Nur noch wenige Tage, dann ist es da – das neue Jahr.

The ongoing debate about skeuomorphism in software interfaces misses the point.

«[…] Atomic design provides a clear methodology for crafting design systems. Clients and team members are able to better appreciate the concept of design systems by actually seeing the steps laid out in front of them. […]»

One of the biggest flubs that product teams make is confusing designs that look great with designs that actually work well. It’s a simple mistake, but it can have grave consequences: If your product…

Latest from “Europe” in The Wall Street Journal

Learn how we adapted our design process workflow to include more prototyping, better design conversation, and new types of deliverables.

David Bushell – Freelance Web Design (UK)

Responsive Web design has been evolving rapidly ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term two years ago. Since then, techniques have emerged, become best practices and formed part of our ever-changing methodology. A few obvious examples are the multitude of responsive image techniques, conditional loading, and responsive design and server-side components (RESS), among many other existing and emerging strands stemming from the core concept of responsive Web design.

Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand. The planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project.

Methoden zur Konversionsoptimierung von Neuprojekten | Conversion Optimierung, Landingpage Optimierung

We’ve written previously about Harvard marketing guru John Quelch’s research into how companies deliberately create an “illusion of scarcity” to elevate product

For the record: It’s super important for us to keep this site 100% free for you and 100% high quality. To help us do that, we’ve partnered with some of

Get the latest information, insights, announcements, and news from Microsoft.

Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. However, emailing your old static designs will feel old fashioned once you **see what these new tools can do**.

If you start with “useful” as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first, writes Wolff Olins’s Mary Ellen Muckerman.

Icon Fonts sind eine spannende Alternative zur Verwendung von Bildern, um skalierbare, 100% scharfe Icons in einem responsive Webdesign umzusetzen. Das Icon Font…

There are a thousand ways to design and create buttons today and you only need to spend a small amount of time looking through work on dribbble to get a sense of them. A great deal of these...

How standards documentation puts UX at the core of mobile application development.

Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community

Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community

To design responsive websites effectively and responsibly, I had to completely redefine the way I view the web. It pains me to admit it, but I wasn’t too keen on responsive web design right out of the box. Weeks after Ethan’s ALA article, I even briefly entertained the idea of writing a post haranguing the practice, nit-picking concerns on how using media queries to relocate elements on a page could disorient users, but I knew deep down I was full of it. My short-lived adverse reaction wasn’t rooted in any specific limitation of the responsive approach itself, but in my inclination to cling to the way I had always perceived (and built for) the web. That perception had solidified over 10 years of making websites in a particular way. Pages were wire-framed, then fleshed out in Photoshop, which was where, for the most part, design ended. HTML & CSS were merely used to execute the prescribed layout. I took comfort in that approach, particularly in the control I had with a rigid grid and a perfectly pressed pixel-based structure. What you saw in the comp was what you got on the web. Bada Bing. To think about the web responsively is to think in proportions, not pixels. That approach, however, only works for a single view, a concept quickly becoming a thing of the past. Mobile browsing has exploded, and tablets (along with a slew of other devices of varying size) have confirmed the web’s status as a moving target. The choice was before me: retain the control in my original approach but accept that I’d be designing three or five or ten layouts, or redefine the way I think about the web. I found that to think about the web responsively is to think in proportions, not pixels. I traded the control I had in Photoshop for a new kind of control—using flexible grids, flexible images, and media queries to build not a page, but a network of content that can be rearranged at any screen size to best convey a message. Web pages (not that the term ever fit perfectly) aren’t really what we’re building anymore. *** Did I forsake Photoshop? No. Reagan and I still start designing with a wide, desktop-sized view, but it means something very different to our process. It’s a starting place, and once we’re going, Photoshop is ultimately used for asset building (textures, photos, etc.). The largest and most exciting part of the design process now happens in the browser. Did I dismiss hierarchy? No, but “squishy” was the unflattering term I initially used to describe responsive sites.  For me, websites take on an increasingly familiar skeletal form as I mentally map content in proportion to specific areas. When working with clients that’s how we address content. Elements are sized & placed purposefully to create order. I was worried that fluid content would have no visual impact and spinelessly reflow, breaking the established hierarchy. However, I soon found that didn’t have to be the case. While working on our first few responsive projects at Paravel, we used fluid-width images, videos, and even text headlines when appropriate, along with proper planning (content choreography) to maintain strong visual presence. The hierarchy, and thus the message, can be preserved at any view. *** In the process I discovered, to my great relief, that I didn’t have to throw away my design sensibilities to ‘go responsive’; instead, I could develop techniques to incorporate design elements I gravitate towards (like interesting typographic arrangements or full-width images) in a responsive way. My stubborn unwillingness to abandon those sensibilities has made these initial steps into responsive web design worthwhile. It’s gratifying to use the things that might have kept me from adopting a responsive approach as inspiration to innovate.  If there’s anything I’ve had to learn the hard way through all of this, it’s that responsive web design isn’t bolt-on. Whereas progressive enhancements (like border-radius), or web fonts can easily be added and removed from a site, responsive (for me at least) has required a complete redefinition of how I approach my craft down to the pixel. The more I learn & adapt, the more certain I am that this is the best way to build for the web. The process of adopting a responsive approach has made me better at my job, and I’m thankful for that.

With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that …

We might not realize it, but as developers, we build inaccessible websites all the time. It's not for the lack of care or talent though — it's a matter of doing things the wrong way. In our new book, Inclusive Design Patterns, Heydon Pickering explains how we can craft accessible interfaces without extra effort — and what front-end design patterns we can use to create inclusive experiences. Quality hardcover, 312 pages.