The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009: recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches.
Beautiful and free icon sets always come in handy. Used properly and moderately, icons can be helpful to provide users with memorable metaphors and illustrations that would provide a visual support for otherwise unspectacular text blocks. For instance, in web-applications memorable icons can be very helpful as they can make it easier for users to memorize how to perfom some specific task or where to find some specific functions.
In the last several years, we’ve seen a rapid shift in software and app interface design, from 3-D and skeuomorphic to flat and minimal. Although this trend has become nearly ubiquitous, let’s take a moment to consider how we got here and what influence it’s having on interface design as a whole. Additionally, I’ll share some tips and considerations on designing flat interfaces.
Developing a product is one thing, bringing it to market is another. In this article, Rachel explains how to start with a new product, develop and support it over time.
Nowadays, with any Web app you build, you have dozens of architectural decisions to make.
Guesstimates by analysts put the number of mobile app downloads this year at somewhere between 56 and 82 billion, with the average user downloading somewhere between 26 and 41 apps, with a smaller subset of those apps being used on a regular basis. Other numbers indicate that 95% of downloaded apps are abandoned within a month and 26% of apps are only used once.
Lately, I have started to see more and more problems with jQuery, at least my use of it. Most of the problems are with jQuery’s core and can’t be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility — which is very important. I, like many others, continued using the library for a while, navigating all of the pesky quirks every day.
Developers should engage with the user to learn about their experience, whether good or bad. If things are peachy, then asking them to leave a review seems reasonable. If not, find out why so that you can make things better for them.
People who land on your website are looking for its content, usually via a link. They would have clicked that link expecting one thing, so why show them a hand-drawn panda? Instead, your 404 page should get them to where they need to be.
One of the reasons for AngularJS’ success is its outstanding ability to be tested.
When you learn something, write about it, and don’t do it just to make money off it.
Although the syntax might be initially confounding, flexbox lives up to its name. It creates intelligent boxes that are stretchable, squeezable and capable of changing visual order.
What if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests?
It’s not enough to look for blatant bugs. You have to be thorough: in execution, in accountability, and in direction.
Has web design lost its soul? And is responsive design to blame?
The web is slow, yet there are a few simple strategies to make websites faster. One of them is inlining critical CSS into the of your pages
There’s a huge need to bridge the gap between content editors and static website generation. Before that happens, static website generation will be reserved for a relatively small subset of today’s websites.
Whether you want your website to feel more like an app, to draw clearer lines between the content and user interface, or to use modern, beautiful fonts with zero latency, you might be interested in using system UI fonts on your website.
Let’s take a closer look at a few airline websites from around the world. Along the way, we’ll discover the critical steps of booking air travel and how they’re presented by different companies.
You can care about accessibility issues without being affected by a disability yourself. In many ways, making your apps and sites accessible benefits everyone.
A typical manufacturer still thinks that users stand in front of their microwave and ponder for a few minutes which precise setting to use and then press a bunch of buttons to execute their carefully crafted heating plan. In reality, one needs only two settings: power and time. Honestly, in a lot of cases people need just the time setting.
Fixing bugs in bad browsers makes your code more resilient in good browsers
My suggestion would be to prioritize a move to https first and then decide on your HTTP/2 strategy.
As I switched between my projects, I started to take note of the flaws that appeared to be wasting much of my time. By the end, I counted three main problems that affect the developer’s workflow
In short, in our usability testing, the "Load more" button solved the usability issues observed with pagination (whereby users explored less of a product list, and comparison of products across pages of results was difficult), and it solved the severe issues observed with infinite scrolling (whereby users superficially scanned products and were often unable to reach the footer).
Responsive web design is the way forward — but it’s often linked to performance issues. This is critical when 64% of smartphone users unforgivingly expect websites to load in under four seconds, yet average page weights continue to rise.
I have collected some of the best of infographic design to see what engaging and informative experiences can look like today
The "clown car" technique is the closest thing we’ve got to a holy grail: leveraging well-supported media queries, the SVG format and the element to serve responsive images with a single request.
Containerization will start a revolution in open source similar to what Git did, by making it much simpler to take any code and start compiling it right away.
The first-time user of Google Docs will spend 20 minutes or so creating content and then look for a "Save" button. Not seeing one, they experience a moment of fear for the safety of their work. Their expectation of how document-creation interfaces work most certainly is not met. But then they see "All changes saved" and discover that the onerous task of saving their work has been taken from them. This is better, a pleasant surprise indeed. They might even tell themselves the joke again a few times, adding to their file and watching the reassuring message validate their new perspective on the interface.
Here are the 10 dilemmas I’ve battled with and some tips on how to deal with them
A syntax that includes a new set of advanced responsive conditions, scoped styles and new selectors for targeting elements, as well as a pure JavaScript library named EQCSS.js
Between October 21st and 25th, Smashing Magazine became completely unavailable for a majority of visitors.
There was obviously a lot of confusion about how HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) worked
Front-end fatigue is very real. I’ve seen a number of posts on JavaScript fatigue but I think the problem extends further than that specific language.
Animation is no longer just for delight; it is one of the most important tools for successful interaction.
This is the story of how we managed to bring roughly 2000 pages and 40 authors onto a technology stack made for hackers.
It would be an oversight for an organization to treat social media as nothing more than an opportunity for customer service enquiries, help requests and brand advocacy
An overview of the issues you might need to consider to ensure that your response times are fast, user interaction is smooth and your sites don’t drain user’s bandwidth
If you don’t want your fixed headers or footers to bounce around on your web pages, you can now use the overscroll-behavior CSS property.
Creating a successful product is all about building trust. Luckily, there are so many ways to improve a product’s trustworthiness through UX.
Let’s look at how some clever design solutions tackle mobile navigation, confirmation dialogs, animations, and gamifying the waiting experience
If you’ve adopted the Jamstack architecture while building a large-scale static site, you might be stuck waiting hours for your site to build.
The holy grail of web font loading has been to make the fallback font closer to the actual web font to reduce the noticeable shift as much as possible, so that using swap is less impactful.
A look at the best ways to use colors in a design system, and what we can expect from our colors in the not-too-distant future.
Too often the way we design reviews and ratings UX confuses and frustrates users, rather than helps them. Let’s fix that.
The path to booking the right flight remains frustrating and confusing. Is there really only one solution? Explore the thought experiment which turned the seemingly untouchable pattern on its head and offered new food for thought.
Is there anything in the front-end world that’s evolving faster than CSS these days? After what seemed like a long lull following blockbusters Flexbox and Grid, watching CSS release new features over the past few years has been more like watching a wild game of rugby on the telly. The pace is exciting, if not overwhelming at the same time.