Group items tagged

Cards live at the halfway point between minimalism and skeuomorphism

Flat design has spread its levelling influence all over the tech industry and its interfaces in recent years

77% of mobile searches take place in the home or at work where a PC is readily available. Whether you call it lazy or convenient, the simple fact is smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the go-to computing devices for consumers.

In the post-PC era, customers expect companies to provide experiences aligned with their needs and abilities, in the right context, and at their moment of need.

Today, content is the interface and navigation is performed directly through gestures and voice commands. As a result, interactions are becoming multi-modal, engaging users through multiple senses.

content-out design4 — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down.

if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you can’t just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.

Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.

Addictive technology creates “internal triggers” which cue users without the need for marketing, messaging or any other external stimuli.  It becomes a user’s own intrinsic desire. Creating internal triggers comes from mastering the “desire engine” and its four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and commitment.

A company that forms strong user habits enjoys several benefits to its bottom line. For one, this type of company creates “internal triggers” in users. That is to say, users come to the site without any external prompting. Instead of relying on expensive marketing or worrying about differentiation, habit-forming companies get users to “self trigger” by attaching their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions. A cemented habit is when users subconsciously think, “I’m bored,” and instantly Facebook comes to mind. They think, “I wonder what’s going on in the world?” and before rationale thought occurs, Twitter is the answer. The first-to-mind solution wins.

A multi-screen world, with ad-wary consumers and a lack of ROI metrics, has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands. Instead, startups manufacture desire by guiding users through a series of experiences designed to create habits

Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.

“There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”

I contend Pinterest as a service is best conceived of as a mood board for the company image. It isn’t a place to broadcast specifics or a way to run contests. It’s not that these are impossible, but Twitter and Facebook are better suited. Pinterest is a forum to communicate a brand’s identity, values, and personality. A place to build trust and affinity with consumers. Surprisingly, it might be the best single channel for communicating brand essence that exists today.

Opt for fewer, broadly categorized boards rather than many narrow ones. I have 5 boards total, and just one called "designed," instead of art, product design, graphic design, typography, advertising, and logos. Broad categories give your boards greater variety, and variety equals engagement.

In my experience, following people doesn't really get you followers on Pinterest. This is anecdotal, but I don't think many users do the auto-follow-back thing - that’s more of a Twitter phenomenon.

Right now, we're at a turning point. Whatever we do it’ll be wrong, either in the short term or the long term. Looking to the future and not using hover will cause pain to the majority of users today or cause pain to the increasing touchscreen user base. Offering hover interactions to only those using desktop/laptops we could consider to be a progressive enhancement. But what about hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface that offer both touch and mouse/keyboard? Can we accurately know what input method is being used? Simple media queries are not enough to know what interaction is possible.

We want our designs to be device agnostic. If we build a website we want to do the minimum to make sure it works across device. We can tweak designs at different sizes to meet needs but changing an interaction style by device seems like old-fashioned thinking.

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.

some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

It's not all about being different; it's about being better.

The new laptop, which Apple unveiled last week, already has Web designers and developers trying to figure out how they're going to create sites and Web apps that look good on the new machine without leaving the rest of the Web's population behind.

One of the key advantages of these high-resolution displays is their crisp, highly readable rendering of text. That particular buck stops with the Web browsers, which are much more varied on the desktop than on mobile devices. Naturally, Safari supports retina-friendly text, but Chrome is still working on it, and other browsers will presumably follow.

For image-heavy sites, swapping out higher-resolution images can have a substantial impact on page load, which in turn affects user experience and even search engine rankings. 

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels