Relative font sizes, or pixel based? 2020-edition

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…

TL/DW: .css_day#ui-special

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.

Josh Clark - A.I. is your New Design Material

Josh urged designers to get feeling for the new design material called AI, the next big thing. We need to know what makes it different, the grain, and also know how we can use it for good. Design might have a seat at the board table, but they need to know how to align user considerations with business goals. More on AI and design by Josh Clark and more.

Steph Troeth - Behind the story

Storytelling used to be all the rage before mobile entered the scene, Steph recalls. Nevertheless, people prefer stories over plain lists of…

Gebruiker als in...

> 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.

Be careful with what you ask for

Since we all seem to know that every other field in the registration form is another percentage of users failing to register*, we think of alternative ways to gather information. We gamify the user profile completeness by adding a progress bar to our user account, we present a full form after the confirmation link or we ask questions while using the application.

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…

No signing in

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…

Wat een beetje murb al niet kan doen.

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…

Why we don't need multi tasking

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…

Don't design to make it usable, but useful

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 …