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... Read More
Every morning, designers wake up to happily work on their products, be they digital or physical, with an inner belief that people will want to use their products and will have a blast doing so. Perhaps that is a slight generalization; however, as designers, we tend to have a natural desire for each project we work on to be the best it can be, to be innovative and, most importantly, to make a... Read More
They’re probably the most familiar interfaces on the planet: the numeric keypads on our mobile phones and calculators. Yet very few notice that the keypads’ design has remained unchanged for nearly half a century in the face of evolving global design norms and conventions.
Even fewer users notice another startling design feature: the phone’s keypad is the inverted version of the... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
Jeffrey Zeldman once said, “Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but that’s where growth and forgiveness come in.” If you think of design as a tool it becomes a much more powerful skill set and by putting the user first you can transform your product into something truly remarkable.
This... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
The mobile web is a harsh environment: mobile processors are slower than their desktop counterparts; network connectivity is flaky; bandwidth is low; latency is high; and touchscreen keyboards are slow. The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling these challenges.
In this article, we'll look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile... Read More
