Category: Reposts

IDEO founder Tim Brown once said, “Design is everywhere, inevitably everyone is a designer.” And it’s a viewpoint that designers are hearing with increasing frequency; because if you’re a problem solver, you’re a designer, right? Not necessarily.

The brainstorming meeting, as we know it, is broken. Opinions fly around the room and the “solution” chosen can often rely more on power dynamics than the facts. As former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale once quipped, “If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Enter the design sprint, an effective means of testing the potential of your next great idea in a five-day, high-stakes challenge.

Insiders call it Vallco Parkway. The nondescript building, just a quick hop down 280 from Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, houses a nerve center crucial to the fingers of everyone who uses a Macintosh. This is the Input Design Lab, where Apple designs and tests the prototypes for new keyboards, trackpads, and mouses. It’s stuffed with a treasure trove of precision machinery that would make geek hearts patter like a pneumatic drill. Until now, no reporter or press photographer has crossed the threshold. But to mark a new set of iMacs — and perhaps to help implement a spirit of more transparency in the previously locked-down corporation — Apple opened its doors (well, some of them) to Backchannel, and talked about its new iMacs and overall strategy.

App Transport Security (ATS) lets an app add a declaration to its Info.plist file that specifies the domains with which it needs secure communication. ATS prevents accidental disclosure, provides secure default behavior, and is easy to adopt. You should adopt ATS as soon as possible, regardless of whether you’re creating a new app or updating an existing one.

If you’re developing a new app, you should use HTTPS exclusively. If you have an existing app, you should use HTTPS as much as you can right now, and create a plan for migrating the rest of your app as soon as possible.

In simple terms, this means that if your application attempts to connect to any HTTP server that doesn’t support the latest SSL technology (TLSv1.2), your connections will fail.

When it comes to designing for the Web I like to follow a handful of general principles. First, design for the medium, or as Frank Chimero puts it, follow “the grain of the Web”. The Web is fluid – based on screens and devices of varying sizes – and typography on the Web should reflect that. Second, design content-out, which usually means designing around a strong typographical base since the large majority of Web content and UI is text. And last, design with modular scales. Things built on the Web should be fluid and infinitely scalable. Using modular scales in a design compliments that idea and keeps things organized in the face of growing complexity.

There’s no doubt that animating user interfaces is a rising trend. Risen enough that the emphasis is often put on the animation itself, rather than on improving the user experience through subtle and functional animation. Pasquale D’Silva gave some good advice in his talk at Web Direction South in 2013, including:

Good animation is invisible.
You shouldn’t notice that you’re looking at animation.

It’s great advice that we — the team behind Campaign Monitor’s email builder — have been trying to apply with a few principles in mind: animation must improve the usability, feel natural and subtle, and give feedback to the user.

Having spent the last year working on the email builder, I’ve learned that animation on the web — as opposed to native apps — comes with many challenges that go beyond finding the right timing, spacing, poses or easing. Animations just don’t render the same on all devices and browsers, and that rendering inconsistency has led us to compromise things to create a good user experience. In fact, some beautiful and useful interactions on our powerful 27" iMacs didn’t make it to the final product, because they felt jerky and slow on a device some of our users were more likely to use.

In this article, we will be discussing what Good UX qualities should be present in Ecommerce websites. We will be talking about how these qualities should be applied. Let’s take a look!