UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
May//21//2021
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Emotional Intelligence and Dealing with Uncertainty. Great article hailing from Fast Company and author Scott Dust. The article, which is substantiated by researched performed by the author and some of his peers, provides insight into how professionals with high levels of emotional intelligence manage to persevere and thrive, not only in times of uncertainty, but also when gaps in employment occur (either forcibly from Organizations themselves or brought upon for personal reasons). The article focuses on topics such as self awareness, self regulation and relationship management, to showcase traits, conducts that emotionally intelligent individuals possess, which allows them to navigate challenging times with some serenity and success. Highlight of the article includes:
“Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and regulate emotions in ways that help us think more clearly and work with others more effectively. Such an ability is a superpower for managing uncertainty and ambiguity — something everyone is experiencing these days. For example, many employees are being asked to come back to the office. This is causing employees to adjust their routines and deal with vague and constantly changing COVID-19 policies. Some are adjusting to a completely remote work environment. Others are still trying to figure out what exactly a hybrid work environment entails. Worse yet, some are unemployed and fighting through Zoom-only interviews. These experiences are emotionally demanding and necessitate conversations with others that require tact and empathy.”
2.
Challenging Design Patterns: Overwhelming Dropdown Hover Menus. Another great article from Vitaly Friedman, courtesy of Smashing Magazine. This is a continuation of the series under the title “Challenging Design Patterns”, and follows the article which focused on the topic of Form Design and specifically data pickers. This time around, the author looks at experiences pertaining to mega-dropdown hover menus, and how those experiences have proven themselves to be quite challenging. The article provides quite a few pertinent examples, including MailChimp’s, where Menus with a fair amount of complexity, have had their interaction refined, allowing for users to fully experience content, without losing sense of factors such as accessibility and mobility driven experiences. Well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“One of the common reasons why mega-dropdowns often open on hover because many large companies want to expose their customers to the breadth of options available on the site, quickly. With the navigation options changing on hover, we can display more options faster, and the customer can explore more options faster as well. That’s why it’s difficult to imagine a large eCommerce retailer without a large navigation overlay, for example. However, it’s a good idea to test if the engagement time and click-through rates remain the same (or increase) if the hover navigation is replaced with a tap/click navigation. In fact, most of the issues listed above can be resolved easily by doing just that: the mega-dropdown overlay would open and close only when the user explicitly prompts this particular action. Hence, there is no need to track the mouse pointer, or fine tune hover entry/exit delays. Plus, since there is no hover on mobile anyway, we need to provide an option to open the menu on tap/click for mobile one way or the other, so we can just keep it this way for larger screens as well.”
3.
Ecommerce Websites. Author Suzanne Scacca has a new article where she provides an interesting curated list of the best ecommerce websites currently on the web. One can’t help but feel that as one clicks through the list, that most of these interactive web experiences, are almost clones of each other, save for the products they’re individually selling. And this once again, flickers the eternal discussion where trends in design eradicate personality and the specific narrative of brands, all in the pursuit of being part of something that is relevant for 5 seconds. This current style, which mimics some editorial design aspects and aesthetics which Purple magazine for instance, was already using in 2003, is the common thread uniting all these products. Worth clicking through and reflecting. Highlight of the article includes:
“Design responsive, intuitive interfaces and navigations. Because many people won’t give a website a chance if it looks unappealing, disorganized, or outdated. Pay close attention to product photography. A site’s graphics should be crisp, clear, and descriptive in order to sell. Include social proof. More than anything else, consumers trust recommendations that come from people they know as well as fellow consumers, so don’t skimp on ratings, reviews, or testimonials. Use trust marks. By including cookie notices, secure payment options, and other trust marks, you can create reliability and put customers’ minds at ease. Make checkout as user-friendly as possible. The longer and more complicated checkout is, the greater the likelihood you’ll see abandoned carts. Carve out space for customer service. FAQs, help centers, live chat widgets, contact pages — consumers want to know there’s someone on the other side of the site.”
