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Janko Jovanovic is user interface designer, software engineer, blogger, speaker and artist. In his free time, he writes about user interfaces on his blog JankoAtWarpSpeed and tweets regularly on Twitter.
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Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don't meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers.
This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects.
So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. While one could apply many approaches, techniques and principles to UI design in general, our focus here will be on business Web applications.
Read more...We're all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we're interested in. That's why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.
Jesse James Garett, founder of Adaptive Path and author of the book The Elements of User Experience, speaks on what UX and UX design is, what UX looked like before and what are some of the challenges people are encountering now. He cites engagement as the main goal of UX design and, through some fantastic examples, shows that engagement is an universal quality achieved through visuality, sound, touch, smell, taste, body and mind. One of the most impressive moments from the session is when Jesse compares Beethoven to an experience designer, accompanied by the Ninth Symphony.
Read more...Buttons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style buttons, including to make them more attractive and to enhance usability. One of the most important reasons, though, is that standard buttons can easily be missed by users because they often look similar to elements in their operating system. Here, we present you several techniques and tutorials to help you learn how to style buttons using CSS. We'll also address usability.
Before we explain how to style buttons, let's clear up a common misconception: buttons are not links. The main purpose of a link is to navigate between pages and views, whereas buttons allow you to perform an action (such as submit a form).
Read more...Ideally, users will fill the web form with necessary information and finish their job successfully. However, people often make mistakes. This is where web form validation comes into play. The goal of web form validation is to ensure that the user provided necessary and properly formatted information needed to successfully complete an operation. In this article we will go beyond the validation itself and explore different validation and error feedback techniques, methods and approaches.
User's input can be validated on the server and on the client (web browser). Thus we have server-side and client-side validation. We'll discuss pros and cons of each. In the server-side validation, information is being sent to the server and validated using one of server-side languages. If the validation fails, the response is then sent back to the client, page that contains the web form is refreshed and a feedback is shown.
Read more...Design patterns were first described in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, a civil engineer who noticed that many things in our lives happen according to patterns. He adapted his observations to his work and published many findings on the topic. Since then, design patterns have found their place in many areas of our lives, and can be found in the design and development of user interfaces as well.
In short, design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects. In fact, you may already be using them now without knowing it.
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