Collaborating on designs with remote teams? Try Google Drawings. Drawings can import mocks Just drag and drop your mocks onto the canvas, then resize and move as needed. Drawings has smart guides, so it’s easy to snap images to similar sizes, common edges, or centers. Drawings are infinite in size Drag the bottom right corner of the canvas, and you can resize it to any width or height. No matter how many mocks you toss in, the drawing will scale to accommodate them all. The zoom tool in Drawings is dreadful, so I wouldn’t let the canvas grow too wild. Drawings can communicate flows Although moving sequentially through mocks is enough for most critiques, it’s difficult to get a macro-view of an entire flow and understand how the screens relate to each other. Drawings stay up-to-date, in real time Each Drawing has a permanent URL; it stays the same no matter how many changes you make to the canvas or its contents.
P.S. Drawings have built-in commenting Right click any object on the canvas, then click Comment to leave feedback. Other quick tips: Record what users do with your prototypes. IconStore. Game Engine Analysis and Comparison | Game Sparks. (Engines Under Review) Hi there fellow sparks. Jamie “the all spark” O’ Flanagan here. Today I’m going to do something a little different than the usual blogs. Before I start I just want to state that the opinions I express in this blog are my own and not those of GameSparks Ltd.
I am going to talk about a few different game engines that are currently available. More specifically, I will be talking about game engines that I have experience with. I have developed games, apps and various prototypes using all of the following engines. So I’m going to go into detail of what I think of each of these engines; the benefits, the downfalls and whether or not I liked the engine 3 Key points for each engine.
Usability (UI, how easy it was to learn and develop with)Functionality (What exactly the engine can do)Price Point (speaks for itself) Engines/SDK’s I will cover. UNITY 3d (Unity 3d) It is a very well rounded engine. (Unity 3d User Interface) Overall it is extremely reliable and highly recommended. Game Engine Analysis and Comparison | Game Sparks. Top 29 Mockup and Wireframing Tools for Developers | ProfitBricks Blog. Wireframing is key to successful and efficient UX development for modern Web and Mobile applications Wireframing tools make the process of creating a cloud computing based SaaS app or website fundamentally easier—allowing you to visually strip the product down and focus purely on functions and user interactivity.
Mockups and wireframes are critical tools for communicating a prototype’s usability and functionality to clients, providing a streamlined, uncluttered visual to supplement verbalized ideas and designs. With the explosion of mobile applications and cloud computing there are more wireframing tools on the market than ever, each offering varying levels of functionality. Some software can be used purely for simple wireframes, while more advanced tools will allow you to create a complete working prototype. Test and Development are moving to the Cloud Test and development workloads are rapidly moving to the Cloud. Image via Flickr by baldiri 1. Key Features: Cost: 2. 3. 4. Key Features: 5. 9 Excellent Tools for Design Mockups. So you've just taken some killer photos with your new DSLR, or you captured a great video with your iPhone — what's next? While it feels natural to just post media quickly to your Facebook Page, sometimes great photos or video need their own home in the form of a personal website.
But on the other hand, it's not easy to make a website layout that complements rich media. In order to make a great website, professional web designers take advantage of mockup tools to analyze layout, design and functionality. Taking advantage of these applications (some of which are 100% free) is a wise move — especially if you're interested in creating a professional website for your photography or video. We've rounded up nine applications that can help you get the most out of designing your web layout. 1.
The application comes with a huge collection of drop-in components and reusable libraries, and an easy drag-and-drop interface. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. inPresso Screens. Gibbon - Knowledge Sharing for Teams. User Experience (UX) & Web Design Agency – San Diego – San Francisco. Prove Yourself Wrong for Great UX. If you think you’re going to achieve all that by patting yourself on the back, you are mistaken, compadré. To do great things, you must prove yourself wrong—as often as possible. UX is Inherently Negative That may seem like a weird way to begin an article about the virtues of using data to reach new levels of super duper product amazing-ness, but it’s true.
UX is not made of rainbows and sunshine. “But,” you might say “isn’t empathy a big part of UX?” The Average Person Never, Ever Tries to Find Problems With Their Own Work Your intuition is actually built to fight the idea that something is wrong with you, your product, your company or even your personal preferences. Your ideas, your work and all the planning and effort that go into them have value to you.
Right?! Data Never Lies… But Sometimes the Truth Hurts In UX design, we have a secret weapon that can eliminate all those natural biases and show us clearly when something is working and when it isn’t. You might be resisting this idea. 7 UXperts Share Most Annoying Usability Mistakes - UsabilityTools.com Blog. Have you ever asked yourself what is UX all about? I have one answer to that – it is about learning from mistakes. You can build a design around the idea of turning bad experiences into good ones.
Yeah, we tend to follow the core principles of UX design in every project possible. However, sometimes they slip people’s minds, and it leads to mistakes that are becoming an integral part of most projects. If UX were treated as linguistics, I would say they no longer are mistakes – they became UX errors. So, to see these errors, we reached out with the question “What ONE UX mistake on websites drives you crazy?” As a result, we collected a list of 8 Usability Mistakes That Make Experts Go Nuts. Expect the unexpected Paul Olyslager, UX Manager at Nu3 shared with us one of the core reasons for all bad user experiences – the unexpected.
Vincent Flanders is an UX designer and a creator of a hilarious website Webpages That Suck. 24% of these clicks did nothing. A proposed improvement to the website. Modern Design Tools: Using Real Data — Design Insights from Bridge. Let’s take a look at one way a modern design tool might allow designers to easily and rapidly work with real data. To begin, we’d need two key things: components and data sources. Components Some existing tools do have a notion of components, but we need to evolve the implementation. Components are dynamic and reusable objects, or groups of objects, that have pre-defined types (image, text), properties (size, color) and behaviors (layout ordering). We can build on the idea of adaptive layout objects here. Data sources Now that we have scalable components, we just need to bring in real data. Designing with data Now that we have components and data sources, we can start to design with data by dragging it directly onto our components, instantly seeing the result.
Let’s design a search view for Spotify playlists. Here, we quickly find out that some people use long names for their playlists, so we’ll have to rethink our layout. A Checklist for Designing Mobile Input Fields. Creating Polished Wireframes – UX Blog – Balsamiq. You land on one of those "12 examples of beautiful interface design" articles and admire the screens of polished wireframes.
In some photos you see monitors shot at an angle with screens askew, receding into the distance, and a slight vignette burning away the edges. Perhaps you think to yourself, "Maybe I should make my UI design look like that? " It's easy to get seduced by these creatively presented shots of user interface deliverables. If making clean wireframes does cross your mind, we think you can do so successfully provided that you don't put aesthetics before the goals and purpose of wireframing.
There are valid reasons for not using sketchy wireframes. Sometimes low-fi aesthetics gets in the way, whether its due to the baggage of hand-drawn fonts or confusion over sketchy lines. That's why we made the wireframe skin, and its minimalist aesthetic is right for these occasions. We advise caution. Stepping off the soapbox. Aesthetics Desktop App Wireframe Mobile App Storyboard. Creating the Zero Inbox Animation | Prototyping with Framer. Slack: Be less busy. The Principles of UX Choreography.
Before I became a UX designer, I thought I wanted to be a title sequence designer. I took a course at Carnegie Mellon taught by Dan Boyarski called Time, Motion, and Communication. It was all about kinetic typography, rhythm, color, and movement. Dan used to describe every element on screen as if it were an actor on a stage — a character that we were directing, giving it behavior and personality. “You are responsible for directing each element’s entrance, performance, and exit.” We would constantly revisit this sequence, giving reason to why a character was there and what its role was. Introducing time and motion changed everything for me, because what I realized was that it gave you precise control over the emotion you are trying to convey and how an audience will interpret your message. Fast forward to a few years later: I’ve created hundreds of wireframes and thousands of annotations that describe how things work and fit together. Disney & UX The 5 Principles of UX Choreography Feedback.
The Next Generation of Mobile Interaction Design | Pixate. Design from iOS to Android (and Back Again) - Articles - Google Design. A practical guide to designing across platforms Designing and developing between platforms is a lot like traveling through different countries. You go through the same motions — sleeping, eating, sightseeing, regardless of where you are — but the customs of the country you’re visiting dictate how you go about doing them.
In some countries, it’s ok to push people into the train, or eat a burger with a knife and fork. Similarly, if you developed your product first for iOS, you shouldn’t simply expect that you can port it into Android without issue, because your app will feel lost in translation. It’s important to understand the idioms and behaviors of each platform before you start design and development.
That way your users will be able to use and easily understand your app on the platform that is native to them, and you will have the most clear and true version of your product — no matter where it’s used. Get acquainted with material design Surfaces & depth Interaction & motion Layout grid. Design user research explained for everyone with animated gifs. The most relevant source of inspiration and considerations when designing things are people.
This inspiration can be deeper than understanding what people do, why they do it and what they say they need; it is ultimately about understanding what they truly value. Building empathy with the users can be inspirational and help define the overall experience. Have a conversation, don’t interview There are numerous books and articles out there explaining how to do interviews, observations, surveys and etc; the user research does not have to be that complicated. Uncover the values not the needs The challenge for designers is not only to understand what people see, feel, and experience but to uncover what they value. “I need to see what happens to my info after I click on Submit” The user values Transparency Meet extreme users, avoid average ones Instead of going out and talking to 30 people, you can select a handful of people and have a deeper conversations with them.
Tell me about yourself? Imgur: Video to GIF. Recordit: Record screencasts fast & free! with GIF Support! The Aardvark Theory of Product: Fake It Till You Make It. Aardvark, by some measures — accumulating many active users or making lots of money, for example — did not succeed. But hey, it did get acquired by Google for a cool $50 million, so it’s worth hearing a little more about how the social search startup succeeded on that front. The real secret, according to Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, who were speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco on Friday, was acute awareness of how close they were to failure. Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz “I’m probably going to fail, so how can I increase my chances of success but — more importantly — use that failure and make it less painful and minimize the risk of the catastrophic fail, when you’ve run out of money and you actually have to change jobs,” was how Ventilla described their thought process.
“Once you’ve sold your startup, it feels very much fated. I don’t think we felt that,” Ventilla said. Aardvark's abandoned product ideas. Fake It. Trash It. Build It. - 42Floors Blog. For over 5 years, I worked as a freelance designer doing everything from small business websites to posters for local events. Founding 42Floors.com is not only my first experience running a startup, but also my first time working on a team with outstanding entrepreneurs as my peers and not just my client.
For many of our projects, we follow an extreme form of rapid prototyping. We design initial prototypes that look real, talk to people about it, and try to understand what we’re going to create. And, then we trash it. Rapid prototyping is by no means unique to us–but we take a particular pride in our execution of it. Our original mobile experience on 42Floors.com was just horrendous.
Before we started working on mobile, 42Floors.com was virtually unusable. Working with Leslie Chicoine, my trusted design/UX partner, we developed our goals for our mobile presence. Starting in HTML also gave us the ability to work with real data. Our first prototype of mobile was built in static HTML. How To create interactive prototypes with Apple Keynote. Step 1: Plan It Create a diagram with each interface screen as a state, and create links to specify how users will transition between them.
The diagram above shows a social media application that tracks multiple accounts, and allows users to post updates to multiple networks. Step 2: Prototype It Open the .Key file that comes with the Keynotopia Prototyping Templates side by side with a new presentation. Start by creating a slide for each screen (each state in the diagram) by copying interface elements from the keynotopia template and pasting them onto your presentation. To edit the label of an interface element, simply double click it and start typing.
You can also modify element sizes, colors, and effects using the shape inspector in Keynote. After putting together the main screens, you can move them to master slides so that you can reuse them in other screens without doing much copy/paste, and update multiple screens with a single change. Step 3: Add Interactivity Step 5: Export It & Test It. Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping. Advertisement The old adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words” captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words’ worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look.
In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development. Prototypes range from rough paper sketches to interactive simulations that look and function like the final product.
The Rapid Prototyping Process Rapid prototyping involves multiple iterations of a three-step process: Scoping A Prototype What Needs to Be Prototyped? How Much Should Be Prototyped? Find the Story Do… Don’t… Mobile-App-UX-Principles_Full-Report_Final. UIHAUS - The best selection of mobile UI designs ever made. The Principles of UX Choreography. Thomas Byttebier - The best icon is a text label. Get a peek into the mind of your users. | Peek by UserTesting. Loop by Nelson Ramm - Fancy Footage Club. Slack: Be less busy. How to perfect your UX with persona scenarios. Accessibility Wins, curated by Marcy Sutton. The 14 Best Tools For Evaluating Your User Experience. 10 Material Design iOS components for OSX and iOS development. Pablo by Buffer - Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds.
Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator! AppSeed - From sketch to prototype. Thomas Byttebier - The best icon is a text label. How to Delightfully Trick Users With Animation. 10 of the Best UX Infographics. Free Web & Mobile (iOS, Android) Prototyping and UI Mockup Tool | InVision.
GoodUI Improve. GoodUI. Bounce. AppSeed - From sketch to prototype. Firesize | Home.