Vinay Chavan

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!

Following Apple’s advice and sticking with Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern seemed like a good idea at first, but as the app continued to grow, logic that drove some parts of it started to became complex to the point where making changes was accompanied with the feeling of unease and fixing issues in one part of the code with the fear of causing new bugs in some other parts. It would not be fair to blame only MVC for that – of course that some problems are caused by bad programming, lack of experience and the pressure of hard deadlines – but MVC is not well-wisher either. Thinking only in the terms of model, view and controller, one can miss some useful possibilities of how responsibilities can be further separated and dependency graph simplified. In following paragraphs I’ll present a situation where MVC can be improved by expanding it to MVVM 

thehipperelement:

This is some good shit right here:

“A designer’s process determines the difference between mediocre and great work. Natural talent and training aren’t substitutes for good design habits. The right process can cover many shortcomings of talent and skill — but the opposite is never true. A good process will bring out your best and most unique work. A bad process will leave you with tired, unsurprising clichés.”

The linked article is exactly how I think about design, articulated better than I have ever said it. In my opinion every designer should read this.

Amen.

I’ve known lots of business owners who want to “get some design in here” by hiring a designer. This almost never works because that owner isn’t thinking about design in the right way. Being a design-first company means to actually change the process of product design to one that starts with users actual goals or a known problem and working outward. If you are hitting a wall and hoping a designer can get you out of it, it’s probably not going to work without a fundamental change to your product development process.

Wells Rilley talks about how we have lost some of the crucial affordances while shifting our focus on to flat design too fast. Its time to hold on for a while and improve the flat design. Design has a purpose and if that purpose is lost, well its not a design anymore… its a decoration.

The flat movement was born out of a need to get as far away from skeuomorphism as possible. Shadows and metallic sheen were replaced with solid hues and typography-driven design. It was a harken back to the Swiss ‘international style’ of design where strong typography and blocks of color reigned supreme in print.

But perhaps the pendulum swung too far in the flat direction. In the transition to flat we lost some of the helpful affordances – especially on buttons and forms – that more traditional aesthetics used to make our products easy to use. When everything became flat, creating a clear visual hierarchy became a constant challenge.

Can you tell which Shift key is enabled?

Flat has been the predominant visual style for over a year, and some brilliant work has come out of it. But it’s clear that now it’s time to let the pendulum swing back – if even only a little bit.

Build something. Build something great. Make it so great that it makes money. Then bring on other people who believe in you and what you’ve built so much that they’re willing to risk for it. Don’t do it only because it makes money, but let money be a reward for bringing more value to your customers. Risk, lose, learn, and then win. It takes guts. It takes a spine. If you haven’t already, grow one.

Seth Bannon talks about the mistakes he made as a CEO that he shouldn’t have,

1. Pay attention to financial operations from the early days. Make a budget.
2. Be explicit with your co-founders at the get-go about decision-making, distribution of information, and level of commitment. Formalize this in a written agreement.
3. Have conversations with co-founders and teammates when they join about what rules you’re comfortable bending and what hacks you’re comfortable implementing.
4. Don’t be a lone wolf. Lean on the experience and smarts of your teammates, investors, and mentors to help solve the tough problems and take advantage of the opportunities.
5. If you’re a first time entrepreneur, invite an outside director to sit on your board when you raise money. The upsides greatly outweigh the downsides.
6. Keep your investors posted on your progress, be responsive to their requests, and lean on their guidance.
7. Be overwhelmingly honest with your stakeholders (team, investors, customers).
8. Build a support network of fellow entrepreneurs when the times are good, because when the times are tough their support is invaluable.

As companies embrace the need to take user experience seriously, often their first step is to build out a “UX department.” However, the reality is that user experience is a phenomenon that emerges from an entire organization’s activities, not just the efforts of one team. There are (at least) six components that need to be aligned throughout the organisation,

• What do you stand for?
• Where are you headed? 
• How do we know when we’re successful?
• How do we encourage desired behavior within the team?
• How do we operate?
• What skills are necessary?

I have never laughed so much while reading programming related stuff.

Yoda Conditions

Using if(constant == variable) instead of if(variable == constant), like if(4 == foo). Because it’s like saying “if blue is the sky” or “if tall is the man”.

The recent minimalist trends in software design — Metro, flat, iOS7, Material — are attempts to scrape away the moss without a radical alteration in the underlying function. It is a reaction to the friction felt between the old stratum of software that has cemented its implementation and thus could afford to wear a rich visual coat, and a new stratum of software that yearns for a radically different approach to interface design.

Remember when the web was damn simple? It still can be. It’s up to us to make it that way.