Product design for December 2014
Alexander Sergeevwrote this on Мар 26, 2015
Mail.Ru Group interface design manager Yury Vetrov has been publishing regular reviews of new articles on interface, new tools, pattern collections and intersting cases. He chooses approximately 5% of valuable publications which are worth sharing with experts. Yury Vetrov has gathered the most interesting links of December.
IBM Design Language
IBM has released their own visual language, really cool described, structured and presented. Many interesting details, approaches to writing guidelines. Although, they are more like principles, as there are almost no definite apps.
There are no definite figures in interface and typographical nets — only principles of their building. For such a large-scale company designer stuff should count 1000 people and product quantity — endless. Such an approach gives flexibility in observing common design spirit.
Intuit Harmony
Intuit has published another cool case of design rebuilding in big companies. It’s a leading soft developer for personal and corporate fiscal accounting which has rethought itself, has built a design-culture and has created Harmony exosystem. Buffer and NASA guidelines has also been published lately.
Myth about scrolling
Welch Canavan has collected many famous publication, unveiling a myth that users don’t scroll pages. Recently a resonant article has been published on a Huge Inc blog about the investigation they’ve made on the topic. Although the myth that users are afraid of scrolling has been unveiled many times, the thing that Huge has done still arouses many questions.
Earlier this year the best article on pseudoscientific character of design by MJ Parnell has been published. It’s extremely sad that investigation of Huge Inc has spread throughout all the Internet and is published by so many people. Yes, the myth that people don’t scroll is false and has been disproved many times. But this definite article makes conclusions in a very unprofessional way.
Fjord Trends 2015
Publication of forecasts on 2015 trends has started. Fjord describes nine of theirs concerning design and innovations. A Huge Inc forecast has also appeared.
Fuse
It’s a new tool for creation of interactive prototypes and their transmission into Android and iOS. Unlike the majority of tools that appeared recently, from the very beginning Fuse Tools orient for close designer-developer link. Interactive prototype that you create with the help of the tool is a nicely written app on a native code of the platform. Plexi has also been announced this month, beta versions of Tumult Hype Pro 3 and Noodl has been released and an instruction for beginners working with Form.
Design Peculiarities in Asia
Several important and interesting publications on the specific character of apps in China and Japan appeared:
- Tendencies of Chinese mobile apps.
- About Chinese web-design condition.
- UX in Japan.
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase
New service inside Think with Google has gathered anonymous data on web-analytics from 42 thousand web sites and has made on its basis a great tool for analysing the ways customers take to purchasing in different segments, markets and countries. Here’s a short PDF guide.
Data Driven Products Now
It’s a very interesting presentation by Dan McKinley from Etsy on how the company has come to a pro-active data analysis while launching new features and services. In the second part there are very detailed ROI calculations for several features they planned to launch.
A story about new NY.gov and peculiarities of work on it, experience of usability-labs GOV.uk and Microsoft Xbox, a collection of mini-stories from big companies, the way they found insights and changed products.
How to Implement Color Search
Elif Ceren Dik tells about experience of creation a good color search for JotForm users according to color theory.
CSS-animation generator for complex gradients is worthy of attention as well.
Resonator
New extension for Photoshop which helps to collect, store and cut icons and all the other graphics for developers. The extension supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone and retina. On the moment it’s being spread via invitations, but they invite really fast. It’ll be usefull for all mobile, some web- and all the designers who got tired of constant manual graphics cutting for developers.
The Screen-Size Debate: How the iPhone 6 Plus Impacts Where We Read & Watch
Pocket team has described in their blog a falling trend of using tablets due to release of wide-screen smartphones. If in a case with iPhone 5/5s, the division of time spent on reading on them and on iPad was almost equal, now the tablets has dropped to 20%. Decreasing numbers of iPad sellings prove the picture. So the triumpaht march of Post PC doesn’t go the way it was planned.
JavaScript for Designers
Stephen Hay’s article on whether designers should know how to impose.
Creating Animations and Interactions with Physical Models
Ralf Thomas has explained physical animation model with vivid interactive examples and details. The project is available on GitHub for personal experiments. In the topic continuation — CSS animation for beginners from ThoughtBot.
UX Leadership. Part 1: The Nature of Great Leaders
Jim Nieters and Pabini Gabriel-Petit has opened a series of articles on UX-managers and leadership. It’s rather clear and intelligible, though a preliminary article was less systematic.
The coolest material by Julie Zhuo on what’s leadership in design and format of interaction between product designer and product-manager.
Designers:Watch
Web-site-collection of key designer movies with links to online-watching. People, historical processes and tendencies. And you can also read articles of mini web-site UXMas.
Upcoming events in UX-industry: December 2014 - June 2015
The main European and American events of UX and design for the first part of 2015.
