Author Nick Babich

May 17, 2022 — Web design should be fun and accessible for anyone. After all, when we build a new website, our primary goal is to share our idea, product, or service with the world, not to dive into solving technical problems. Let’s take a closer look at how you can create your very own WordPress site up and running created and hosted with the Elementor Cloud Website. Read more…

October 1, 2019 — Design is increasingly becoming more complex. Design processes require having a tight cross-functional collaboration between all teams involved in the creation of the product. Having a shared design language empowers teams to collaborate more effectively. That’s why many companies invest in design systems. But how can we ensure that a design system actually works for a product you’re working on and improves your team’s productivity? In this article, Nick Babich will try to find the qualities that make a design system good for your product development. Read more…

September 10, 2019 — The market is filled with site builders that promise to be universal solutions for any design challenge, but when it comes to practice, they fall short on both the design and development side. Only a few tools actually keep their promises. In this article, Nick Babich reviews Webflow — the next-generation tool for building a sophisticated web experience that allows users to design, build, and launch websites visually. Read more…

May 28, 2019 — A successful design system needs to become part of an organization’s DNA that help your team produce more consistent user experiences, and it also builds bridges between design and development, and help you improve your design process without exposing your orgchart. In this article, Nick Babich will talk about things you can do to set up your organization for long-term success with your design system. Read more…

May 2, 2019 — It’s essential to be ready to design for both visual and voice. Since prototyping for voice is new for many designers, it may be unclear as to where to start and what process to follow. Read more…

April 2, 2019 — Design systems have changed the way we design and build applications. They are quickly becoming a cornerstone of an organization’s digital product strategy. In this article, Nick Babich presents a tool that offers a ready-to-use design system that can be adapted to your individual needs: meet Indigo.Design. This tool attempts to solve this problem by introducing a unified platform for visual design, UX prototyping, code generation and app development. Using this platform increases the chances that you will create a design system that takes root and becomes an essential part of the organization. Read more…

March 12, 2019 — What are some of the most effective ways to grab a user’s attention? What engages them most? People are visual creatures, and visual design has a significant impact on the way we understand products. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the most crucial web design trends and illustrate each trend using Be Theme, a responsive multipurpose WordPress theme. Trends come and go, but it’s still important to know which trend best fits your project. Let’s get started! Read more…

December 18, 2018 — We’re at the dawn of a UI revolution. Not only will multimodal interfaces give users more power, but they will also change the way users interact with systems. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how to build your own multimodal UI using Adobe XD. You will explore the concept of a voice-enabled interface and review different types of voice-enabled interfaces; find out why voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience; see how you can build a multimodal UI using Adobe XD. Read more…

December 11, 2018 — Whenever project managers try to manage their team using spreadsheets alone, they usually face some problems. Reporting and documenting with spreadsheets can become quite a time-consuming task. Today, Nick Babich will like to introduce Float, an app that makes it so much easier for product managers to keep a good overview on the tasks of the entire team and everyone involved. Float makes it easy to see everything you need to know about your team’s projects in a single place, giving project managers the information and functionality they need to handle the fast-paced world of digital design and development. Let’s get started! Read more…

November 12, 2018 — WordPress has a few significant limitations — it requires time and coding skills to create a website. Building a website used to be a complex exercise only professionals could do, but the situation changed. Today, Nick Babich will review a tool that will allow us to work smarter. Imagine WordPress without design and technical limits. In this article, Nick reviews the Visual Composer Website Builder tool that helps simplify the process of page building in WordPress. Read more…

October 9, 2018 — Good functional animation makes a landing page not just more appealing, but also more usable. When done correctly, animation can turn a landing page from a sequence of sections into a carefully choreographed, memorable experience. Today, Nick Babich brings you Slides, a framework that will help you use animation to communicate clearly. In this article, Nick will provide the best examples of animation created using the Slides framework. Read more…

September 25, 2018 — Whatever website you want to create, whether it be a landing page, an online store or a personal blog, your goal is to make the content and design work together harmoniously and play off each other. With Tilda, it’s become much easier to achieve that harmonious balance. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how Tilda differs from other website builders and how it helps you focus on what you know and love, without having to think about technical stuff — because you often don’t have time to learn technical things. Read more…

August 28, 2018 — Users can be hesitant to fill out forms. That is why it is our goal as designers to make the process of filling out a form as easy as possible. The primary goal with every form is completion. Two factors have a major impact on completion rate: Perception of complexity and Interaction cost. In this article, Nick shares some techniques that can help you design effective forms. He will help you cover many aspects related to structure, input fields, labels, action buttons and validation. Read more…

August 23, 2018 — Looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team? It’s not as difficult as you may think. If you’re a team manager who is looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team, then this article for you. Here Nick Babich brings you seven of the most common challenges distributed product teams should overcome and how a team-management tool called “monday” can help. Read more…

June 12, 2018 — Thousands of companies worldwide are struggling each day to gain more market share and to win over new consumers. To succeed in the modern market, companies need to do more than produce an excellent product or provide reliable service: They need to turn their faithful users into advocates. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how, by discussing who are product advocates, actionable ways to turn your customers into brand advocates, and what to consider when creating a strategy for advocacy. Read more…

May 29, 2018 — Let’s say you want to reach out to a business. What would be the first thing you would do? Probably you would look up their website to search for answers to your questions or simply any contact details you can find. With no doubt, the first impression of any website is now more important than ever. There are more than 1.8 billion websites on the Internet right now, and the number is growing. What makes your website stand out? In order to make sure your website is a success, it’s important to keep the big picture in mind. Read more…

May 22, 2018 — Design is a constantly evolving discipline. A lot of things might change during each iteration. Designers will introduce changes, and developers will dive into the code to adjust the design. While jumping into code to solve an exciting problem might be fun, doing it to resolve a minor issue is the exact opposite. The process of content management should be as easy as possible for everyone involved. In this article, Nick Babich Introduces Elementor, a tool that offers flexibility to visually design an entire website. Read more…

February 12, 2018 — The difference between a good app and a bad app is usually the quality of its user experience (UX). The average US user spends 5 hours per day on mobile. The vast majority of that time is spent in apps and on websites. So, there are many things to consider when designing for mobile. Today, Nick Babich brings you a detailed guide will help you get rid of that headache when building apps. Read more…

January 31, 2018 — The most important thing to remember when designing products is that design is for people. To design great products, you must deliver the right features, with the right user experience for the right people. Thus, define your target audience, then research their problems, and, finally, focus on building a product that solves those problems! In this article, Nick Babich takes a closer look at how to define an optimal product vision, strategy, and design process. Read more…

December 20, 2017 — A grid is like invisible glue that holds a design together. Even when elements are physically separated from each other, something invisible connects them together. Grids help designers to build better products by tying different design elements together to achieve effective hierarchy, alignment and consistency, with little effort. If executed properly, your designs will appear thoughtful and organized. In this article Nick Babich aims to give you a good understanding of grid systems, what they are, and how they can be applied to your design process. Understanding how to use grids will come from practical experience. Read more…

December 13, 2017 — Links make the Internet what it is. A robust visual design is essential to making the user journey joyful. While underlining has its downsides, it remains one of the most explicit ways to indicate the presence of a link. Underlining text makes links both easy to find and easy to understand for visitors. In this article, Nick Babich will explain the concept of underlining and provide a few tips on how to use it to improve the web experience, and help you find out when and why underlines should be used in our digital products. Read more…

December 4, 2017 — Building a mobile app usually costs a lot of money and takes months to launch. Well, there’s a fast and more simple way to create your own native app. In this article, Nick Babich explains how you can use Dropsource (a free visual platform for building mobile apps) by creating an Android app for a chain of restaurants. Read more…

November 21, 2017 — Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users. Read more…

November 9, 2017 — You can’t afford to skip testing, because even a simple round of testing could make or break your product. Investment in user testing is just about the only way to consistently generate a rich stream of data on user behavior. Testing provides the inspiration, guidance and validation that product teams need in order to design great products. That’s why the most effective teams make testing a habit. In this article, Nick Babich will show you some tips that can be applied to different types of testing. Read more…

October 25, 2017 — UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom the products are being designed for. In order to create better products, designers must understand what’s going on in the user’s world. And that’s where storyboards come in. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on storyboards as a means to explore solutions to UX issues, as well as to communicate these issues and solutions to others. Read more…

October 4, 2017 — Designers need to create the most usable and attractive websites possible, and well applied minimalist principles can help designers make attractive and effective websites with fewer elements. Minimalist websites simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements and paring down content that does not support user tasks. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some examples of minimalism in web design, things to consider when designing minimalist interfaces, and explain why sometimes “less is more”. Read more…

September 27, 2017 — UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables for that purpose. Don’t be surprised by the number of deliverables Nick Babich mentions in this article. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective for all projects. Each deliverable becomes an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience. Read more…

September 20, 2017 — Few design elements are more fun to play with than color. Color effects can be dramatic, impressive and even serene. It can draw attention, set a mood, and influence the user’s emotion, perception and actions. When it comes to the web and mobile app design, this is definitely a time of vibrant colors. You the designer really get to experiment when using color effects. Whether you are a fan of bright, bold hues or prefer a more minimalist black and white, the one thing to remember is that there are no wrong colors. What matters most is how you use them. In this article, Nick Babich will summarize a few popular techniques of using vibrant colors in web and mobile design. Read more…

June 8, 2017 — Vision is perhaps the strongest human sense, a hero image is one of the fastest ways to grab the user’s attention. As long as it is high quality, interesting to look at and works well with the content, a hero image is a great option and a powerful communication tool. Design with sufficient contrast and a clear call to action to make the most of this technique. In this article, give you a few tips on using hero images. Also, if you’d like to get started and take a go at prototyping and wireframing your own designs a bit more differently, you can download and test Adobe XD for free. Read more…

June 1, 2017 — Users can be reluctant to fill out forms, so make the process as easy as possible. Minor changes   can significantly increase usability. Forms remain one of the most important types of interactions for users on the web and in apps. In this article, Nick Babich will show you practical techniques that have been gleaned from usability testing, field testing, eye-tracking studies and actual complaints from disgruntled users. These techniques enable designers to produce faster, easier and more productive form experiences. All you need to do is to download Adobe XD and get started right away. At the end of the article, you’ll also find new ways to design forms. Read more…

May 25, 2017 — Scrolling opens a lot of new doors to designers. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page. Long scrolling has benefits such as translating well to mobile devices, or having more potential to engage users. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some of the benefits, things to consider and quick tips for long scrolling. Read more…

May 18, 2017 — if an app is not useful, it will have no practical value for the user. Even if the app is useful but requires a lot of effort, people won’t bother learning how to use it. Good design has a clear focus on key user goals, and it removes all obstacles from the user’s way by bringing clarity to the interface. In this article, Nick Babich brings you closer to seven UX design tips that are key for creating really great mobile user experiences. Read more…

May 10, 2017 — Establishing good navigation is a challenge on mobile due to the limitations of the small screen and the need to prioritize content over chrome. Every navigation patterns suffer from a variety of usability problems. In this article, Nick Babich will examine five basic navigation patterns for mobile apps and describe the strengths and weaknesses of each of them. If you’d like to add some patterns and spice up your designs, you can download and test Adobe XD for free and get started right away. Read more…

February 22, 2017 — While functional aspect of a design is key to product success, aesthetics and visual details are equally important — particularly how they can improve those functional elements. Shadows and blur effects provide visual cues that allow users to better and more easily understand what is occurring. When carefully applied, such elements can (and should) improve a functional aspect of design. In today’s article, Nick Babich will explain how visual elements, such as shadows and blur effects, can improve the functional elements of a design. Read more…

February 8, 2017 — To make sure your users don’t delete your app after the first use, you need to successfully onboard and engage your users during those first interactions. Don’t let the user face a blank screen the first time they open an app. Invest in empty states because they aren’t a temporary or minor part of the user experience. The onboarding process is a critical step in setting up your users for success with your product. In this article, Nick Babich will provide some tips on how to approach onboarding using a simple pattern called “empty states.” Read more…

January 25, 2017 — The human to computer interaction is heavily based on interacting with graphical UI elements, and color plays a critical role in this interaction. When designing a new app, it’s often difficult to decide on a color scheme that works well, as there are an infinite number of possible color combinations out there. In this article, Nick Babich will go over the most important points related to color in apps. He’ll cover traditional color scheme patterns, custom color combinations that aren’t based strictly on any one pattern, and he’ll also learn how to choose colors and contrasts for your app that support usability. If you’d like to hone your own color usage skills, you can download and test Adobe XD for free, and get started right away. Read more…

January 18, 2017 — Thinking about images in terms of their usability is important. All visual communication in your design leaves a cumulative impression on the user. Compelling images have a unique ability to inspire and engage your audience to provide useful information. Take the time to make every image in your app or site reinforce user experience. Human beings are highly visual creatures who are able to process visual information almost instantly; 90 percent of all information that we perceive and that gets transmitted to our brains is visual. In this article, Nick Babich will cover a good number of useful principles and best practices that will help you successfully integrate imagery into your designs. Read more…

January 11, 2017 — In this article, Nick Babich will talk about the role of functional animation in UX design and see when to incorporate motion into a design. If you’d like to follow along and spice up your designs with animations, Adobe introduced Adobe XD which you can download and test for free, and get started right away. Identifying the places where animation has utility is only half the story. If you’re going to use animations in your designs, they should be built well, and that is only possible when an animation is a natural part of the design process. Read more…

December 7, 2016 — While an instant response from an app is the best, there are times when your app won’t be able to comply with the guidelines for speed. A slow response could be caused by a bad internet connection, or an operation itself can take a long time. For such cases, in order to minimize user tension, you must reassure users that the app is working on their request and that actual progress is being made. A wait-animation progress indicator is the most common form of providing a system status for users when something is happening or loading. It’s important to provide feedback to the user about what is happening with the app within a reasonable amount of time. Read more…

November 9, 2016 — Buttons are a vital element in creating a smooth user experience, so it’s worth paying attention to the best essential practices for them. In this article, Nick Babich will show you the essential items you need to know in order to create effective controls that improve user experience, such as making buttons look like buttons, making the most important button clearly identifiable, or labeling buttons with what they do for users. Read more…

November 2, 2016 — Navigation is generally the vehicle that takes users where they want to go. When you examine the most successful interaction navigation designs of recent years, the clear winners are those who execute fundamentals flawlessly. While thinking outside the box is usually a good idea, there are some rules that you just can’t break. In this post, Nick Babich will help you better understand the principles of good navigation for mobile apps, then show you how it’s done using two popular patterns. The easier your product is for them to use, the more likely they are to use it. Read more…

October 20, 2016 — Iconography lies at the heart of UI design. It can make or break the usability of an interface. Every icon should serve a purpose. When done correctly, they communicate the core idea and intent of a product or action, and they bring a lot of nice benefits to user interfaces, such as saving screen real estate and enhancing aesthetic appeal. In this article Nick Babich will show you how to make that possible. If you want to take a go at creating your own icons, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away! Read more…

October 11, 2016 — Today, people seek out information quickly, and cards serve it up well, regardless of device. Most of you probably have a better understanding why card-style design is so popular and will continue to increase in popularity. This trend won’t end anytime soon. Cards are here to stay and continue to be an essential part of app design. In this article, Nick Babich will explain what cards mean to UI designers, and he’ll review three popular card-based services. Read more…

October 6, 2016 — Are gestures a powerful mode of interaction? The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices has dramatically changed the way we think about interaction. Gestures are more than merely entertaining, they are very useful and feel familiar. Today, the success of a mobile app significantly depends on how well gestures are implemented into the user experience. There’s no way to design a mobile app without thinking about gestures. They should serve as facilitators and time savers. In order to design a meaningful gesture you should tie it to an action and allow the gesture to stand with the action. Read more…

September 21, 2016 — The best error message is the one that never shows up. It is always better to prevent errors from happening in the first place by guiding users in the right direction ahead of time. But, when errors do arise, well-designed error handling helps teach users how to use the app as you intended. In this article, Nick Babich will examine how the design of apps can be optimized to prevent user errors and how to create effective error messages in cases when errors occur independently of user input. Read more…

August 30, 2016 — A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from clients, project managers and developers. A style guide ensures that your project doesn’t encounter serious problems when you implement the initial design. In this article, Nick Babich will review the process of creating a style guide, the process of handing off a design, and collaboration across the whole team. He’ll also walk through an example workflow, demonstrating how developers and designers can improve cross-team communication and drastically reduce iteration time. Read more…

August 10, 2016 — Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. As Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Every element of the design matters. Details make your app stand out from the competition because they can be either practical and forgettable or impressive, useful and unforgettable. Read more…