The difference between amateur and professional design
Today’s fast food for thought re: #design and #UX. If the conversation is around how good the design is or how it looks, it’s the wrong conversation. The shift depicted here marks the difference between amateur and professional design.
Design is Design is Design is…UX?
Look, we all know at this point that UI design is not the same thing as UX, and that doing one well does not guarantee the quality of the other. But at the same time, the two are more closely related — interdependent, in fact — than most “experts” seem to want to...
Signal vs. Noise: Removing Visual Clutter in the UI
When I was a kid, terrestrial radio was pretty much our only option for listening to music on the go. Small, portable transistor radios (like the one you see in the picture) were essentially the blueprint for iPods and today’s smartphones. And if you were a...
Simplify UI Data Visualizations – in 7 Simple Steps
To give you some context as to the importance of designing effective data visualizations, I’d like to give you a scenario to consider. Imagine that you’re standing in a room with 100 other people, all of whom are shouting at you at the very top of their lungs....
The Right Way to Use Icons in Your UI
Back in 2005, a young man by the name of Jensen Harris was an intern program manager at Microsoft. During that summer, he says, he learned a key UX lesson — on the use of icons — that carried over into the DNA of the now-ubiquitous “Ribbon” toolbar. In a post titled...
