UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
August//31//2018
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.https://medium.com/inside-design/the-future-of-design-systems-f86055d445b
Design Systems. Another great article focused on Design Systems and the establishment of standards. As these tools become more prevailing in organizations, it’s important to read on strategies to make these essential mechanisms strategic and adequate for the challenge and organization at hand. Highlight of the article includes:
“Design primitives are the building blocks of a UI. These include specific predefined colors, fonts, spacings, and more. They are foundational visual elements that can be combined into components. Changing primitives is echoed throughout a given design system’s components, and doing so changes the overall feeling of a brand. Additionally, what are components? We’ll also need to codify those. Components are mostly views composed of design primitives and smaller components whose minimal internal logic is mapped exclusively to state and state change.”
2.https://www.chargebee.com/blog/user-onboarding-emails/
Accessibility Considerations. I’ve highlighted previous articles on accessibility, but this is another useful indexing of rules and considerations to be mindful of when creating web products. From alt tags, to enabling keyboard navigation, to screen reader enabling, this is a concise and deft article worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“Everyone’s different and not everyone will interact with your site in the same way. Additionally, just because assistive technologies allow users to discern content, they may not do so in an efficient manner. On your end, this means you have to offer multiple forms of navigation so your users can find whatever they’re looking for and determine exactly where they are on your site, at all times. Because it’s very rare you’ll come across a site that’s a straight read from top to bottom, you have to include features like search, tabbing, headings and links they can use to navigate wherever they want.”
3.https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/08/best-practices-for-mobile-form-design/
Mobile Form Design. Another great article from Smashing Magazine, detailing considerations and effective best practices for mobile form design. It’s a great article filled with details, highlighting how form complexity is a user deflecting tool when it comes to checkout experiences. Highlight:
“Interaction cost is the sum of efforts — both cognitive and physical — that the users put into interacting with an interface in order to reach their goal. Interaction cost has a direct connection with form usability. The more effort users have to make to complete a form, the less usable the form is. A high interaction cost could be the result of data that is difficult to input, an inability to understand the meaning of some questions, or confusion about error messages.”
