5 Great Reads!
9 Ways To Improve the SEO of Every Website You Design
Sometimes enhancing the user experience goes beyond making your site usable. If it’s not findable what’s the point? This post by Six Revisions give you 9 ways to ensure your site gets found!
It’s a well-established principle that on-site SEO is one of the most basic building blocks every business needs to have as they start on the road to search engine domination. So it makes sense to add another string to your own marketing bow as a web designer and incorporate some simple SEO strategies into every web design you deliver.
5 Can’t-Miss Usability Tips for Mobile Website Designs
It’s seems everyone and their mother has a mobile site nowadays. What sets yours above the rest is how usable it is! Spyre Studios has a list of 5 well thought out tips to ensure your mobile website hits the mark!
Finding your way around a majority of the mobile websites that exist has become a nightmare with the lack of proper usability being implemented into their designs.
Explaining UX Design to High Schoolers
Sometimes trying to explain UX to anyone can be a challenge, this great post give some great insight that can be applied to high schoolers but could be anyone whos attention-span can me measured in nano-seconds.
How do UX designers tell their story in a relevant, meaningful way, to audiences who have no exposure to UX? UX practitioners are keenly aware that everything we use in our lives was designed by someone. But outside of our industry (and related ones), most people aren’t aware of the many decisions that were made (or not made) on their behalf when a product or service was designed.
Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces
This is an oldie but a goodie. We stumbled on this post via @dougneiner on Twitter. It has really solid tips on applying some realism to your interface bits.
From thinking about what objects would look like form a side view, to using vectors when possible. These tips should get locked into your arsenal and considered every time you start designing an interface.
The underlying secret to beautiful user interface design is realism: making 2D objects on your screen appear to sit in 3D space with volume, surface properties and undulations that might appear in real life. These faux 3D objects have highlights and shadows just like objects on your desk might have, and they have textures that emulate real objects from glass to sandpaper and everything in between. Designing beautiful user interfaces has more to do with the why than the how.
The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX: Match the Mental Model to the Conceptual Model
Pretty neat stuff in this post. It talks about how people perceive how something SHOULD work before using it and how UI designers solve for this scenario.
Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark. You have a “mental model” of reading a book on the iPad, even if you’ve never done it before.