UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
July//26//2019
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.https://medium.com/nightingale/style-guidelines-92ebe166addc
Data Visualization Style Guidelines. Very pertinent article from author Amy Cesal, documenting her process to establish style guidelines for Data Visualization. This article is particularly relevant since infographics are so relevant and communicate extensively data to the user, in what should be an immediate and intuitive way. Establishing these guidelines, positions the quest for consistency across the brand and the product design experience, swiftly and efficiently. Highlight of the article includes:
“Data visualization style guides fit within an organization’s larger design system. They include how other guidelines, like brand standards or editorial guidelines, apply to data visualization. For example, they specify how elements like a logo, brand colors, and language tone specifically apply to charts, tables, and diagrams. Style guides maintain uniformity across different tools and software that produce charts. An organization’s charts should be consistent across tools and look visually similar to the rest of the blog or report it’s part of. Having a style guide with principles and components that work across multiple tools, rather than just one template for one tool, helps achieve this consistency.”
2.https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-operations-101/
Design Ops. Hailing from the Nielsen Norman Group, another pertinent article on the topic of Design scalability, and what that entails in terms of strategy. The article explains thoroughly what Design Ops are, what their purpose is, and ultimately how it provides opportunities for productivity, integration, scalability, all topics that are relevant as Design teams expand their footprint, and the demands for consistency across of plethora of subjects is crucial for successful endeavors. Highlight of the article includes:
“The goal of DesignOps is to establish processes and measures that support scalable solutions for these challenges, so that designers can focus on designing and researching. All fields must figure out how to mitigate growing amounts of bureaucracy and overhead communications as they scale. Each field will have its own solutions, and DesignOps is ours. However, UX professionals have more need than most for figuring out how to efficiently handle “more.” We often grow at a faster rate than the rest of the company, as the organization realizes the value and high ROI of UX and begins to expeditiously add staff and responsibility to the UX team.”
3.https://reallifemag.com/numbers-game/
Gamification. Great article from Drew Austin on the topic of Gamification. This article sheds light on what gamification is, while also detailing the evolution of this concept and how it has become a paradigm associated with so many applications/product experiences. Much like I previously highlighted from another article, where gamification is anchored on three master components, namely, motivation, mastery and triggers, this article provides a deeper insight into a particular case study with the product Fortnite. Worth a read to witness the evolution of what gaming is evolving to. Highlight of the article includes:
“Initially, “gamification” helped individuals make sense of the perceptual revolution sparked by the widespread adoption of smartphones. Though the logic of gamifying behavior is not new, the sensors and connectivity of phones allowed tech companies to bring gamification’s necessary prerequisite — behavioral tracking — into many new domains. Countless apps exhibit gamelike principles that have become as normal and familiar to their users as crossing the street. The phone, as a handheld sensor, not only records the world around it but inscribes its apps’ logic onto the world, orienting users’ behavior toward newly legible metrics and rewards — not merely content-level metrics such as likes and retweets but also badges, follower counts, verified checkmarks and other indicators of personal status improvement.”
