UX Darkroom

A curation of the best links on UX design

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Stop Gratuitous UI Animation

This mini essay will explore the over use of animation in UI design, show comparisons with early visual design and offer…

Gratuitous animation can be seen everywhere and it’s not only limited to amateur designers. As a user it’s easy to spot this kind of animation. It’s the animation that gets in your way. The animation that makes you furrow your brow in frustration as it stands between you an your intended goal. As a designer you need to realize that your UI is not entertainment. Nobody is firing up your app (or website) to delight at all its awesome popup animation wonder!  ...

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UI Mechanics of a Date Picker — User Experience Design (UX)

A study and an experience redesign of selecting date from a calendar

Choosing dates using a date picker has been one of the most commonly followed design trends across a plethora of websites. In order to make this process a lot more intuitive and seamless I decided to work on a few different options for picking dates.

Before working on the sketches, it was imperative to pick the different ways dates could be represented and sorting the information that went along with the dates on the form to create an information hierarchy.

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By definition, Design is a method of problem solving.

Design is not about creating something for your viewing pleasure. It’s about the challenge of solving a problem, something that doesn’t quite work or just feels ‘wrong’.

It’s about loving that challenge. The bigger, the better. It’s a quite common perception that a designer’s work is all about how it looks, if the colour scheme matches your preferences or the typeface is your favourite.

But good design is selfless. It’s aimed for the good and needs of others. Keep reading >

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Designing Musical User Interfaces

Using harmonies and chords to go beyond visuals and enhance the user experience

We leverage the sounds of our morning alarm or the distinct beep of an unlocked car to communicate with our technology. Yet there’s an assumption that user interfaces communicate mostly through a screen, overlooking the power of sonic language.

I've been a designer for 16 years and I compose music as a hobby. These two skill sets have helped me reinforce the idea that user interfaces are meant to incorporate at least sound and vision. In my current job as a UX Designer at Udemy, my team has been working on a revamp of our learning experience.

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The 10 Commandments of Good Form Design

1. Thou shalt provide clear, always visible labels for each field.

There is a trend in web design to show form labels only when a field is focussed. This can be cool on a simple form like a username/password form, but for anything longer it is probably a bad idea. When you have the space to show labels, do so. Especially in a long form a user will review the input he or she entered; when you can’t read which field corresponds to which label there is no way to do a good review.

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Innovating on the Pull-To-Refresh Gesture

The pull-to-refresh interaction is useful. But it's a demanding gesture, so it needs to be more rewarding. With an augmentation to the design pattern, it can be more productive.

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Tips to make your users scroll better on your website

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9 Hidden User Experience & Interaction Gems on Airbnb

10512618 If you’ve ever used Airbnb to book a place, you’d know they’re a top-notch team when it comes to product design. The experience is seamless and they revolutionised an entire industry. That’s why I’m here nerding out on the topic. As a (product-growth-user-experience-interaction-interface-web-tacos) designer, I enjoy breaking down and finding hidden experience and interaction …

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Boarding Pass Redesign

Taking another look at one of the worst offenders of information design

Airports are not enjoyable places to be. Long distance travel is not a tonne of fun. Badly designed boarding passes are annoying. Seriously annoying. The boarding pass is essential for air travel but when badly designed, must be one of the most counter-productive items an airline could issue. I think they cause headaches for airline and airport staff and travellers alike. Travellers are often stressed, emotional, groggy, jet lagged or a toxic mix of all four. The thought of having to decode a rubix-cube-puzzle of crucial information in that state makes me want to just give up.

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Futures of text

When the weather is bad I take a bus to work. I’m forever grateful to the person at the bus stop who informed me that you can text New York’s MTA service to find out exactly where the bus is and when it’s going to arrive. Sure, an app that put the bus on a map would be more rich in information, but when I got to texting Bus Time I thought, “Thank god I don’t need to download another f------ app for this.”

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It is awesome to see more and more people playing with Material Design. The Google visual language is much more than visual design, it is comprehensive and it blurs really well the lines that separate visual, UX and motion. It also an incentive for new designers to sharpen their skills and focus more and more on becoming great product designers. On this post today I will share some great examples of Material Design from MaterialUp, a great site that aggregates explorations on Google's design language.

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The process of selling content strategy to management begins when the content strategist has a conversation with a key decision maker. This week, author Hilary Marsh shares with us a strategy for making that conversation simple and successful.

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A BBC iPlayer Accessibility Case Study

Not long after I started working at the BBC, I fielded a complaint from a screen reader user who was having trouble finding a favorite show via the BBC iPlayer’s home page. The website had recently undergone an independent accessibility audit which indicated that, other than the odd minor issue here and there, it was reasonably accessible.

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Advices to engage stakeholders in the process of UX