs to be done, in goals, and in revenues. (medium.com)

Breaking through the limits of brand style guides (Keren Veisblatt Toledano, Lindsay DeVellis, Alan Finch)

Just about every designer’s dealt with a brand style guide, an authoritative document that dictates how a brand should look, speak, and generally exist in all mediums. At Brooklyn United, we’ve seen our fair share of ‘em: the Do this, not that style guide, the Here’s a list of colors and fonts style guide, and the ever-so-popular Do we even have one of those? style guide. (invisionapp.com)

3 Design Best Practices That Web Designers And Conversion Optimizers Can Agree Upon (Jeremy Smith)

I know what you’re thinking. A CRO person just said “best practices.” Holy *(^&%&^. Hurry up, tell everyone. We are going to burn this guy in the comments and then publish it on every social network possible. OK, well, maybe not that dramatic. It’s a rare citing indeed, and I risk ridicule from all of my fellow CRO colleagues. (marketingland.com)

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Nancy Drew: The Most Iconic Woman In Gaming (Samantha Dupler)

She may not wield badass dueling pistols like Lara, or rule over the Mushroom Kingdom like Peach, but this detective has made the transition from pages to pixels, and gathered a formidable online fandom in the process.​ We should all be a little more like Nancy Drew. It’s a slogan that I believe in. So much so that it takes up 47 of the precious 160 characters allotted for my Twitter bio. And really, why shouldn’t we all strive to be more like Nancy Drew? The titian-haired girl detective has been something of an icon for generations of girls and women: she’s confident, cunning, and drives around River Heights in that snazzy blue roadster (during the Great Depression, no less). (digg.com)

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How To Avoid Design By Committee (Addison Duvall)

Here’s a scenario for you: a woman has three young children, each armed with a handful of crayons. They’re happily drawing on a large sheet of paper, cooperating and sharing colors. The woman leaves the room for a moment, and when she comes back, she is dismayed to find that the children have all begun scribbling on the walls. (speckyboy.com)

Experiential Commerce Is The Next Billion-Dollar Opportunity For Developers (Atlee Clark)

Technology has transformed entire industries over the past decade, from travel and transportation to media and real estate. While commerce has enjoyed some innovation, its transformation is far from over. The next frontier is “Commerce Everywhere,” which blends online and offline experiences to let you make purchases wherever and whenever you want. (techcrunch.com)

How to Stand Out as a Web Designer (1stwebdesigner.com)

There are many opportunities as a web designer. However, there are also hundreds of thousands of web designer in the World Wide Web, all of whom are very talented and creative people. Just imagine the competition as you give your best to position yourself and get the best clients. It’s like trying to get the attention of the President in a sea of people while he’s making a speech. (1stwebdesigner.com)

Creating a Survey? 7 Tips for Getting More Respondents (Justin Prugh)

For marketers, tracking meaningful data is key to understanding how to generate leads. Of this data, pointed feedback from prospects and customers is especially valuable. The best way to collect it? Surveys. (hubspot.com)

Apple Music is a Usability Nightmare (Cezary Wojcik)

I was really hoping that I could switch to Apple Music from Spotify. I really wanted this to work. Not because Spotify is bad, because change can be fun (and because searching any song with Siri on my watch sounds pretty cool). I'm running the iOS 9 beta on my phone, so I downloaded the iOS 8.4 update on my iPad to check out Apple Music. Unfortunately, I don't see myself switching from Spotify anytime soon. I really tried to convince myself to give it a chance, but Apple Music is just simply awful to use. Everything I would want to do would either take forever or is simply not possible. (cezarywojcik.com)

Somaesthetic design (Kristina Höök, Anna Ståhl, Martin Jonsson, Johanna Mercurio, Anna Karlsson, Eva-Carin Johnson)

We are surrounded by a plethora of new technologies—biosensors worn on the body, interactive clothes, and wearable computers, such as mobiles equipped with accelerometers. A whole space of possibilities for gesture-, physical-, and body-based interaction has been opened. But despite all the work we have seen on designing for embodiment, the actual corporeal, pulsating, live, felt body has been notably absent from both theory and practical design work. Most design work has taken a quite instrumental view on interaction: Our bodies are there to be trimmed, perfected, and kept free from illnesses and bad influences. By placing some sensors on our body and then having the data fed back to us, we are supposed to be able to change our bad habits, become healthy and beautiful, and live a long life. (interactions.acm.org)