Occasionally I still have discussions about px-based font sizing, feeling like the other party has lived under a rock since early 2000's. But some designers still like their pixel based tools; maybe it even got popularised again by relatively new tools like Sketch and Figma, introducing pixel-units in a vector-based tool.
Well, to be honest, it matters less these days when compared to the days I learned that pixels are bad. Those days browsers were enlarging only text when it used relative sizes. In response to not all sites serving relative font siz browsers have introduced full page zoom functions, which is common place these days, when you press Command/Control plus ‘+’ everything will scale; text images etc.
But the text-size function is still used. In Firefox, Settings > General > Language and appearance sets the default font-size. In Chrome: Settings > Appearance > Lettersize. When you’re young and able you probably wouldn’t need to know about these things. But we shoul…
Yesterday I attended the CSS Day conference. This year only the first day, that focussed on designing user interfaces, less the building of it. Here are the key take aways for those who thought going through all slides is too long, or didn’t went.
> Je zou je kunnen afvragen of het goed is om geld te investeren in b.v. Facebook; als adverteerder of als content producent. Een 'gebruiker' van Facebook is eerder een 'gebruiker' zoals bedoeld in "gebruiker van heroïne" dan een gebruiker zoals in "gebruiker van biologisch afbreekbaar afwasmiddel". Ga op zoek naar frissere nettere plekken om die gebruiker te treffen.
But there is another reason why we might not even ask all the questions. Ask the wrong questions and you may alienate your user.
It can be relatively minor things like picking your favourite colour, where the form just lets you pick one colour, while many have multiple. But it may also be more personal (or one could argue, more political): not everyone defines oneself as male or female, so why only present just these options (and do know that it isn’t particularly nice being referred to as ‘the other’ all of the time).
These issues are well discussed in this [talk by Ca…
When reading about user experience, you might think about it as the softer side of technology. You read about persuasive technologies, emotional design, that kind of stuff. But user experience is more than that. As it is more than just interaction design too. To me user experience is mostly about the interaction with and of the product within the entire ecosystem the end-user is operating in. Hence, some of my thinking around user experience might get a bit more technical because the ecosystem might feature useful technical advancements. But in the end the only thing that matters is the complete end-user's experience, in which your piece of tech may only (have to) play a small role.
IMPORTANT: the assumption made here is incorrect. I suggested using a hashing function, but one should make a special message authentication code function such as HMAC…
A thing I've been rediscovering as of late is the bookmarklet. Not that I use many, but in contrast to many of the browser extensions, bookmarklets are really minimalistic and hence very simple to use (although installing them on mobile devices is not) pieces of software. Currently I use the Tumblr, Instapaper and Pinterest bookmarklets, but they all share a common problem: they require you to authenticate before you can actually use them.
Not satisfied with the third parties, not satisfied with hot they work…
I'm using the Tumblr blogging service simply because it makes posting, via its bookmarklet, easier than posting s…
Mensen vragen mij wel eens wat ik doe. Zo’n gesprek loopt vaak uit in
schaamte weglachende opmerkingen over dat zij ook zo veel moeite hebben
met het gebruiken van de nieuwe apparatuur (veelal oudere mensen),
waarop ik gelijk op kan reageren dat dat nou precies is waar ik mijn
bijdrage denk te kunnen leveren. Jongere mensen reageren vaak zo van,
uhuh… (ze zijn immers alleswetend) en beginnen over coole gadgets,
waarna ze in de loop van het gesprek er ook achter komen dat de techniek
toch eigenlijk niet zo werkt zoals ze wilden dat die zou werken.
Techniek frustreert toch nog steeds te vaak. En dan kan dat ene apparaat
wel perfect werken, toch moet er vaak ook informatie van het ene
apparaat (lees ook b.v. software) naar het andere apparaat. En daar gaat
het, ondanks dat we in dit moderne leven zo vaak informatie
uitwisselen, nog vaak mis.Dus. Wat kan ik voor uw organisatie betekenen? Wel, volgens mij kan
een bedrijf op de lange termijn alleen maar succes…
Because computers can multi-tasks
doesn't mean they should. People are actually quite bad at multi tasking. Computers, like any other tool, are made to support tasks. Make things easier to
accomplish. Requiring users to multi task is far from supportive. Every interruption, which switching interfaces is, takes time to
recover from. Hence, instead of promoting the idea of multi-tasking,
computer makers should think more about completing tasks users are
confronted with.
Instead of designing top notch 'solutions' for an entire 'office in a machine', computermakers should design solutions for a single clerk's
job, or maybe even just a part of that job and find a way to nicely integrate in that clerk's job. Computers, or the softmachines powered by them, should be attempts to support an entire
task without forcing the user to switch interfaces during task
execution. Bad and good designs should be tested against the vision of
perfect support for a single (ty…
It turns out that I finally get to understand what I would like to specialize in, a designer of user experiences in the field of I(C)T. But what should that entail? What is it that a User Experience designer can add to the value of a project?A project starts with a goal, or maybe more like a question, e.g. 'I would like to have something that helps you in getting X done'. If you think about it, solving X may be simple. You gather a set of requirements, translate these requirements in a nice graphical user interface, which may even correspond to all accessibility guidelines available at that time and would work of course flawlessly from a technical perspective, and get it implemented. If done correctly, the client will initially be happy (because it does exactly what it was supposed to do, and you may have gotten him or her to agree on a few sketches and flowcharts you drew in the meantime). Such a process, however, is not considering the needs of the actual users. It is hard to get …
