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 not only helps teach users how to use the app as you intended, but also prevents users from feeling ignorant.
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CodePen has become the playground for developers. The sandbox where you can build whatever your imagination fancies. Practical things, experimental concepts — it’s a treasure chest, bound to fuel your ideas.
For this Quick Tip, we have done some digging around and found some interesting UI demos and concepts for you to indulge in and build upon: dialog and modal windows, signup and login screens, navigation and menus, sliders and toggles. Small bits of delight that make the user’s interaction with a website or app more pleasant. Enjoy!
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Our objects are becoming increasingly connected. My watch is connected to my phone, which is connected to the speaker in my living room, which I can also connect (or not) to the speaker in my bedroom. When I go out to dinner with friends, we have to make a concerted effort to keep our handheld and wearable devices silenced or otherwise placed “in the background” of our social experience, so that we can focus on each other.
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Digital products may get too feature-driven and too complex, creating a bad user experience. Designers should be focusing on processes, not screens, to get more results with less interactions.
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As digital calculators become popular, pressing buttons is’t our only way to interact with numbers anymore. We use gestures, so what would be the most ergonomic arrangement for human fingertips?
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There’s more to designing mobile apps than meets the eye. The task requires a deep knowledge of devices, and it often means changing the way we think — even if that means leaving behind much of what we’ve learned from designing for the web.
I started my career like many designers: working on print design projects. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the world of websites, which fascinated me and became the focus of my work for some time. Along the way I learned concepts related to interaction design and user experience, which I hardly knew existed until then.
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Responding to user input is arguably the core of what we do as interface developers. In order to build responsive web products, understanding how touch, mouse, pointer and keyboard actions and the browser work together is key. You have likely experienced the 300-millisecond delay in mobile browsers or wrestled with touchmove versus scrolling.
In this article we will introduce the event cascade and use this knowledge to implement a demo of a tap event that supports the many input methods while not breaking in proxy browsers such as Opera Mini.
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This article will be an introdrction to the human-centered design process. I’ll tell a personal story in which I built a challenged family member a device to help them communicate more efficient and effortlessly and I’ll share lessons I learned from the failures and successes along the way.
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In a previous article, I discussed using POP to create sketch-based clickthrough prototypes in participatory design exercises. These prototypes capture well the flow and overall layout of early design alternatives.
The same piece briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, I will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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If you have to design an interface it’s almost obvious to think to begin the process by drawing. But is this the best way? I once casually started by writing an imagined human-computer conversation, and only afterwards I continued by drawing. This changed my way of thinking and I never went back to drawing first. This article will explain the reasons behind my decision.
I have always been a huge admirer of the guys at Basecamp. Some time ago, I was reading a tweet by Jason Zimdars, one of its designers: “UI design starts with words.” He wasn’t joking. The comment got a lot of retweets, a lot of favorites. Everyone understood what he meant — except me.
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