Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.
These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.
Be still my childhood heart.
18F user experience (UX) designers join cross-functional teams to improve interactions between government agencies and the people they serve. The 18F UX Guide helps us get this job done. It’s a starting point for UX design at 18F: doing it, discussing it, and ensuring it’s done to a consistent level of quality.
Another useful open source guide from the incredible team at 18F.
Maintained by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Usability.gov contains a wealth of knowledge on topics such as user experience design, content strategy, project management, and visual design.
An open source checklist of resources designed to improve your online privacy and security. Check things off to keep track as you go.
This is a great resource, but it highlights the delicate balance of security and user experience that often tips too far toward security at the expense of usability. For those of us in the software design world, it’s more important now than ever to make these technologies more easily accessible to the masses.
There’s quite a bit that an engineer can learn by participating in design-related activities.
Google’s Paul Lewis answers the same questions that Matt Gaunt received (and that I previously linked to). Paul’s focus on the user and their experience of our work resonates strongly with me and is something I harp on quite frequently.
I think performance, accessibility, and security share some traits: they can’t be retro-fitted to a project, they’re often thankless tasks, and they’re only notable by their absence. They’re all, however, the bedrock of a good user experience, onto which you can layer high quality designs and interactions.
Paul also cites one of my favorite documents, the W3C’s HTML Design Principles:
In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.
Truth.
It may not be in your title, but it’s definitely part of your job.
The interactive sketching notation is an emerging visual language which affords the representation of interface states and event-based user actions. Through a few simple and standardized rules, what the user sees (drawn in greys and blacks) and does (drawn in red) are unified into a coherent sketching system. This unification of both interface and use, intends to enable designers to tell more powerful stories of interaction.
As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want.
In this article we’re going to break down the page fold myth and give some tips to ensure content below the fold gets seen.
Recently, in a set of interviews we conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked “What are the things you like best about the site?” Lots, apparently.
How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million.