Smart Interface Design Patterns

When I start any UX project, typically there is very little confidence in the successful outcome of my UX initiatives.

How do you know what UI component to choose?

Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills.

You can find more details on design patterns and UX strategy in How To Measure UX 🍣 — with a live UX training coming up this year.

The goal of the content design is to reduce confusion and improve clarity.

Complex data tables are difficult to get right.

Sometimes design conversations take slightly more time and effort than needed.

So what's the difference between combobox, multiselect, listbox and dropdown?

Newsletter pop-ups are everywhere.

Why do we see login forms split into multiple screens everywhere?

Both hiding and disabling features can be utterly confusing to users.

As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated.

Digital sustainability is often seen as a technical concern for engineers.

Children start interacting with the web when they are 3–5 years old.

So what if you need a bit of inspiration for accordions, or footers, or dashboards, or maps, or perhaps hover states?

When it comes to designing for mobile, there is always quite a bit of confusion between all the different units, guidelines and measurements in iOS and Android.

Redesigns are often expensive, time-consuming and incredibly risky.

So you want to conduct UX research, yet you find yourself constrained — by wrong assumptions and wrong expectations about what UX research actually entails.

Every screen you interact with has multiple personalities: blank state, loading state, partial state, error state and ideal state.

Good research is always rooted in the past, not in the future.

Often misunderstandings don’t just cause confusion.

Design decisions are often seen as a matter of opinion or preference.

Where would you find inclusive, free-to-use photos of diverse people?

Do you actually rely on the well-established Double Diamond process in your design work?

That’s a question that seems to fuel never-ending discussions year after year.

Getting support for accessibility efforts isn’t easy.

Nearly 1% of the global population is autistic.

Design tokens represent small, repeatable design decisions.

These books have been kindly shared by the community, with lessons learned by authors for everybody to read and benefit from.

Poor color contrast is the most common problem on the web.

Things To Avoid as a Design Manager # Most managers don’t give enough feedback.

Avoid Wrong Assumptions # Don’t assume that older adults struggle to use digital.

Too often accessibility is seen as a checklist, but it’s much more complex than that.

An example of anin-house ladder, ranging from junior designer to design director.

In some interfaces, navigation feels extremely slow and frustrating.

Dyslexia can take different shapes.

How do we write a great design case study?

Do your design initiatives clash against the company culture?

When talking about job interviews for a UX position, we often discuss how to leave a good impression and how to negotiate the right salary.

Design process is messy.

We often rely on sticky headers to point user's attention to critical features or calls to action.

Rage taps are annoying and frustrating.

Drag-and-drop is not a trivial user interaction.

Many companies organize their workflows around projects and departments.

Recently I stumbled upon the article How To Avoid Bias in UX Research, with pointers on how to anticipate, identify and overcome biases in your research by being more strategic about how you ask questions and how you run the test.

Red flags to check in your design interviews.

Are you the only designer on the team?

Autocomplete!

Too often, our individual goals and plans are left far behind the company’s goals and product development roadmaps.

Designing a time-zone selection is hard.