Someone emailed me yesterday, and mentioned they were going to make “a” wireframe to figure out how their site/app would work. Here’s my response… Wireframe are about QUESTIONS not answers. You should check out the website “whichtestwon.com”. They have a free test every month that you can see. It’s amazing because such subtle changes can… Read more »
Mark Edwards has a great demo of how he quickly creates a bunch of icons using vectors. The animated GIFs are great, but he also takes the time to talk through his thought process. If you want to get faster/better at vectors, you should check it out.
I really enjoy exploring these sorts of projects. Part of this make it clear it’s a student project (convoluting “brand” with “visual identity”) but mostly it’s very well done. Definitely something to be proud of. Most of these are simple changes but appropriate but the big thing he completely nails is fixing Apple’s convoluted search function:… Read more »
The New York Times has an article about some of the ways Uber uses psychology (i.e. Game Theory) to “trick” it’s drivers. The subtext of this article is Uber is evil/cruel/privileged/disgusting (which at least as the top level it seems it is), but the strategies they use here are NO different than ANY company tries to do. Regardless of… Read more »
Google analytics has had some very basic A/B testing tools built in, but it looks like they’re upping their game and competing directly with Otimizely now too…
Guetzli from Google and a gaggle of researchers over at Cornell created a new open source algorithm which decreases JPGs by 35%. There are a couple of catches – It’s slow. It can take 5-10 minutes to compress a large file (such as a photo). It’s not (yet) wrapped in a GUI, so if you want to try… Read more »
The client was old school. She said she didn’t like it and kept focusing on details. Some people might consider this a sign of a bad client, but I see it as a sign of a bad designer or creative lead (or a bad design process maybe?). OK here’s the deal. If a client doesn’t “like” a… Read more »
Smashing Magazine has a typically long (and slightly convoluted) article which talks about Optimistic User Interface Design. It can probably be nicely summarized in this: After the like button is clicked, Twitter instantly updates it to the success state visually. … the server request has been sent but is still in progress. The “likes” counter… Read more »
Jarno Rantanen has a great article outlining some CSS best practices. One in particular I’m happy to see there is the first on the list: 1. Always prefer classes This is just to get the obvious out of the way. Do not target ID’s (e.g. #header), because whenever you think there can be only one… Read more »
Both Safari and Chrome have the ability to “spoof” the browser and emulate different devices. In Safari you must turn on developer tools in preferences and then you can select Develop Menu >Enter Responsive Design Mode. Google’s has also cleaned up their interface. To test mobile you go to developer tools (buried in the hamburg menu on… Read more »