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24 Exceptional Women-Hosted Podcasts for Entrepreneurs in 2017 Many of the most informative podcasts for entrepreneurs have a female perspective.

24 Exceptional Women-Hosted Podcasts for Entrepreneurs in 2017 Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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7 key attributes of a quality UI

User interface design is a hot topic these days and for good reason. In a world where digital experiences are such a large part of our lives, the value of a quality user experience is higher than ever. Not only is it important now, but the quality of user interfaces is bound to be even more important in the future given the tremendous growth of mobile, digital, and the Internet of Things. From web sites, to displays in our cars, to thermostat controls in our homes, user interfaces of all types make up much of our daily experience. Taking into account that users are becoming more experienced with digital displays and are expecting better experiences than they were willing to put up with just a few short years ago, it is imperative that businesses carefully consider the quality of the experience they create for their customers. But what makes a quality user interface? 1) Simplicity Great user interfaces tend to be nearly invisible. They are not made up of gaudy adornments or unnecessary elements. A quality user interface is made up of necessary elements that are logical and concise. While you are working on the design of your interface, ask yourself “Does the user really need this to compete their task?” before adding features and content. Limit your interface to the items that are essential for the user. Don’t add items just to feed your ego, but rather, focus on the quality of the user experience. One company that does a great job with this concept is Maaemo. On this Norwegian restaurant’s website the very first thing you see is the option to book a table, other options are hidden behind a hamburger menu to avoid clutter. No time is wasted scanning through complicated navigation trying to figure out where to go to book a table.

2) Clarity Clarity is one of the most important attributes of any user interface. Keep in mind that your user interface exists for the sole purpose of facilitating users interacting with your system. To do this it must clearly communicate with users. If users can’t figure out how to use your interface easily they will become frustrated and abandon the experience. To help improve clarity, create clear and concise labels for buttons and actions. You want to keep your messaging simple to improve the experience as well. The easier your labels, navigation and content is to read, the easier it is for users to understand what to do. Remember though that the first attribute was simplicity; you want to keep that in mind with your labels, definitions and explanations. Avoid cluttering up your interface with lengthy explanations.  Your users will not read or appreciate them and they will only get in the way of the user experience. It is better if you can explain a feature in one word instead of two. Save your users the reading time and cognitive strain by keeping your labels and messages concise. While keeping text both clear and concise may require some effort, it is well worth it to improve the user experience of your user interface. 3) Consistency With your user interface, you will want to maintain consistency throughout the entire experience. Consistent interfaces will allow your users to rely on and develop usage patterns that will improve the experience. People crave consistency and you should give your users the opportunity to be proven correct when they rely on it.    They want an experience where if they learn to do something, they will be able to rely on it working the same way on other screens. Maintain language, layout and design throughout your interface. By doing so you make it easier on your users to understand how things will work, increase their efficiency and improve the user experience. 4) Familiarity One of the goals of UX design is to make an interface intuitive for users. Let’s consider what intuitive means when it comes to user interfaces, if your interface is intuitive, it can be naturally understood by users. To do this, it is important that you leverage familiarity in your design. Your interface will feel familiar if users don’t have to think how to use it because they already understand it. When users are familiar with something, they know what to expect and don’t have to think about what to do. Because of this, work to identify areas of your design where you can leverage familiarity to make interacting with your system easier for your users.  A current example of this would be the hamburger icon seen on so many apps these days. Any time you see this icon you instantly know where the menu is and you don’t have to stop and look for the menu and think about what you are supposed to do. It comes naturally because you are familiar with this icon. The Born Shoes web site helps illustrate this concept. Familiar icons are placed in a familiar position making it easy for visitors to know what to do.

5) Visual Hierarchy One attribute that is often overlooked but is important to a quality UI is designing your interface so that it allows users to focus on what is important. If you try to make everything look important you just create information overload and reduce the quality of the user experience. The contrast between the different sizes, colors and placements of elements should work together to give a clear understanding of your interface and what a user should do. A well designed visual hierarchy reduces the appearance of complexity and helps users accomplish their tasks. The Budnitz Bicycles website shows how the use of color can help create a visual hierarchy that draws users to a particular section of their web site. Here their shop button stands out and guides visitors.

6) Efficiency Your user interface is how a user will get to where they want to go and do what they want to do. A quality user interface allows users to perform tasks with speed and ease, in other words, it operates with efficiency.  One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of your interface is through task analysis. To perform a task analysis, consider the activities and tasks users are most likely to perform and then streamline the process to make each as quick and easy as possible for users. Consider carefully what functions it needs and what goals users are trying to achieve. Rather than just creating a list of where users can navigate, consider what your users are going to want to do and help facilitate those activities through your design. Mulberry provides an excellent example of this with their website over the holidays. Anticipating visitors looking for holiday gifts they allow users to shop for gifts without having to work to do so.

7) Responsiveness When it comes to the responsiveness of an interface, you should consider a couple different forms of responsiveness. To begin with, a responsive interface is fast. You want your interface, and the system behind it, to work fast. Users easily become frustrated having to wait for a web site to load for instance. In fact, these days if your web site hasn’t loaded in three seconds you will start losing visitors quickly as they just start hitting the back arrow on their browser. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load and as more time passes even more users will hit the back arrow. Mobile apps and web sites that load and operate quickly improve the user experience. Additionally, when you think about responsiveness you should also think about your interface responding to users. Your user interface should provide feedback to the users. Let your users know what is happening and that their effort to engage with the interface has been understood. For instance, create a response to let them know they have pushed a button successfully or create a progress bar to let users know the next screen is loading so they don’t assume it is stuck. These types of feedback improve the user experience and reduce errors. 

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7 key attributes of a quality UI Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 02

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Evil Icons – Simple and clean SVG icon pack http://evil-icons.io/ Evil Icons – Simple and clean SVG icon pack Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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Comics of the week #371

Comics of the week #371

Comics of the week #371 Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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Will Mobile Apps Change How We Interact With Ecommerce Websites? With online shopping reshaping people’s buying habits, here is how to integrate mobile apps.

Will Mobile Apps Change How We Interact With Ecommerce Websites? Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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Popular design news of the week: December 19, 2016 – December 25, 2016 Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news. The Current State of Adaptive Design

  Material Components by Google

  Taking IKEA Out of its Box and Redesigning it for 1.6B Users

  “Great” Mac Desktops are on the Way

  One Sure-Fire Way to Improve your Coding

  Dogs Explain the Mysteries of HTTP Status Codes

  30 Best WordPress Themes of 2016

  Blox: A Beautifully Minimal 3D Game

  Best and Worst Identities of 2016

  What We Learned About Web Developers at Adobe — just By asking

  Front-end Tools: My Favorite Finds of 2016

  Web Fundamentals

  The Anatomy of a Web Request

  Email Design Trends 2017

  10 Great Ways to Use White Space in Web Design

  CSS Vertical Centering – Everything You Need to Know

  Web Design Trends We Can Expect to See in 2017

  5 Reasons Why UX Design is not Cheap

  Typography in Shared Spaces: A Trend You Need to Know

  Luminar: World’s First Photo Editor that Adapts to the User’s Skills

  The 42 Best Photoshop Plugins

  15 Best New Pieces of Tech for Designers in 2016

  Shift: Switch Between Gmail Accounts like a Boss

  Preparing to Be Badass Next Year

  Voice is the Next Big Platform

  Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Popular design news of the week: December 19, 2016 – December 25, 2016 Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 02

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Santa Tracker: ready for take-off http://ift.tt/2i3qob5 Santa Tracker: ready for take-off Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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The Biochemical Reason Helping Others Is Good for You In this powerful video, learn the physical and mental benefits of giving.

The Biochemical Reason Helping Others Is Good for You Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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Comics of the week #371 Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons. Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own… Designer decorated

Photoshop makeover

  Subtle hint

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

Watercolor Christmas Bundle of 350+ Design Elements – only $17!

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Comics of the week #371 Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 02

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CSS viewer for designers https://csspeeper.com CSS viewer for designers Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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Presentation Attributes vs Inline Styles

Presentation Attributes vs Inline Styles

Presentation Attributes vs Inline Styles Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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3 Ways to Guide Your Employees Toward Empowered Decisions Traditional top-down management can create a single point of failure within each department: a middle manager held accountable for his team’s projects and products.

3 Ways to Guide Your Employees Toward Empowered Decisions Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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6 Calculators That Can Help You Determine Your Salary It may seem like a small detail, but negotiating on the front end can have an exponential effect on your earnings over time.

6 Calculators That Can Help You Determine Your Salary Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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Don’t design this at home…3 UI disasters to avoid I coined a term today: Loathsome Design. It means something along the lines of “design decisions that make me want to die.” In other words, it’s the opposite of the recently popular “designing for delight” concept. Loathsome design captures the essence of frustration. Often, this comes about as a result of neglect—in an attempt to achieve one thing, something else must be left by the wayside. Why should you care about loathsome design practices? Because they are the type of decisions that can drive users from your sphere of influence, and into that of your competitors. 1) Hidden Settings I opened my Spotify app today with the intent of showing an undecided co worker its “extreme quality” streaming options, so that he could make an informed decision on which music platform would serve him best—Google Play Music, Spotify, or Tidal. Before Spotify redesigned their Android app to mimic the design language of their iOS app (and in effect, iOS itself), the settings icon was located in the hamburger menu. It was straightforward, and intuitive. Now that the hamburger menu is toast, the four menu options have been moved to a permanent spot at the bottom of the screen.

So where’s the settings button? That’s the question I found myself asking. Turns out, Spotify’s designers have tucked the settings away in the top right corner of the “Your Library” tab; an extremely unintuitive placement, if you ask me. And did you notice where the “My Profile” button went? Yeah, me neither. That little icon in the top left corner of the “Your Library” tab (the one that barely passes for a stick figure) is what you’re looking for. The new design may become upsetting to users, because it forces them to fiddle with the menu in order to find the settings, or their profile. For some, this may be a prime example of the drawbacks of the Apple-style bottom menu; for others, this is just a case of loathsome design. 2) Disruptive Launch One particularly loathsome design choice, is the disruptive launch. Uber and Wikipedia are both extremely guilty of this, except Wikipedia only does this during their fundraising season, while Uber does this year round. A disruptive launch is one where the user is required to complete a task prior to using the app. In most cases, this is a one-time thing required of users on first launch—aka, the user must sign up before they can use the service. It makes sense, and it’s not that much of a hassle. Uber takes this one step further by forcing users to rate their previous driver before they can order a ride. Regardless of whether you’re in a hurry, or if you don’t want to rate a driver, you cannot order a ride without rating the previous one. This is not only an inconvenience, but it actively changes the way that users interact with the app. By mercilessly prompting users to rate a driver at every launch, they are essentially conditioning users to mindlessly click a rating as quickly as they can (see: classical conditioning). What probably looked like a good idea on the Uber design team’s whiteboard is actually a horrible tactic that has made me, and likely other users, apathetic toward the rating system.

Users are effectively encouraged not to think before rating, because doing so will delay their gratification. Every driver gets a five star rating (or wherever a user’s thumb comfortably falls on the rating scale), regardless of the experience. Wikipedia is guilty of this as well, if to a lesser extent. During fundraiser season, visitors to Wikipedia are prompted to donate to the online encyclopedia—something I am not innately opposed to. It’s the way that the site prompts users to donate that makes it loathsome. The donation prompt takes over the full height of the screen, and gives no indication the user need only scroll down to view their intended page. Over time, of course, most users will learn that if they do not wish to donate, they need only scroll down, but for first-time users it is likely to be a catastrophic annoyance. 3) Cumbersome Interactions Occasionally, all it takes for a design choice to become loathsome is for it to require cumbersome interactions. A prime example of this is the way in which Apple and some third party versions of Android have designed their alarm clock apps. It’s not the apps as a whole that are causing me to feel encumbered, but rather the way in which the designers require users to input the time at which an alarm will sound. This is the face of pure evil. Who decided that scrolling to a specific time, in increments of one, was a good idea? Not only does it take longer to scroll than it would to input a time in one of a handful of other common ways, but it also cannot be done in one movement. On ZTE’s Android skin, in order to get from “01” minutes to “59” minutes, users have to swipe several times. On iOS, one swipe will send the numbers spinning with momentum. Of course it’s cool and realistic, but it is hardly more efficient or usable. This seems to be a current trend with Apple.

A dramatically more efficient and usable method for inputting alarm values is presented in stock Android.

Google’s designers have figured out a layout that allows users to input alarm values in just two taps. This means that when sleepy users are trying to set an alarm, they won’t be forced to pay extra attention to the input method, and can instead focus on getting to sleep. Don’t Make Your Users Loathe Your Design There aren’t that many things that will make users loathe your app. Typically, the number one offense is simply inconveniencing users. Hiding critical functions, disrupting the launch of an app, and designing overly complex interactions will inconvenience your users, and depending on how much it bothers them, they may come to loathe your app. Avoiding the pitfalls of loathsome design isn’t hard. You just have to start (and finish) every feature with one simple question: am I making this as convenient and intuitive as it could be? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then there is still work to be done.  

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Don’t design this at home…3 UI disasters to avoid Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 02

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Exporting Images in Multiple Resolutions Simultaneously http://ift.tt/2hXroxq Exporting Images in Multiple Resolutions Simultaneously Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01

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8 Steps to Get Your Product Successfully Reviewed by an Influencer From finding the right person to giving appropriate guidelines, here are the steps needed to create a successful campaign.

8 Steps to Get Your Product Successfully Reviewed by an Influencer Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 03

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National Geographic?s Classic Infographics, Now in One Stunning Book

National Geographic’s Classic Infographics, Now in One Stunning Book

National Geographic?s Classic Infographics, Now in One Stunning Book Phoenix Web Design Info From: Design News 01