UI/UX Articles And Interesting Tidbits Of The Week
October//9//2020
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Leadership in Rapidly Changing Times. Very interesting read from the Fast Company, on the heels of their Innovation Festival. The article focuses on a conversation the author of the article, Lydia Dishman, had with two CEOs of two well performing organizations, Box and PagerDuty, respectively Aaron Levie and Jennifer Tejada. The topic of article is specifically on how to lead teams in times such as these, where there’s plenty of uncertainty and where organizations need to pivot rather quickly. The article focuses on topics such as transparency, agility and innovation. Well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“That doesn’t mean they think they’ve got it all figured out now. Levie quips about making early decisions on remote work based on the thinking that the pandemic would be resolved in just a couple of weeks. But he stresses the point of being able to think quickly and be decisive. If he has any regrets as a leader, Levie says it was during “times where I didn’t have us move quickly enough on a major issue or strategy.” His aim now is to “improve the clock speed” of the organization to take risks and pivot when needed. Tejada agrees, but adds that one of the times she dragged her feet was on her way up the ladder. “I waited too long to be CEO,” she confesses, and it took a mentor calling her an “idiot” a couple of times before she agreed to throw her hat in the ring. Now, she says, “I was born for this.””
2.
Designing Policy, Privacy and Terms and Conditions Pages. Having gone through an exercise of centralizing all this information for a project quite recently, I can attest how timely and relevant this article actually is. Hailing from the Smashing Magazine, and author Suzanne Scacca, this is a thorough look at how to organize information that companies have to make available on their websites and applications. This concerns Privacy Notices, Terms and Conditions, Cookies, Conditions of Use, Disclaimers, all information that is deeply tied with product usage. The author provides as always pertinent examples to illustrate these cases, such as BuzzFeed, Indeed, The New York Times, to name but a few. Well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“When building websites for large corporations, popular social media platforms and mega e-commerce sites, you have to remember that it’s not just English speakers in the United States reading the policy disclosure pages. As such, the terms should change from language to language and country to country.
Let’s say the company you’re building a site for has very strict legal terms. Their legal team has advised them not to change any of the policy disclosure content because they need it to hold up in a court of law in case anything should happen. That doesn’t give you much flexibility in terms of how you design the page then. Sure, you can make the headers extra big and bold and you can use H2, H3 and H4 to create a hierarchy. That’ll help with readability a little bit, but not much. When there’s no way to manipulate the legal content itself, summaries are the way to go.”
3.
Considerations on Responsive Design. Hailing from the Plant Design Blog, this article is a testament to considerations to be had when understanding, implementing and deploying Responsive Design strategies. The article looks at topics such as Performance, Eliminating Functionalities, to name but a few, while also providing recommendations on how to display information in a responsive manner. Worth a gander. Highlight of the article includes:
“With Responsive Design, the experience of a website on different devices can vary dramatically. Often, designers cut out functionality that they think is unnecessary on mobile devices. But such a decision breaks the expectations of users, especially when they already have experience using the extended version of the website. They come to the site for a solution to their problem and want to get the same functionality regardless of the device. Another compromise is adding a button to the mobile version of the Request Desktop Website, under the guise of caring for the user and giving them choice. But to be honest, it feels like being lazy when designing a mobile version and taking responsibility for how the user will receive content on their device.”
4.
Innovation by Design 2020. As the end is about to wrap itself, Fast Company is listing not only the most accomplished User Experiences for the year, but also at the most innovative. This list goes across a variety of categories and industries and is well worth investigating.
