UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
August//12//2022
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Online Whiteboards. Another article from the Invision Blog, this time around authored by Brittany Anas, focused on the topic of Digital Whiteboards. While this article is of course a gratuitous endorsement for Invision’s Freehand, it’s also a great reminder of how remote collaboration can be effectively done, and share by multi-disciplinary teams. The author enumerates some of the numerous applications these tools can have (onboarding for instance), and while I personally don’t think Freehand is the most robust tool on the Market, it’s a solid example of how teams can use that canvas to collaboratively work through problem solving and document their journeys. Highlight of the article includes:
“But online whiteboarding comes with some distinctive advantages, too. The canvas is limitless and flexible, which allows teams to have an interactive planning space. When you log into a whiteboard platform from the web, you can make changes in real time and see any additions your teammates have made. Virtual whiteboards also maximize visual collaboration, which is key for cross-functional alignment. Freehand tool kits allow you to create sophisticated flowcharts, diagrams, org charts and more with easy-to-master sticky line connectors and shapes. You can also drop images, GIFs, or graphics into your Freehands.”
2.
Core Web Vitals. Very interesting article hailing from Zora Cooper and published through Smashing Magazine, on the topic of Core Web Vitals. For those wanting to learn more about what it stands for, please check this article published on Google’s dev environment, but it essentially tracks quality signals that are fundamental to delivering a solid experience on the web. Ms. Cooper’s article focuses on tools which allow for the measurement of such quality signals including PageSpeed, Layout Shift Debuggers, amongst other tools, which analyze all the quality signals revolving around a digital online product. Worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“The success of your website depends on the impression it leaves on its users. By optimizing your Core Web Vitals scores, you can gauge and improve user experience. Essentially, a web vital is a quality standard for UX and web performance set by Google. Each web vital represents a discrete aspect of a user’s experience. It can be measured based on real data from users visiting your sites (field metric) or in a lab environment (lab metric).”
3.
Low and No Code Platforms and Tech Development Disruption. Interesting reflection from Katrina Dene on the topic of Low and No Code Platforms. While the suppositions and reflections the article sets forth are considerable and worth reading through, having gone through a lengthy exercise of delivering software applications using these environments, I can attest to the fact that these are far from ideal solutions, at least from where they currently are. Well worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
““One of the seemingly inevitable side effects of making software easier to build is that you tend to sacrifice customizability and a much deeper understanding of how the software works,” Jon Chan points out, Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering for Community Products. “Low-code/no-code tools tend to look for a general use case and that can restrict how flexible that software can be: there seems to be a tradeoff between ease-of-use and control in all of these tools that I haven’t seen anyone tackle really well (yet).””
