Back to Lisbon! It’s been a while, but I got the chance to give a talk at SINFO and a conference for tech students. It was probably one of the best-organized events I’ve been to in a long time. I talked about hacking user perception and the binary of design.
🎙What makes a great app design? Listen to my conversation with Aman Birdi on all things UI/UX 🎨
Checkout the podcast on Spotify.
I spoke at the Amuse / Craft Conference in October this year about User Fudged Experiences and what happens when users improvise with our products or services, usually in an unexpected and hacky way. The talk revealed how you can use user-fudged experiences to discover what your users are trying to accomplish, explore user perception, spot examples …
Last week, I spoke at a collaborative event by Muslamic Makers and Muslims at Meta Network, who came. We came together for an event that captured the community and gave back. We had over 120+ people come along!
🎙️ Listen to the latest episode of The Future of UX podcast: Designing for User-Fudged Experiences: Insights from ME!
Get ready to supercharge your user experience (UX) skills with the latest podcast episode!
Checkout the podcast on Spotify.
User Fudged Experiences happen when users improvise with our products or service, usually in an unexpected and hacky way.
Video: Design talk on YouTube.
I just got back from the Push UX Conference, which was a fantastic event; looking forward to posting the video of my talk. It was a wonderful atmosphere, so a big shout out to the organisers and audience.
My talk described User Fudged Experiences that happen when users improvise with our products or service, usually in an unexpected and hacky way. …
I had the opportunity to speak with Sebastian Gier on a UX design podcast, Design Drives. We discussed the relationship between design as a creative discipline and how systems and tools shape this creativity for better or worse. Listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcast.
We also spoke about why it helps designers to customize their …
In this episode, we delve into the relationship between design as a creative discipline and how systems and tools shape this creativity for better or worse.
Video: Design Drives
Do you want to learn how to break user perception to make websites and apps feel faster? I share research on improving perceived performance and provide user experience examples and technical tricks to improve your site’s speed.
At the beginning of 2020, the Chrome team across mobile and desktop laid out a plan to improve the discoverability and engagement of installed web apps. Our work led to a greater than 100% increase in PWA installation and engagement. We achieved this by researching existing features, running A/B test experiments and user interviews to gain insight …
Introduction to richer install UI on progressive web apps plus other newer features of PWA.
Mobile devices and the introduction of device vendor app stores have changed users' mental model of how to discover, evaluate and install software. Users are now so familiar with app stores, and the additional information that is provided through app stores such as context about the app, social feedback, ratings etc that you see the app store …
There is also the old joke of a kid seeing a floppy disk for the first time and asking his Dad why he has a 3D printed version of the save icon. Well a while back when I was on Twitter, a Japanese user’s asked an important question about Microsoft Excel’s UI, and the question was “Why is the save icon a vending machine?”
This user’s experience is …
User Fudged Experiences are when users do something unexpected with our products or service, usually in a hacky way. Below are a series of examples where users improvised these experiences for various companies.
The Golden Arches were trying to increase the sale of their milkshakes and interviewed users to find the …
McDonalds packaging redesign, dangerous selfies, and eco-friendly websites
Bu bölümde Google’da UX Designer olarak çalışan Mustafa ile tasarım süreçlerinden, animasyonların insan algısına olan etkisi ve tasarımcılar için tavsiyelere kadar uzanan birçok farklı konuyu ele aldığımız, keyifli bir sohbet gerçekleştirdik, iyi dinlemeler.
A talk on how to to increase perceived performance, and gives UX examples and technical tricks to improve the speed of your site, at Awwwards Conference Amsterdam 2020.
In this talk I will cover research on speed and UX that Google has conducted.
What do UX designers at Google actually do? Me and Ryan Warrender spoke about UX, Web Design, and Data.
The assumption that designers and developers sole role is to either make things look pretty or to be a cog in a machine with no soul.
Research completed at Google regarding speed and users perception and how we can hack that to make sites and apps feel faster.
Highlights from Google Design podcast series, on the relationship between designers and developers
David talks about Progressive Web apps, Firebase, and how you can design for speed.
In recent years, mobile usage has risen to the point where people now spend twice as much time on mobile devices as they do on desktop, and in many countries mobiles are the only device they use. Users demand consistently great experiences on both native apps and mobile websites.
Adrienne talks about auto-complete, payment request, better forms and security in Chrome.
Nick talks about motion design, prototyping and the three layers of material design.
A design system is a set of principles that helps guide designers trying to navigate a platform, environment or ecosystem. Sometimes they impose restrictions and force rules, but a good set will always seek to guide. Design principles are not a new thing, Roman architect Vitruvius had three golden rules for great architecture;
Material design components for web, stress testing your design and collaboration between designers
A progressive web app (PWA) is a website that has app like features, for example, it can work offline, send you notifications and provides more seamless integration into the native features & behaviors of your phone & desktop.
There is a spectrum of PWA UX, with some PWAs focused on content websites that let users browse them when their …
For graphic designers, this will seem quite odd, but to produce boxes with rounded corners on the web was tricky to implement 10 years ago. To get them you needed hacks and horrible HTML tricks to get a box with rounded corners.
Ironically when the ability to add rounded corners with CSS standardized across all major browsers, designers didn’t want …
To start with, I have to state that you should always have professional researchers on hand to do research properly, in the same way, you need a trained designer or engineer. That said, if you are starting out, or want to improve your process and site or app, diving into research is the best thing you can do to improve the work that you do.
When …
Importance of research and usability testing and discusses various methods
To release a browser when there were already established ones in the market was a bold move—especially when some of the major browsers were clocking over a million downloads within just hours of their release.
Darin talks about designing a web browser and the evolution of Chrome during it’s 10 years of existence
Payments on the web, Progessive web apps, and how to think about designing for offline states.
We have been exploring some of the pain points web designers faced in the industry and did a small research project to understand better what challenges designers and developers face.
This project was broken down into three activities, two roundtable discussion with new graduates, conversations with designers on social media and looking at existing …
Ever wondered why when you call up a utility company and you are put on hold, they play music? Consider how you would feel if there was no music, just dead silence. CNN ran a survey that showed 70 percent of callers who are on hold in silence hang up within 60 seconds. Because the silence would make you think the line had perhaps disconnected, and …
Designing motion, HCI, eye tracking and the Gestalt principles.
Scenarios that call for prototyping and how to approach them to maximize speed and minimize cost.
The Gestalt principles are a series of laws that are used to explain why human beings naturally find organized patterns in objects they see around them. The goal with the principles was to explain why we group objects in some ways but not others.
There are many different principles, but here I am going to look at the ones that effect grouping, …
Many years ago I was designing a website and was given a set of design guidelines that were quite interesting, shall we say. I think they were going for a Zen-like approach, in that it was a style without style, they used Arial everywhere and blue was their primary colour; it was painful to look at. I was tasked with designing the flow and UI. …
Getting a head start in the industry via a boot camp, gatekeeping and WildcardJS.
I feel that we as an industry are sometimes a little unwelcoming to newcomers and at times can come across as a little condescending. Especially when beginners are caught using technology or tools that are deemed too simplistic.
Take WordPress, the free content management system used to power blogs, that makes up ~30% of websites on the internet. …
Bruce Lawson, web standards lovegod and fashion consultant, talks about Browser standards
Ithought the phrase; “best viewed using Internet Explorer version 4.0 or higher” would have been killed off by now. It seems someone forgot to tell NASA. Ok to be fair that site is there for historical purposes, still, that message was littered all over the web in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
These days we are bombarded with websites asking you to …
Addy talks about designing performance.
The tools we use sometimes inspire the things we make. Their inherent limitations become the epitome of a style that later generations look back on in awe. For example, Andy Warhol’s use of silkscreen printing defined the pop art style of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The silkscreen’s; ability to reproduce the same images precisely at a high quality …
A new font specification that can significantly reduce font file sizes
Last year, some colleagues at Google ran a research study titled “The Need for Mobile Speed” to find out what the impact of performance and perception of speed had on the way people use the web on their mobile devices.
How do we link the two ideas of designer VS developer? Does the problem lie in the way we teach the subjects, and if so, do we need to rethink the education system? As we open the call for Design Academy 2017-18, Google’s Mustafa Kurtuldu discusses tackling and changing perceptions in education.
Matt talks about progressive web apps.
Every generation of art and design seems to revolve around a political debate with the previous generation. On one side you have a custom, hand-made, personal approach to design and on the other you have a more uniform, systematic and functional perspective. From Realism Vs. Modernism to New Wave Vs. Swiss Design, the design debate pendulum swings …
Why we need to design for the next billion users.
The cornerstone of any empire is a monument that lays the foundation of what that empire represented. The Roman Empire had the Colosseum, the Greeks the Acropolis, and the Egyptians the Pyramids. To be a real empire, you need a building that awes visitors to your capital city.
In 1550 the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, Kanunî Sultan Süleyman, wanted …
Yasmine Evjen talks about learning design skills.
Every so often a non-designer will ask me “How can I learn to design?”. This seems to imply that design is a checkbox that you can tick, on a checklist of things.
I think the reason for this confusion is in part due to the aesthetics being very prominent. The aesthetics appear superficial and, thus, give the illusion that ‘design’ is something you …
Mat talks imposter syndrome.
How do we know that we’re good designers or creatives? This is a question we often time ask ourselves. The imposter in us seems to show its ugly head every time we come to a blank canvas to start a new project.
Aforementioned in turn causes -insert skill- block — that condition where we can’t focus on the task at hand because we are too busy …
So this is it then. The era of Flash is officially over. When my teammates and I first heard the announcement, we collectively cried a tear and reminisced about the good old days.
Long gone are the times when we would wait 10 hours for an intro to load. Gone are the whizzing sounds of our computers fans because they are about to choke. Bye bye to …
Addy talks about designing performance.
Material Design Components for the web (MDC Web) offers designers and developers a way to implement Material Design in their websites. Developed by a core team of engineers and UX designers at Google, these components enable a reliable development workflow to build beautiful and functional web projects.
Material Design provides a set of tools and guidance to help you make informed decisions about the different UX design directions you could take when creating an app. But what happens when the guidelines don’t fit your product needs? And what happens at Google when a designer is working on a product that doesn’t quite fit the guidelines?
The Payment Request API offers users an easy way to make payments on e commerce websites and apps with one tap. But getting your bosses or clients to buy into its simplicity and ease of implementation can be tricky.
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
The arts have lived on the streets amongst the communities of the underprivileged fighting out against control, a response to political suffocation. Often depicted as sub-cultures, these movements of the Punk era in London were a rejection of the modernist Swiss Style of the 1940s and 1950s.
In the late 70s we saw a typographic explosion on the New …
Mariko explains creative coding.
Whether you’re a web developer, web designer or web marketer, you probably care about the end user of your product more than anything else. If you don’t, well maybe we need another eBook for that!
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
I miss the design app Flash. It was the perfect design tool for digital designers. It visualised code concepts like using ‘movieclips’ like variables and the ‘stage’ like a UI canvas. This made the logic of programming accessible to visual makers who didn’t have a computer science background.
It was also excellent for getting teams to work …
This week we speak to Surma about design tools.
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
Last week, I heard a developer refer to someone on my team as a “unicorn”. This term has come to mean someone who can do multiple things, like a developer who can design. I don’t like this term. It implies that someone with dual abilities is a rare mythical creature.
For the best part of 17 years in the industry, I have witnessed the debate/polemic …
This week we speak to Sérgio Gomes about responsibilities in design.
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
Imagine you’re Ada Lovelace. Your father is one of the most creative romantic poets of his generation and held up in high esteem by people from around the world. His work is an inspiration to revolutionaries across Europe, moving them emotionally with the flick of his quill.
Your mother is accomplished in multiple fields including science and …
This week we speak to Paul Lewis design nature vs nurture.
Material Design Lite is a frontend website template that enables you to easily add a Material Design look and feel to your projects. MDL was designed for static websites, as we wanted it to be framework and toolset agnostic.
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
This week we speak to Ade Oshineye about native web vs apps.
This quote is often attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Even though there is no evidence to prove Ford actually said this, the quote has become a mantra in some design circles to mean:
Don’t ask the users what they think, and if they articulate what they want, simply ignore them. …
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps. Each video, in which Kurtuldu has a conversation with a different industry expert, is accompanied by an essay (below) which delves deeper into the topic discussed.
Whenever I think the UX world is over regulating the creative process, the story of Jonas Salk, the inventor of the first polio vaccine, reminds me that there’s always hope and a way to find that creative spark.
This week we speak to Ewa Gasperowicz about UX and creativity.
Designer vs Developer is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding foster greater understanding between the two camps.
I was super excited. It was my first day of my brand new job. I had just finished university and was raring to go. I had made it. I could finally call myself a “Designer”. That glorious emotion was short lived though, when my manager approached me and said that my job was to “just make it look pretty…”.
This week we speak to Jake Archibald about communication.
Using Google Design Sprints to create a collaborative environment
This article introduces a workflow that can help teams, products, startups and companies create a robust and meaningful process for developing a better user experience for their customers. You could use different parts of the process separately but they ideally work best as a series of steps.
Link: article
The ability to add web apps to the home screen has existed for quite some time but with the arrival of offline support, it means we can run our web apps without a network connection. This makes adding to the home screen feel like a real installation, …
Building a robust financial app that allows people to view, buy, and sell stocks is a complex undertaking. Robinhood tackles this challenge with a slick onboarding experience that uses motion to help orient the user through the app’s core features.
I’ve been searching for a way to remove the LIs and UL elements from a standard wordpress nav, wp_nav_menu, while keeping the classes from the LI and moving them to the A tags.
this is in italic and so is this
this is in bold and so is this
this is bold and italic and so is this
I’ve been searching for a way to remove the LIs and UL …
Notes
This article is for a new youtube series called “Designer Vs Developer”, which you can see here on our Youtube …