Product design for November 2014
Alexander Sergeevwrote this on Мар 23, 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 November.
Website Style Guide Resources
It’s a huge collection of material on web site live guidelines. Articles, guides, podcasts, conference reports, toolsets and real examples - everything is gathered together, cataloguized and regularly updating. A powerful comparative table of frameworks and ready made decisions should be also mentioned. 
By the way, here’s another interesting collection — Crayon, a searching engine for a vast collection of real marketing designs. And one more — design in Google ideology Material.
Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines
Finally official guidelines for Apple Watch have been published in the context of full documentation for developers and designers. Besides, Apple own font San Francisco has been presented for the first time. It has been already compared with Roboto and used in Yosemite.
An interesting pattern is described in watch guideline — detail of notification depends on how long is the user watching on it (is defined by accelerometer).
The Rise of the Phablet: Designing for Larger Phones
Steven Hoober explains that large screens aren’t a problem because the majority of users doesn’t use their phones with one hand.
An introduction to user research techniques
Reference book on user research from GOV.UK. Also a series of articles on conducting of classic user testing has been published along with a list of 60 ways to understand user needs by David Travis from UserFocus and regulations on work with users for all participants of product company by Jacob Nielsen.
Tumult Hype Pro 3
Third version of Hype Pro is another modern tool for designers. They promise interactive reusable animated objects with a physical model and adaptability for web sites, iBooks and advertisements.
A couple of tools has appeared recently: Blocs for visual web site creation (smart stud on Bootstrap) and Atomic for mobile prototyping and team work on them.
Google has suddenly bought Form, a newly announced Origami-like tool for interactive prototyping.
The Art of UI Animations
It’s a workshop with Mark Geyer on animation in interface. The format is rather interesting, launches in a browser. The workshop itself is rather informative. Geyer works at a Salesforce research and development department.
Zeplin — Collaboration app for UI designers & frontend developers
Zeplin is a desktop app for designer and developer team work. It connects to Sketch and soon will be able to connect to Photoshop. The app makes specification transfer easier. Here’s the Facebook group. 
Several collaboration tools have appeared recently: Gibbon for organizing of knowledge exchange inside a company and a team and Wake for a team work on mockups and moodboards.
IBM Design
IBM will present a new design language soon which promises to become one of the most large-scale among big companies like BBC GEL and Material Design. It will appear on IBM Design web site. At the moment there’s information about company initiatives. Phil Gilbert (corporation design manager) has told in his recent appearance about the guidelines.
IBM design language will describe common approaches, visual and interface guidelines, methods and work tools.
In particular they suggested their own variation of design-thinking, more pragmatic and applicable to real life.
The company is more than 100 years old and it could reinvent itself several times and come out of hard crises during this time. They have approached design the same systematic way they approach any other issue ― the strategy of its introduction to life is astonishing, so is the scale (designer stuff is approximately 1000 people). You can follow the announcements in team’s Twitter
Building SoundCloud
It’s a fascinating story by Michael Evensen about the way iPhone app SoundCloud was remade. The story is very detailed and extensive.
About Face 4: Chapter 6: Creative Teamwork
UXMatters publishes Chapter 6 of Alan Cooper’s book About Face “The Essentials of Interaction Design”. Cooper’s company has also shared all the diagrams from About Face 4 as a SlideShare presentation.
Checkout/login designers, this is your new bar: ONE tap/NO forms
A radical simplification of сheckout process on smartphones which is possible on condition of widespread use of fingerprint scanners.
The Evolution of the Title Bar Buttons
Evolution of habitual close buttons, minimization and maximization of app windows in desktop OS is studied. It’s interesting that in many cases everything started from a burger icon. Here’s one of articles on the history of burger icon.
AMA: I'm Julie Zhuo, director of product design @ Facebook
A series of questions and answers with the Facebook director of product design Julie Zhuo on Designer News. There also appeared AMA sessions with Mig Reyes from Basecamp and John Maeda.
