If you’re a designer, you’ve no doubt come across CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) many times before. Maybe you’ve heard your colleagues speak about how powerful they can be for styling websites, decreasing page load times, or saving web developers precious time. (It’s certainly less of a headache than styling each page individually within the HTML code.)
CSS can also be a lifesaver when you want to rebrand your whole website, since updating your style sheet will apply the changes across the board. CSS can be incredibly valuable to both developers and designers when working together to create beautiful, dynamic websites.
But if you’re still not exactly sure how knowledge of CSS can benefit your work, or you’re simply not confident about how to use it, then keep reading for a step-by-step guide to CSS, and how to keep your style sheets in order to benefit your designs and clients alike.
Just as fashion icons set the tone for what will be “in” this season, tech trendsetters influence the style of thousands of websites. How?
Web developers create and publish frameworks, a set of rules for common website elements. This gives other developers a starting point for their website design..
Frameworks can help you get a decent-looking website up and running quickly. It’s like trusting that you’ll look okay in anything you pull off the rack in a fashionable high-end retail store—you don’t want your website to be a fashion faux pas akin to wearing a neon green shirt with purple Wellington boots.
A framework is a reliable base, but you should still experiment. Tweak the colors, fonts, etc. You never know—your style sheet could become the next popular framework. After all, who knew ripped jeans would come back in style, or even become fashionable in the first place, right?
2. Strive for simplicity
You’ll find that as a website grows, you’ll develop a pretty long, scrolling list of various elements and CSS rules. Some of the rules might overlap or override each other eventually (in that case, usually the more specific rule will win).
You can end up with a lot more code than you expected, especially considering the different variations of a rule you need for different browsers and screen sizes.
Sooner or later, you’ll feel like you’re splashing through endless puddles of CSS code, struggling to find the exact rule for the exact section you want to edit.
It’s good practice to always check before adding a new style rule—maybe an existing one could apply.
3. Structure your file
There are many ways to refactor your CSS code to make it easier to navigate and use. Some of the easiest methods are the most effective and have the most mileage. Here are some of the quickest ones:
Keep your spacing uniform: Maintain the same spacing between rules and within declarations throughout your file so that it’s easier to read.
Use semantic or “familiar” class/id names: Instead of using a class name like “bottom_menu”, try using the semantic tag “footer”. Or when you have an image in your “contact” section, make sure you’re using a class on your image like “contact_image”.
Keep it DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself): Ideally you want to repeat as little of your code as possible. Do you find the declaration “background-color: #000″ repeated throughout your CSS file? Consider typing it once and instead, using multiple selectors on the one declaration.
Put your tidiness to the test with these tools: Run your CSS through CSS Lint or W3C—these will help to parse your CSS file correctly, and highlight problem areas. Your web browser’s developer tools are also extremely useful for pinpointing specific elements on your website and using the area as a sandbox to experiment with different styles and positioning.
4. Go beyond the basics
If you have some programming skills, you can use more advanced CSS options like Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (SASS) or LESS. With these pre-processors, you can take advantage of more complex code options like variables, nesting, mixins, and functions to further clean up your CSS and avoid duplicates.
But with great power comes great responsibility. Remember to keep your CSS organized. Just as keeping a tidy closet is important so you can find your favorite neon green shirt without hassle, keeping a clean CSS file will help you implement those spontaneous design ideas without delay.
Eric An Eric An is a writer, product manager, and CareerFoundry web development tutor based in California. He graduated with a degree in Economics before going on to run a retail business for 6 years. After a fruitful run of packaging thousands of boxes and sorting through countless pieces of mail, he learned how to code and moved into product management.
The survey closed on December 19th at 11:59 PM EST. Over 9,500 people participated. We encourage everyone to explore the results, and visit our gallery page to learn how you can bring the data to life. The gallery will open January 17th.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdesigncensus.org%2F%23!%2Fresults%2F
The Design Process characterizes the current state of UX — one of awkward pubescence — and suggests that some serious self-reflection, together, is necessary if design is to be taken seriously; by Pablo Stanley.
In Defense of Homogeneous Design suggests that in our experimentation with products, we should also recognize when our ‘unique’ design gets in the way of our users’ experience; by Yaron Schoen.
These in-depth articles explore some of the tech industry’s most successful products. Here we learn from the processes of Spotify, Facebook and Instagram.
Design Doesn’t Scale reveals why Spotify’s product fragmentation was reflected in its team’s fragmentation and how when you invest in aligning and coordinating designers, design does scale; by Stanley Wood.
Designing Complex Products shares insights about the growing landscape of interactions and how to cut through the complexities of people and products in your design projects; by Erik K.
Redesigning Chrome Desktop is a detailed account of Chrome Desktop’s redesign, the importance of a more future-proof design process and the value of a pixel; by Sebastien Gabriel.
UX
User experience is a broad topic and the focal point of any great product. Thankfully, these UX pieces cover a vast amount of ground, from basic tips to cutting-edge recommendations.
The Value of Multi-Typeface Design offers a counter-argument in defense of eclectic type systems and ways to effectively incorporate multiple typefaces in your projects; by Bethany Heck.
Developing Your Eye for Design showcases a simple strategy that will help you develop and improve upon your taste and ability to identity strengths and weaknesses in designs; by Jonathan Z. White.
Designing Confirmation urges us to think about invoking action in a landscape where advanced technologies and interfaces are vastly changing user interaction; by Andrew Coyle.
UI is a robust, fascinating topic, especially in 2016. The following pieces reframe long-held assumptions concerning word design, television, best button practices, and present trends.
How To Design Words claims that those who work with words should make reading as easy as possible and gives us 7 tips for designing them; by John Saito.
Animation is an integral part of digital design, and its implementation has ignited some interesting debate and discussion over the past year.
UI Animation: Eye-Pleasing, Problem-Solving acknowledges those who view animation as an unnecessary feature overloading UI, but maintains that it’s the closest thing that captures the essence of actual and real interaction, and should support the user; by Tubik Studio.
Designing in Color serves as a guide for your color palette process because it’s important and at times intimidating, so much so that 90% of people’s snap decisions are made solely based on color; by Jonathan Z. White.
Picking a Color For Your Brand outlines the significance of color to a brand’s identity and provides some thoughts to guide you through answering this question — what colors are right for this brand?; by Bill S Kenney.
Trends
From card-based design to studying business, 2016’s design trends are covered below in great detail.
Design and the Self reviews the various levels at which we can understand design and calls for good design in the world because good design helps us to be the best version of ourselves; by Irene Au.
50 Shades of #FAFAFA is a list of silly things designers do and don’t do, but don’t take it too seriously; by Jon Moore.
Misc.
How-to’s, myths, approaches, and assholes, the following pieces aren’t easily categorized, but merit inclusion on the list for their array of valuable thoughts on design.
Design, Illustrated in 3 Charts is made up of a few doodles that illustrate one designer’s thought process of trying to out what, exactly, is design; by Julie Zhuo.
UX Design Methods & Deliverables contains some UX Designers’ most common methods and deliverables, each with a list of additional links and some of the best practices available in the industry; by uxdesign.cc.
An Iconic New Look and More shows off Sketch’s brand new icon as well as other app improvements and additions that will excite designers; by Sketch.
Thanks!
A long list, we know, but that’s it — all of our favourite design writing from the past 12 months. Thanks for reading (or skimming). If we missed a great design post from 2016, please let us know!
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fswlh%2Fmediums-best-design-writing-of-2016-68de5ed2b7d9%23.otv3uz3yy
With this premise, I’d like to share some thoughts on how designers can adopt a few techniques to ease our & our colleagues’ work in the execution phase with the help of a well rounded & thorough design handoff —
When a design is handed over to the developer, there’s multiple layers of information that needs to be conveyed. In addition to the Mockups and Specs+Assets, one must also share the Interactions, Copy, and a Checklist.All these cover different aspects of the designsolution and need to be collated in one, simple, accessible document that sits on the cloud. You can call it the Design Handoff Document.
A Design Handoff Document is a throwaway artefact. It serves the goal to build something, and that’s it.
There isn’t much to mention here. We all have been generating & sharing UI mocks comfortably since many years now. But I do have a couple of points to make :
Naming your files : Let the file/screen name not possess any form of versioning. The name of the screen should simply describe it’s function. If you’re not yet using a version control solution for your designs, you probably should. Plus, make sure you use consistent casing when naming your screens, whether it’s ‘camelCasing’ or ‘Sentence casing’ or ‘lower casing’ etc.
Have the necessary, archive the rest : At the time of handoff, you’d have collectively zero’ed on an option you’re going to build. So weed out all the older iterations & explorations. It also helps you write simpler filenames.
Suggested Tool(s) : InVision, Marvel
2) Interactions
Make a flow : Putting the mockups together is only half the work done. You’d need to stitch the screens together based on the flow using Hotspots (or just make an Interactive Prototype). It helps the product manager understand how the user journey is panning out; and helps the developer plan his approach to code.
Figure out the fidelity : Not every screen has to be fleshed out with high fidelity prototypes. Few screens could simply be static with explanatory comments, few could get away with platform-specific standard interaction patterns and few might require those custom prototypes. There’s no blanket rule for all the screens, so discuss with your developer & plan accordingly. Do not end up spend a ton of time prototyping a simple interaction pattern that already exists.
Whether you choose to communicate the interactions through an Interactive prototype or Comments marked up on each static screen — it’s upto you. But the idea is to have the interactions documented. There’s a tendency to leave this bit till the last minute when you hear designers say “I will sit with the developer & hash it out”; but it’s not efficient.
My advice is to list all the Copy in a 3-column table using any cloud tool of your team’s choice (Paper by Dropbox or Sheet by Google). There’s always a lot of Copy that cannot be shoe-horned in the UI mocks, so we’d need to record them somewhere else.
For reference, I’ve drawn a brief template for our Copy table — • First, specify the type of copy. This helps developers quickly parse through the list. The rows could be grouped by the name of the screens (Homepage, Cart, Checkout etc.) • Second, specify the situation & context of the copy. (Eg. Whether the user is logged in or if it’s a repeat user. Or, if there’s an ephemeral event which’d influence a particular UX). Mentioning the context or the heuristic helps the developer understand when should the message appear/disappear. • Lastly, the actual message.
More often than not, most of the product & design folks don’t spare enough brain cycles on Copywriting. Different team compositions would dictate if you’d need a specialist copywriter or not. But this post is not about whether the designer should write her/him own copy; nor is this another rant about how ‘copy is king’. I’m just saying you should have all the copy documented when you share the designs.
Plus, you’d anyway not want your developer to ‘fill in’ the copy for you in the final hour before the release. (‘cuz you are obviously not around ‘cuz you’ve already left for the day. Oh, designers.)
Suggested Tool(s) : Paper by Dropbox or Sheets by Google
4) Specs & Assets
Automate : Today, with products like Zeplin, Avocode & InVision’s Inspect, a designer should not be allowed to waste any time redlining the designs with specs, measurements, and style guides. Let’s make use of these nifty tools and save our team’s time. A tool called Sympli even has plugins for Xcode & Android Studio. It’s just a matter of properly organising layers & groups in your sketch file and let the tools do the rest. Whenever you ought to define/refine your visual library — Give Lingo a spin, which helps you create a sharable style guide.
Accountability : Automating the handoff process gives designers the authority to question the developer incase of deviation from the prescribed designs.
For example, raise a jira ticket against the responsible developer the moment you spot a discrepancy in the build. This way there’s organised accountability within a timeframe and no email escalations against the designer.
Here’s an aerial view of various tools with their handoff capabilities —
The most gut-wrenching part of any design execution exercise is the ‘missing designs’. There’s always an edge case or two missing from the designs shared, and this always gets escalated mostly during the last mile of design execution, with a sense of panic because of the looming deadlines. This leaves the designer reacting to the situation instead of responding with reasonable thought.
A practical solution to avoid all the last moment chaos, is —
Maintain a plain-jane checklist of all the cases & features that need to be designed; created & managed by the designer on the project.
The checklist will flag the status of the feature being picked up or not, and whether it’s completed or under works. All the completed rows should have the link to the corresponding design.
If a certain feature is moved to the next version because of a certain dependency, then the corresponding team is marked along with a describing comment.
Anything that does not exist on the checklist, is not accountable for implementation, and this understanding is established between product, design & engineering at the start of design solutioning. This way the checklist acts as a reference & single source of truth incase of a deadlock or confusion around whether or not the feature was agreed upon to build.
Suggested Tool(s) : Paper by Dropbox or Sheets by Google
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fuxdesign.cc%2Fhttps-medium-com-91bilal-guide-to-successful-design-handoffs-18345f42d5d6%23.9z8q025zk
Augmented reality is entering the workplace and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipate that it has the potential to transform the way workers interact with large amounts of data, specifically in the supply chain. The use of AR, which superimposes digital content including hologram-like images onto a user’s view of the real world, […]
from CIO Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/12/12/researchers-see-augmented-reality-as-enterprise-game-changer/?mod=WSJBlog
We are looking forward to how UX will evolve in 2017. In the meantime, here are the top trends we’re seeing in UX next year.
#1 Usability becomes a commodity #2 The words we will stop using #3 Everything is a conversation #4 The year we begin breaking the glass #5 Stitching all the pieces together #6 Virtual Reality: a body and space puzzle #7 Should designers design? #8 Design must be automated #9 Not your fault, but your responsibility
from uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design – Medium https://uxdesign.cc/wireflows-ux-books-card-animations-in-principle-and-more-ux-this-week-1b54e28a03ec?source=rss—-138adf9c44c—4
How Invisible Interfaces are going to transform the way we interact with computers
In the mid-nineties, a computer scientist at Xerox PARC theorized the concept of the Internet of Things, albeit with a different name, far before anyone else had and even further still before it had become possible.
Even though today we call it by that name, Ubiquitous Computing — as it was then coined by Mark Weiser — imagined a world wherein cheap and ubiquitous connected computing would radically alter the way we use and interact with computers. The idea was ahead of its time. In the world of ubiquitous computing, connected devices would become cheap and, thereby, would exist everywhere.
Importantly, these devices would as a result cease to become special or unique — they would become invisible.
As we near this utopian world filled with computers, our relationship with them inexorably will change. Each of us will come to interact with dozens of separate devices on a daily basis. As such, we will need to develop interfaces in a way so as not to distract us, as is currently done, but in a way in which to empower us.
Or, how Weiser put it, we will need to adopt the concepts of “Calm Technology”.
What is Ubiquitous Computing?
On the face of it, ubiquitous computing is just that, a reality in which computers are everywhere. Of course, with trends relating to IoT, we are nearing this, but we are not there yet. One of the most important implications to come from ubiquitous computing, for example, will be the changes it will make on how we perceive and interact with computers.
For instance, think of the electric motor: an old technology that is ubiquitous in the present. Today, there could be dozens of them in a single car. However, when we hit a button to roll down the windows, we don’t think at all about the motor pulling the window down. We simply think about the action of making the window go down. The electric motor is so mundane and ubiquitous in our lives that we don’t even think about it when using it. It is invisible.
It is this sort of invisibility that allows the user to take full control of their interactions with a given piece of technology. When using a piece of technology that has become invisible, the user thinks of using it in terms of end goals, rather than getting bogged down in the technology itself. The user doesn’t have to worry how it is going to work, they just make it happen.
Invisible technology keeps us focused on the task at hand.
In another example, Weiser simply states a good pencil “stays out of the way of the writing”. Now, even though technology surrounds us today, we aren’t at this point yet. Gadgets and devices are still special to us in a distracting way. We still not only still marvel at new technology, we are told to by whomever is producing it.
But why does this matter? The best way to see how ubiquitous computing will impact us is to examine the way we engineer and interact with the apps that exist today.
Apps written today are, in many cases, not created to save the user time and are certainly not created to keep them focused on a given task.
When creating a web app, for instance, you try to guide or manipulate the user into using your tool as much as possible. When you create a drip marketing email campaign for it, in most cases, you aren’t creating it so that the user needs to use your tool less. You are creating it so they can spend more time and use all of its features. That is to say, the goal isn’t foremost and necessarily to save the user time. Furthermore, there is no question asked as to whether the user aught to spend more time using whatever particular app is being optimized.
It goes without saying that the same is especially true for social media platforms.
Within a social media website, each user is given a piece of “social property”. A social media platform imbues each social property with a value system — think of the concept of likes, comments or shares — as incentive to spend time on the site. Each user interaction with a social property, whether it be a photo or a comment that is written, is then logged and recorded, so they can easily be rewarded for the time invested. Some social apps, such as LinkedIn, will have us hooked for something as simple as a pageview of our profiles.
These actions are further incentivized through the use of gamification. Apps send intrusive notifications, giving you some information about what they are about, but not everything. And this is crucial. Not knowing what is in the notification entices us to open it even further. It goes without saying, this is important for increasing the amount of screen time we give the app. For, if we saw everything in the notification, there would be no point in opening the app. It makes waking up every morning feel like opening a bunch of small presents.
The end result is that many of our interactions with technology are not determined by ourselves, but by the technology.
And, while it’s a stretch to say that developers are acting nefariously to steal our time, those building our web services and tools should construct them with respect to the user’s guilelessness. Doing so requires adopting principles of invisible or calm technology.
What exactly should an Invisible Interface look like?
Contradiction aside, the most accessible way we can get a glimpse into a future dominated by invisible interfaces is the movie “Her”. Although not the focus of the film, “Her” showcases a future wherein inputs given to devices are done so largely through voice commands. Yes, there are still smartphones, but the majority of interactions take place by simply talking to a given device using natural language.
Theodore is able to interact with technology in a manner that is completely at hand. He can ask any sort of question or create any sort of demand without getting bogged down in how the device works. Furthermore, the technology never tries to whisk his attention away from anything. The technology is always there, but it is only in the periphery.
According to Weiser, this is one of the key principles of designing calm technology. The device in question should never try to distract or pry the user away from what they are trying to accomplish. Yet, it must always be ready to accept user input. It is calming in the exact opposite way that receiving group chat notifications on your phone is not.
We can see this principle of design, in part, at play in the new Apple AirPods. Even though they have yet to be released, they promise to let us interact with the internet without ever needing to look down at our phones. And they are aware of their environment too.
They know such things like if they are in an ear or not, and, if they are not, they know to stop playing sound. It’s these small, micro-automations that will further make technology invisible and allow us to focus on whatever it is that we want from the technology and not worry about having to configure it.
Other, more simple, examples include the auto-brightness on your phone or its fingerprint scanner. They simply work without any sort of configuration or notification about what they are doing.
And more technologies like this are coming. There are, today, even advocacy groups such as Time Well Spent that try to spread awareness about how interfaces and apps can hijack the ways our brains work. Even more promising is that there are companies that are following suit in these designs principles. For instance, the upcoming Moment smartwatch is a device which interfaces with the user largely through touch feedback, instead of relying on the screen.
All that’s needed now? Better speech recognition.
from Sidebar http://sidebar.io/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fstartup-grind%2Fhow-invisible-interfaces-are-going-to-transform-the-way-we-interact-with-computers-39ef77a8a982%23.aus7gxrp8
A new generation of design books published in 2015, 2016 and 2017, that have recently become part of my virtual collection.
UX Books are still a thing. Although long-form articles on User Experience are increasingly becoming available online, for free, books still have a place in our hearts. The challenge of reading in the browser is that we’re constantly distracted by notifications, emails, and much more attractive browser tabs that derails us from finishing what we started – whereas books allow us to focus on a much more immersive type of reading experience.
When you think of UX Books, there’s a pretty well-known list of essential books for every UX designer circulating online. There are many versions of the same list, but they mostly revolve around the same usual publications.
But what about the most recent books?
What are some interesting UX and Design Books published over the last two or three years, that are worth considering to any designer’s personal collection?
The list below aggregates some of my favorite books, in no particular order. Hope you enjoy the selection.
We don’t ever link to Amazon or any ecommerce website because we don’t have any commercial interest that you buy these particular books. About uxdesign.cc.
from uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design – Medium https://uxdesign.cc/best-new-ux-books-from-the-last-3-years-d975403b2956?source=rss—-138adf9c44c—4
Following its announcement back in June, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) has today revealed that the specification of the much-improved Bluetooth 5 technology has been finalized and is now ready for adoption by manufacturers all over the world.
Bluetooth 5 offers double the bandwidth, four times the range and eight times the broadcast message capacity of Bluetooth 4.2, which will likely prove to be useful for smart appliances and the Internet of Things as the current standard often isn’t powerful enough to connect an entire home.
Europe, are you ready?
TNW Conference is back for its 12th year. Reserve your 2-for-1 ticket voucher now.
“Bluetooth is revolutionizing how people experience the IoT. Bluetooth 5 continues to drive this revolution by delivering reliable IoT connections and mobilizing the adoption of beacons, which in turn will decrease connection barriers and enable a seamless IoT experience,” says the SIG’s executive director Mark Powell.
“This means whole-home and building coverage, as well as new use cases for outdoor, industrial, and commercial applications will be a reality. With the launch of Bluetooth 5, we continue to evolve to meet the needs of IoT developers and consumers […]”
Aside from providing users with a longer range for Bluetooth headphones, the latest standard won’t have an impact on sound quality for audio playback and telephone calls. Engadget notes that we shouldn’t expect to see any improvements to audio compression, latency and power use until 2018.
The SIG expects the first range of products equipped with Bluetooth 5 to hit the shelves early next year.
