Designing For The Empty States Understand how to add some delight into an app by designing the empty states and give users a better experience. Empty states are places in apps that have no content or data. They are empty. A blank page. Traditionally empty states are overlooked as most designers focus on how best to display lots of content or data. It’s common for empty states to be dealt with by developers as they are often caused by exceptions (such as no internet connection). There are three mains types of empty states. 1. First impressions are vital. When someone signs up for an app, the chances are high that they know what it does. 2. Consider the inbox. Take a look at how Sparrow, Gmail and the default iOS Mail app handle the empty inbox. Sparrow shows an icon representing a traditional inbox and the phrase ‘Inbox Zero’. Gmail goes a step further by injecting some character into the app with the smiling sun. 3. Sometimes the people will experience an empty state as part of an error. Conclusion Contribute
Hack Your Maps Web maps have come a long way. Improved data, cleaner design, better performance, and more intuitive controls have made web maps a ubiquitous and critical component of many apps. They’ve also become one of the mobile space’s most successful transplants as more and more apps are powered by location-aware devices. The core web map UI paradigm itself—a continuous, pannable, zoomable surface—has even spread beyond mapping to interfaces everywhere. Article Continues Below Despite all this, we’ve barely begun to work web maps into our design practice. Have you ever taken apart a map? This article is a long overdue companion to Paul’s piece. Opinionated about open#section1 Paul makes a strong case for why you might want to use open mapping tools instead of the established incumbent. There is nothing mysterious about web maps. In short, we’ll be working with a fully open mapping stack. Starting out#section2 I’m a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. A tale of places#section3 Maps are data#section4
Je ne suis pas un ergonome — Gilles Demarty Lorsque j'ai démarré chez SQLi, j'ai signé un contrat de travail de Consultant Ergonome Expert. De même, souvent, quand je discute avec des clients, on m'appelle ergonome et on me parle de "l'ergonomie que j'ai faite". Pourtant, cher lecteur, j'ai un aveu à te faire : je ne suis pas un ergonome. Non pas que je n'applique pas des principes d'ergonomie dans mon activité de tous les jours: je sais comment les utiliser, et quelles sont les limites du nombre de Miller, des Lois de Hick et de Fitts, et des principes du Gestalt. Je ne suis pas un ergonome ; je suis un Designer d'eXpérience Utilisateur… et un Designer d'eXpérience Utilisateur n'est PAS un ergonome. C'est un fait, l'ergonomie et les Designers sont souvent amalgamés dans le monde du Web, mais ils sont bien différents. Faisons ensemble le chemin pour différencier l'Ergonomie et le Design d'eXpérience Utilisateur (que j'appellerais UX Design). Le but de l'ergonomie est donc de rendre un outil Utilisable.
UIColor: Understanding Colour in iOS | iOSing Something as trivial as changing a colour or adding a colour should be pretty simple to achieve, one that shouldn’t take long to do or much thinking. Sadly with iOS this isn’t as straight forward as you assume at first and because of this i thought i would throw together a really simple tutorial explaining how colours work. This really is the most basic tutorial i can think of, i mean i think someone who’d recently suffered a massive head injury could come to terms with UIColor on iOS after this tutorial. So lets get to it. How Colours Work Lets look at the colour in terms of HTML simple because i’m a web designer and it’s the most simple solution i can think of. In HTML/CSS you would typically define a colour outright, for example to make the background of the website red, you’d apply red to the background of body. …or if you wanted to apply a HEX colour you would define it merely as the following. Pre-Defined Colours self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor yellowColor]; An Even Better Way
Web IDEs: the future of coding Still using desktop code editors? Web integrated development environments (IDEs) are a new way to build your web projects directly in the browser, often saving development time and making collaboration easier. The humble browser used to just serve up simple HTML documents, but it’s often now your first stop for just about any task. Think about it — document editing, file sharing, image manipulation, server backups, 3D rendering, music production and just about any other work traditionally done in desktop software can now be handled by a web service. I’ve actually become reluctant to install anything anymore, as there’s usually a great web alternative that just requires a simple account signup to use it. But even with all the great services on the web, web development itself has been one of the last frontiers for this trend, perhaps because of developers’ reluctance to work online. Coding offline is crazy Most developers build websites on their desktop before putting them online.
Briefs crée des prototypes interactifs d’app iOS Briefs[1.0.1 / Démo – US – 179,99 € – OS X 10.8 – Briefs, LC] est un outil de prototypage pour applications iOS qui permet de tester une interface avec son interaction, directement sur un appareil iOS. Ce principe n’est pas nouveau, mais ce logiciel fait le pari du natif : même s’il est dédié à un designer et même s’il ne nécessite pas de savoir coder en Objective-C, il offre un rendu réaliste, avec les animations de base d’iOS. De quoi se faire vraiment une idée d’un design avant de le mettre en place concrètement dans Xcode. Puisqu’il s’agit d’un outil dédié à la création de prototypes et non au développement, vous ne verrez aucune ligne de code dans Briefs. Briefs utilise son propre vocabulaire qu’il faut d’abord appréhender. Autant dire qu’un manuel ne sera pas de trop pour Briefs, mais il n’y en a pas encore pour le moment. Quand vous avez placé tous les éléments d’interface, Briefs propose ensuite de créer des liens entre les écrans qui composent votre application.
Pixel Perfection A lot of designers throw around the term pixel perfection. But what does it really mean? Googling it really didn’t help. With this article, I am going to not only attempt to define it but also give clear examples on how to achieve it. I will also share design files from which you can deconstruct and analyze. Download .sketch files You’ll need Sketch to open these files: Sharpness “Sharp” is defined as razor-edged and honed. By looking closely at this design, you’ll notice a light shadow and a white shadow. Perfect Position & Dimension Understanding perfection is not enough. In Photoshop, that means pixel snapping vector points manually by selecting them, then Command + Shift dragging them. In Sketch, it’s even more precise because you can simply select each sub-shape and edit round the numbers (x, y, width and height). Obsession Pixel perfection is an obsession and a standard to which serious designers live by. Go ahead and download my .sketch files and spot the half pixels.
HTML5 Video Bumpers Video is a bigger part of the web experience than ever before. With native browser support for HTML5 video elements freeing us from the tyranny of plugins, and the availability of faster internet connections to the workplace, home and mobile networks, it’s now pretty straightforward to publish video in a way that can be consumed in all sorts of ways on all sorts of different web devices. I recently worked on a project where the client had shot some dedicated video shorts to publish on their site. They also had some five-second motion graphics produced to top and tail the videos with context and branding. This pretty common requirement is a great idea on the web, where a user might land at your video having followed a link and be viewing a page without much context. Known as bumpers, these short introduction clips help brand a video and make it look a lot more professional. Adding bumpers to a video What if the bumpers could be added dynamically? HTML5 bumpers Wrong So what can we do?
30 Menu Navigation Designs for Mobile User Interface Menu navigation is one of the essential elements of both web and mobile version. In the early days of web design trends, a simple bullet lists will do. With the technological advancements, however, web designers are able to create an extraordinary menu navigation design using the features of CSS. Since there are various open source CSS resources that can be accessed with just one click, today is easier than yesterday. Sure there’s a bunch of drop-down menu navigation (PSD) which every designer can download. Usability is an essential goal of mobile websites, and usable menu navigation designs with good mobile user interface is something that should be done. With our previous collection of mobile UI that revolves around search bar designs, you’ll notice that crafting a great user interface considering the user experience and everything is not easy to create. You might want to take a look at the following related articles: Youturn Mobile Navigation UI Dribble for iPhone 5 Mobile Portfolio
iOS Fonts 50 Free Tools and Apps for Web Designers and Developers Over the past year or so I have bookmarked hundreds of various tools and resources covering all aspects of web & mobile development – There are tools that will improve your work-flow, resources that will clean and validate code, apps that will allow you to collaborate with any number of colleagues, bookmarklets that let you create mockups within your browser, productivity checklists, sites that will track and keep a watchful eye on your sites… and on … and on. So, having all of these amazing bookmarks, I thought I would share my 50 favorites with you. I have split the article into the following sub-categories for easier browsing: General Web Development Tools, Web Typography Apps, Browser Tools, Web Site Analysis Apps and, finally, Productivity Apps & Tools. Web Development Tools ProCSSor – Advanced CSS Prettifier ProCSSor is a useful tool that will 'prettify' and format CSS files on the fly. ScriptSrc.net HTMLform.com Spritebox HTML Purifier Tiny Fluid Grid TABLEIZER! Try Ruby! Plupload 0to255
My À La Carte Dream - Apple TV Concept | The Verge Forums Posted by Knowledge on November 25, 2012 11:32 pm Before I begin, I would just like to first say I'm not a writer, designer, programmer, engineer, etc etc, just a guy with a vision, a man with the dream of paying only for content I want to watch -- content that actually matters to me. When I set out to compile these ideas I thought it would be impossible for anyone to ever launch such a product because of the current monopolization by the cable companies, but rather than figure out a way around that I decided to come up with a product that would be my ideal product, the product of my dreams and probably many others regardless how impractical the politics and economics of the whole thing might be. Here's my take on the future of television, I'll let the suits figure out the rest. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Ideal yet reasonable hardware Inputs and Devices +FaceTime The App Store LIVE TV is split into 3 sections easily navigated with an Apple Remote. Spotlight Subscriptions TV Guide