23rd March 2013
A cautious take on the responsibility of using gestures in our products (mainly apps but it’s applicable to the web) by Rakesh. Gestures require learning, but they reward the user when they are genuinely useful, eg a shortcut that has a definite benefit over traditional input methods.
The catch is you can see a button whereas you cannot see a gesture. To perform a gesture without seeing them you’ll have to recall them from your memory. Recalling a gesture is much harder than recognizing a button.
Rakesh mentions the importance of consistency in gestures, and I echo his thoughts. Services with heavy pagination like Dribbble and Designspiration have consistent keyboard shortcuts/gestures in place to help users page quickly by pressing the left and right arrow keys to go forward and back a page respectively. This is an example of a gesture that rewards. It’s much quicker than finding and pressing the hit area for the previous or next page.
I would add that for (specifically web) products, there should always be an alternative way of performing the action that the gesture represents.
23rd March 2013
Thanks to Richard Rutter’s pull request on GitHub, the accuracy of the results has been improved. More mobile operating systems to come soon.
22nd March 2013
“It like, refixes itself on each thing!”
(Via Brad Frost & Scott Kellum)
20th March 2013
Viljami Salminen’s Remote Preview is an invaluable tool for responsive web designers. It works where Adobe Edge Inspect does and doesn’t, in fact it pretty much works where the web works. Now updating multiple devices with the same URL has got easier with the Remote Preview Chrome extension.
And who could resist this?
19th March 2013
My former boss Paul McKeever eloquently explains how typography is the foundation of a responsive web in his useful piece for Wired:
We must remember that the web is fundamentally a textual medium. People use it to read content and complete tasks. Remove the text from almost any popular site and it becomes impossible to use. This means those differences in screen size, device resolution or text rendering don’t matter in and of themselves, but only because they influence how someone will read our content.
I agree with him — type is the most atomic element in web design and is therefore the element from which all design decisions should should originate from.
19th March 2013
Interesting concept for an on-screen keyboard where screen space is limited. It looks like a compromise between the old T9 keyboards seen on feature phones and a QWERTY keyboard.
18th March 2013
An enjoyable read by Matt Griffin as he explains his rationale behind using media queries to adjust font size based on line length.
18th March 2013
Matt Stow explains the options available to developers faced with the task of retrofitting a responsive design. The piece serves as a good platform for him to introduce his RWD Retrofit plugin which seems to be a cost-effective solution although it depends on the flexibility of the existing code base.
17th March 2013
A timely article on the importance of experiences which coincides nicely with the universal praise for the Teehan+Lax redesign1. Would the unstyled content alone for the redesign sell the story? No, although the story is skilfully told. Would the visual styles alone create a good user experience? I don’t think so either. It’s the zen-like co-existence of both that make it a memorable experience.
…we mustn’t chase branded content with the same blind fervour with which we’ve chased past fads. But the idea that traditional content is the be all and end all of your digital presence is flawed – the harmony of everything you do online is what counts.
(Via Rick Monro)
17th March 2013
I would go as far as to say that this is essential reading for any agency making the transition to a responsive design process or for agencies teaching their designers how to code.
…there is a bigger, less talked about benefit to this: It gets designers using their designs sooner. They’ll begin catching issues that were in their designs all along that were impossible to see. The issues are invisible. They need to be felt. At first, designers new to this may not have the skill to fix them, but they’ll have the ability to identify them. That’s worth the price of admission alone.
To add to that — designers that either don’t code or don’t understand the limitations of code will be making design decisions based on assumptions. These assumptions can either limit the design with an overly cautious approach or make potentially harmful design decisions that a developer becomes contracted to code after sign-off.
Connor Sears also raised a key problem:
Design work that stops at the PSD is inherently incomplete. Far too often, this incompleteness leads to developers having the last word on the final design.
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