Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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Finding a hotel and flight is relatively easy, but when it comes to tours and activities, the problem is that late or last-minute bookings are not always available, and the mobile experience can be limited because many websites are slow or their booking process is long and complex. Building a great mobile experience is really hard and time-consuming, but with enough attention to detail, you can succeed. In this article, Einar Þór Gústafsson will present a case study and share observations on the project he designed and built: GetLocal, an online travel-agency and booking platform in Iceland.
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When working with creative designers on web page designs, it’s fairly common to receive multiple Sketch or Photoshop artboards/layouts, one for each breakpoint. In this article, Jake Wilson is going to examine how to create scalable, fluid typography across multiple breakpoints and predefined font sizes using well-supported browser features and some basic algebra. The best part is that you can automate it all by using Sass.
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Google decided to launch a war against interstitials that ruin the user experience. Any website found guilty of showing intrusive popups, banners or overlays will see its content demoted in Google’s mobile search results. In this article, Myriam Jessier explains what exactly is being penalized, what’s allowed, and some workarounds to help you cope with this new penalty.
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Our industry has exploded with new thinking, patterns and approaches. In this article, Chris Poteet wants to look specifically at the issue of responsive navigation. He will first talk about information architecture, then the purpose of navigation, and finally he will look at three responsive navigation patterns that have served well over time.
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By using colour, typography, hierarchy, contrast, and all the other tools at their disposal, designers can take an unordered jumble of information and turn it into something that’s easy to use and pleasurable to behold. Like life itself, design can win a small victory against the entropy of the universe, creating pockets of order from the raw materials of chaos. For years, web design was dictated by the designer. The user had no choice but to accommodate the site’s demand for a screen of a certain size or a network connection of a certain speed. Now, web design can be a conversation between the designer and the user. Now, web design can reflect the underlying principles of the web itself.
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With dozens of responsive design frameworks available to download, many web developers appear to be unaware of any except for Bootstrap. Like most of web development, responsive design frameworks are not one-size-fits-all. Let’s compare the latest versions of Bootstrap, Foundation and UIkit for their similarities and differences. These are popular frameworks with piles of features out of the box, making them attractive to many development firms wanting to work with “Bootstrap or a close equivalent.”
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Previously, Bruce Lawson’s tried to make some supply-side improvements to web standards so that websites can be made to better serve the whole world, not just the wealthy West. But there are other challenges, such as ways to get over creaky infrastructure in developing markets, to surmount, and Bruce will also look at some of the reasons why some of the offline billions remain offline, and what can be done to address this.
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Many of the developing economies across the world are growing extraordinarily fast, with a rapidly expanding middle class that has increasing disposable income. In this article, Bruce Lawson will examine some of those countries and where the next 4 billion connected people will come from, as well as some of the innovations that the standards community has made to better serve them.
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While the concept of mobile-first began as a philosophy to help prioritize content and ensure positive, device-agnostic experiences, budgetary and scheduling constraints often result in mobile-first meaning mobile-only. According to the analytics data of Marli and Jasons’s healthcare clients, the majority of their users are still on desktop. They want to provide a positive experience for those users and for users on mobile and tablet apps and for those using mobile browsers — and even for users having an in-person experience! It is not accurate to assume that mobile is the primary experience.
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