CategoryDesign Patterns

September 24, 2018 — The mobile web is a booming place right now, which means web designers are spending lots of time trying to figure out how to win over this particular class of users. One way not to do that? Dark patterns. While your company may get some superficial and short-term gains in the process, nothing good will come from it in the long-run. Read more…

June 14, 2018 — In times when everything is generic, how do we stand out without spending too much time and resources on elaborate art direction? Let’s explore a strategic guide for bringing back personality to the web, in regular real-life projects. Read more…

June 5, 2018 — Nowadays, users are increasingly cautious of online and email scams, phishing attacks, and data breaches. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will present a brief history of persuasion, look at how persuasion is used with technology and new media, and present food for thought for designers and developers to avoid crossing the ethical line to the dark side of persuasion. Read more…

April 2, 2018 — Have you noticed the alarming lack of touch stimuli in current technologies? Our thoughts and feelings are strongly connected to the gestures, postures, and actions we perform. I aim to push you — as a designer — to think outside of the zone of screens. In this article, Lucia Kolesárová will aim to consider using more touch and motor skills when designing your very next product. Read more…

March 28, 2018 — Designing a good signup form is tricky. UX design does matter. To improve UX, the designer needs to put themselves in the user’s shoes. Make your form clear from the start, with visible labels placed outside of empty form fields. There’s always room for improvement. In this article, Kate Sipkina & Olga Ratinova will show you how to improve your contact forms — those crucial elements before users make a purchase or subscribe to a newsletter. Read more…

February 19, 2018 — How would you design a responsive car configurator? How would you deal with accessibility, navigation, real-time previews, interaction and performance? Let’s figure it out. In this article, Vitaly Friedman dives deep into the dos and don’ts of designing a perfect configurator. As designers, we might try to make our configurators advanced and sophisticated, but too often we overwhelm customers with too many non-trivial options. Read more…

January 29, 2018 — Offboarding is something users come into contact with every time they complete an online transaction. It is usually described as the interaction between a company and their customer at the end of the customer journey. Whether a user is permanently ending their relationship with a company, or they are just finishing a single transaction, offboarding should be acknowledged as the last impression a user has of your business. In this article, Christine Logan will show you everything about the benefits offboarding can bring to your company and how to apply it in such a way that it is a good experience for all users. Read more…

January 8, 2018 — Though we have a good understanding of the types of button design rules that universally work, there will be times when you’re surprised by a rogue element that performs well. Like ghost buttons. They aren’t much of a mystery, despite their eerie-sounding name. They’re call-to-action (CTA) buttons for your website, like any other. The key difference is in how they look. Logic would dictate that ghost buttons are not good for web design. Yet, research shows us that visitors don’t necessarily see them that way. Read more…

October 9, 2017 — We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components. Read more…

August 15, 2017 — When designed properly, Feature comparison can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table. Read more…