UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week

May//3//2019

Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!

1.https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/design-starts-with-craft/
Design and Time. Interesting article hailing from the Invision blog, focused on the time, craft and process that underlines a design thinking process. The author creates an interesting analogy with an ice-cream maker, as that business learns from its customers, and has strategies that account for seasonality, demographics among other factors. It’s an article that functions as a testament to the intricacies of the process and the benefits that are extracted from it. Highlight of the article includes:

“Well-crafted products are not always superficially beautiful, but they are always deeply satisfying. Craft existed long before it became the domain of designers, and it will exist long after today’s hot companies fade into the history books. We designers have many lessons we can learn from the craftspeople at Ballabeni.”

2.https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/05/future-design-voice-prototypes/
Designing for Voice and Prototype Considerations. Smashing Magazine continues their impeccable release of relevant articles, with this one focused specifically on Designing Voice Oriented products. The article details best practices and what to focus on when creating these types of experiences, namely focusing on crucial factors such as research (understanding both the users, but also and equally as important, their languages), creating dialogues that substantiate the scenarios that are outlined, error handling, to name but a few. It also ties this experience with Adobe XD’s voice prototyping capabilities, which in itself are worth investigating. Highlight of the article includes:

“Dialogues are the building blocks of voice user flows. For each key scenario that the voice app will support, start creating conversational dialogues between the user and the app. Strive to make interacting with the app as familiar as having a regular conversation with a real person. Human conversation is complex; it often has many twists and turns. It will be important to take this into account when working through your scenarios and writing dialogues.”

3.https://baymard.com/blog/homepage-carousel
Carousel and Usability Issues. Very interesting dissection of the carousel feature. This article details how this feature while at times working suitably for desktop experiences, doesn’t translate as well into omnichannel experiences or other platforms. It also provides alternatives to the utilization of this device, by suggesting the use of static content, more easily digestible and more curated throughout these web driven products. Highlight of the article includes:

“While our large-scale usability testing reveals that users generally like the large imagery of carousels, a homepage carousel can cause more harm than good if the inherent serious usability pitfalls aren’t addressed. In short; we do find that homepage carousels can work with users, but in practice almost all carousels don’t, and the list of detailed requirements is long. Indeed, our UX benchmark reveals that only 41% of the sites that have a homepage carousel have an implementation that’s largely free from usability issues.”

4.https://www.fastcompany.com/90342214/the-science-of-why-you-hate-your-open-office
Open Office Spaces Controversy. An atypical article for me to include, but thought this to be relevant to the Design practice and Design professionals. The culture underlying the open space concept continues, with more backlash emerging in recent years. One assessment that I can effectively state, based on my personal experience — physical proximity isn’t synonymous with effective collaboration or synergy. Highlight of the article includes:

“One of the biggest myths of the open office is that it encourages collaboration between coworkers, who–lacking walls–will spontaneously bump into each other and have conversations that will lead to the next brilliant idea. But a landmark Harvard Business School study from 2018 found that open plan offices encouraged less face-to-face collaboration–employees spent 73% less time interacting with each other in-person. Instead, out of a desire to not distract or disturb their colleagues, people just sent more emails and instant messages. The study found that email use increased by 67%.”