When we think about a slider, we usually imagine an image gallery slider, or the infamous carousel, or perhaps off-canvas navigation, with the overlay sliding in from the side. However, this article is not about those kinds of sliders. Instead, we’ll look into the fine details of designing better slider controls for selecting a value or a range of values. Think of price range sliders, 360-degree-view sliders, timeline sliders, health insurance quote calculators, or build-your-own-mobile-plan features.
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Once someone starts using your app, they need to know where to go and how to get there at any point. Good navigation is a vehicle that takes users where they want to go. But establishing good navigation is a challenge on mobile due to the limitations of the small screen and the need to prioritize content over chrome.
Different navigation patterns have been devised to solve this challenge in different ways, but they all suffer from a variety of usability problems. In this article, we’ll 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.
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To say that responsive web design has changed our industry would be an understatement at best. We used to ask our clients which resolutions and devices they wanted us to support, but we now know the answer is “as many as possible.” To answer a challenge like this and to handle our increasingly complex world, our industry has exploded with new thinking, patterns and approaches.
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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.
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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.
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Through this case study on redesigning the Building Social website, Marko Dugonijć will share some simple yet often overlooked front-end techniques that defer the use of JavaScript as much as possible, while providing some neat JavaScript enhancements, too. By being creative and using the basic tools at your disposal, you can improve performance and accessibility, as well as simplify code maintenance. By getting content on the screen as soon as possible, you will improve the user experience, and in doing so, you will earn a few extra karma points along the way. Everybody wins!
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Improving every tiny thing by 1% dramatically improves performance. This applies to what Marko Dugonjić did in the SGS project and its intricate navigation. By focusing on the finer details, improving each detail by a tiny bit, he significantly reduced the complexity of the navigation and improved loading times, while keeping the navigation appealing and engaging for users. No web project is ever truly complete; there are always a few more things on the to-do list. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you keep on testing, refining and providing the best experience for users.
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Experience and the memory of experience are related but systematically different. Everyone has two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, but the remembering self does the learning, judging and deciding. Memory is a collection of snapshots that gives extra weight to the most intense moment and the final moment of an experience. In this article, Curt Arledge is going to provide some tips for designing for experiences that leave a lasting positive impression.
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Parents are less willing to let their children play outdoors without direct supervision. As a result, children spend most of their free time in organized sports, music and arts activities. This results in less time for unstructured play than in previous generations. Digital technology is often blamed for children not going outside. Yet studies have shown little difference in the outdoor time of children who follow the American Academy of Pediatrics media guidelines and those who do not. When done right, digital technology can help solve the unique challenge of motivating children to go from indoors to outdoors and then to connect with nature.
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In this article, Luca Leone and Anders Schmidt Hansen will investigate an alternative to the classic “pages and links” paradigm, a model dubbed “zoom navigation.” Perhaps the reason why zooming interfaces are rare is that traditional HTML linking quickly became the dominant navigation paradigm, and zooming navigation presented problems of implementation, but we have good reasons now in a multi-device world to give zooming navigation another chance and to experiment with ideas and implementations. At the end of the article, they will introduce some prototypes and discuss their technical implementations.
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