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Food Design Digest, March 2020

The digest has been collecting fresh articles on interface design, as well as tools, patterns, cases, trends and historical stories since 2009. I carefully filter a large stream of subscriptions so that you can upgrade your professional skills and better solve work tasks. Previous issues: April 2010-February 2020 .

Food Design Digest, March 2020

Design Management Patterns: Online Conference

On May 28, I will supervise another online conference on design management. It will feature the heads of large and medium-sized design and UX research teams: Alexei Chupin (MTS), Sofya Chebanova (Wargaming), Yuri Solodovnikov (Alfa-Bank), Lena Liseeva (Rambler Group), Ivan Solovyov (DocDoc), Vectorly competency map tool makers and I are from Raiffeisenbank. Students of the same course - almost for free.



Patterns and best practices


Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklists PDF

Powerful collection of checklists for interface patterns from Smashing Magazine. PDF sent after registration.



Mobile Tutorials - Wasted Effort or Efficiency Boost?

Alita Joyce of the Nielsen / Norman Group talks about an interesting study of educational screens on mobile. They should make the interface more understandable, but rather create a sense of complexity for the user.



Modal vs Page - A Decision Making Framework

Great tutorial on choosing interface patterns for presenting additional information from Ryan Neufeld. When to take the user to a separate page, when to show a pop-up or other dynamic element.


Always Explain Why the 'Phone' Field Is Required (58% of Sites Don't)

Bayward's Edward Scott recalls that it is important to specify why a company has a user's phone number. This increases confidence and the probability of filling the field.



Animated GIFs in Email Are Worse Than Static Emails

Kim Flaherty of the Nielsen / Norman Group talks about a small user study of animated GIFs in mailing lists. They are more of a problem for readers than good (although the performance may well be good).

Inspired Design Decisions With Otto Storch - When Idea, Copy, Art And Typography Became Inseparable

Andy Clarke continues a series of experiments with an interesting magazine layout on the web. In the seventh issue, he parses the work of Otto Storch.



Good abandonment on search results pages

On rethinking the role in providing information to users.



Design systems and guidelines


Bootstrap 5

A new version will be released in the spring.



User understanding


iPadOS 13.4

The cursor appeared, and in the new iPad Pro trackpad (the keyboard, by the way, works like a stand in the spirit of a regular monitor). An interesting entry to hybrid devices from the other side.
image

Jim Kalbach - The Jobs To Be Done Playbook

Jim Kalbach’s “The Jobs To Be Done Playbook” pre-ordered. She comes out in April at Rosenfeld Media in April.

Information architecture, conceptual design, content strategy


7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map

Kim Flaherty of the Nielsen / Norman Group talks about analyzing a customer journey map to find problems and growth points. Good memo with examples.



New Interface Design Tools


Sketch 64

The ability to change the color in the symbol (ideal for icons), a redesigned menu of components and general optimization.



Protopie 4.3

Components inside components, snap to pixel grid, background blur effect in iOS.

Drama 2.0

An update has been released with components and other useful features.

Figma: Plugins


  • Coda : Insert data from Spotify, Wikipedia, Dropbox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, Shopify, Github and other services.
  • Table Paste : Insert tables from Excel.
  • Vector Maps : Insert a vector map of any part of the world.
  • LilGrid : Organizes the scattered elements into a clear grid.
  • LottieFiles : An animation plugin is now available in Figma.
  • BeatFlyer Lite : Animation.
  • GiffyCanvas : GIF from the layout.
  • Webgradients : Plugin from the creators of the gradient generator.
  • TinyImage Compressor : Image Optimization.


Articles

Lyft's Alex Lockwood talks about automating the work of designers and developers with plugins .

Flowfield art

A simple graphics generator based on line flows.

Broider

A simple tool for creating a 9-part border on CSS.

Tartanify

A generator of Scottish checkered patterns with an SVG output. How did they do it .



colors.lol

Banter over pretentious color names in the form of outrageous palettes.

Moooie

Generator of popular banner sizes and video ads from one master. History of creation .

Snapfont

The plugin for Chrome allows you to quickly try on fonts on an existing site.



User research and testing


How to hire for ResearchOps - skills, experience and potential

Kate Towsey describes her understanding of the role of ResearchOps based on Atlassian experience. Who their team consisted of and how she interacted with individual researchers.

The Discovery Phase in UX Projects

Maria Rosala of the Nielsen / Norman Group describes a methodology for studying the space of problems at the exploratory stage of the design process. Excellent overview of methods and results.

Another article on recruiting is how to live if you find it difficult to find respondents to study.

Natalia Mishina from Kontur gives tips on finding respondents for custom research. Especially in situations where it is not easy.



Roadmapping for more strategic research

HubSpot's Julie Fischer talks about how a team forms a custom research plan. Everything cannot get there, so prioritization is needed.


Does the Von Restorff Effect Influence User Preference?

Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis are exploring the Von Restorff effect, which could potentially describe the difference between front-end solutions. They conducted an experiment to identify the most visible alternatives, but did not receive a simple answer.

Incentive calculator

Reward calculator for Ethnio user research respondents. Tries to take into account the country.



How we're pivoting - researching from a distance

Ariel Chernin and Cassie Kaiser from Shopify talk about the work of the UX and marketing research team in a pause in using most of the familiar methods.



No, COVID-19 Is Not Skewing Your User Experience Research

Rob Tannen's thoughts on how relevant user research is under quarantine, which greatly changes people's behavior.

Unintentional biases

Elissa Darnell describes three types of unconscious cognitive biases within product teams that should help solve user research.

The medium and the message

Shopify's Paulina Barlik of Shopify weighs the pros and cons of different formats for presenting user research results. She gives a recommendation on the most popular artifacts.



Practices and Challenges of Using Think-Aloud Protocols in Industry - An International Survey

Mingming Fan, Serina Shi and Khai N. Truong interviewed 197 user researchers on the characteristics of the method in which the respondent voiced their thoughts out loud. Nuances and pitfalls.


UX expert kitchen - how to prepare a heuristic product rating

Usethics Olga Kryukova tells how to compare different products by heuristics. She gives an example for restaurants.

Avoiding User Research No-Shows

Jonathan Walter gathered advice from colleagues from Rockwell Automation on situations where the respondent did not come to user research.

A guide to asking the right user research questions

A guide to formulating the right questions for user research from Jeremiah Lam, depending on the task.

User research as a natural process in product development

Marina Stepanova from Uchi.ru talks about the process of user research in the company.



Visual programming and design in the browser


A Variable Fonts Primer

A group of enthusiasts has launched a memo site on the introduction of variable fonts and work with them.

New scripts



Work with color on the web

HCL Easy : Color Palette Generator for Disabled Users by Mos.ru Team

Metrics and ROI


Your team does not know the key product metrics. Why and how to fix it

Oleg Yakubenkov writes about the importance of constantly reminding key metrics to the product team. He talks about his Facebook experience and how that knowledge was constantly refreshed.

Design Management and DesignOps


UX Hiring - The Performance Profile is a Game Changer

Jared Spool describes his approach to hiring designers based on Lou Adler's book “Hire with Your Head”. He focuses on what should change after the successful work of a new person.


In the second article, he describes an approach to collecting preliminary information about candidates , which helps both the company and the designer himself to better understand common points.

What do I want to do with my c̶a̶r̶e̶e̶r̶ life?

Evelyn Kim from Uber shares his template for holding 1: 1 meetings and maintaining a competency map as a whole. The template itself .

Understanding cultural

Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong give tips on changing the culture at a company that helps good design.

Teamwork


How to work with distributed design teams

While authoritative people are trying to figure out who crowned the virus, a huge number of product teams suddenly became deleted for themselves ( an impressive list around the world ). This is a difficult format of work and it’s difficult to start without preparation (about how to crank out an agile transformation in two weeks). But there are no options, so you need to learn on the go. Here is a bunch of good tips for distributed design teams that have been released recently.





Company Experience: Gitlab

GitLab has long been working completely remotely and put together a whole mini-wikipedia.



Trello

Templates are available for some of them.



Shopify (and one more )

Complexity depends on the degree of distribution and, oddly enough, the easiest way is with completely dispersed people - then there is no local group that inevitably becomes the core of all activities.



Microsoft

How united disparate design teams working on Outlook.

Nielsen / Norman Group

A selection of their materials on the topic. The company all the years of its existence worked without an office .



Zendesk

Practices and methods taking into account several countries and time zones.

Mark boulton

Advice to design teams that suddenly became remote amid caratnins and self-isolation.

Methods and Tools: 1: 1 Meetings

Miro. A template for fixing discussion topics and results.



Sprint brand

When rebranding Miro.



Working sessions

Tools : generation and evaluation of ideas, mapping. Their last article on creating CJM in this format. The same from Cisco .





Generation of ideas

A synchronous and asynchronous approach to generating ideas. Most of the iconic conferences and mass events in the world are canceled or rescheduled . And user research is moving to a remote format. But the shares of Zoom are growing. And the same InVision initially works completely remotely.







Foundational UX Workshop Activities

Sarah Gibbons of the Nielsen / Norman Group describes the basic activities for any working session in the form of manuals.



Cases


Designing teamwork - How our customers helped shape the future of Slack

Anna Niess and Zack Sultan talk about the latest Slack redesign. They describe the logic behind each interface solution.



How holistic UX design increased GitLab.com free trial signups

Matej Latin talks about redesigning test account registrations at GitLab. A Kevin Comoli training manual helps design the entire script.

The Power of Storytelling in Onboarding New Users

Maura Byrne talks about refining the new user meeting process at HubSpot. The combination of the demo mode and the good storytelling along the way has great boosted metrics.



Digital Product Branding


Creating Virgin Atlantic's Digital Design System, part 1

Ed Vinicombe from Virgin Atlantic talks about the unification of the design of all platforms - the site, application, entertainment systems on board the aircraft. The article is presented as a story about the design system, but there is no technological component, but there are a bunch of completely different carriers.

Story


Absolute list: VKHUTEMAS 100

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the VKHUTEMAS school (Higher art and technical workshops), the first national school of professional design. Bang Bang Education prepared a large selection of materials about her

Trends


Tech in 2020: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Presentation of Benedict Evans on Internet regulation in the world as one of the main technological trends.

United Nations Global Call Out To Creatives - help stop the spread of COVID-19

The UN turned to designers to help prepare informational notes on the fight against coronavirus. This is a much better way to channel your creative energy than another unsolicited redesign of a major service. Parsing from It's Nice That .



Voice Interfaces


Three Questionnaires for Measuring Voice Interaction Experiences

Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis describe three questionnaires designed to evaluate the quality of voice interfaces. These are The Mean Opinion Scale (MOS), Subjective Assessment of Speech System Interfaces (SASSI) and Speech User Interface Service Quality (SUISQ).



Conversion design

A selection of articles by the Google design team about goal interfaces and bots.

The Fritzes 2020 Winners

The best movie interfaces for 2019, according to the authors of the book Sci-Fi Interfaces. By the way, they launched a YouTube channel with cuts from films .



For general and professional development




Senongo Akpem - Cross-Cultural Design

A Book Apart has released Senongo Akpem's Cross-Cultural Design. It is dedicated to incorporating different cultures into interface design. Excerpt from it .

People and companies in the industry


Fiverr: it's bad, guys - it's bad

Geoffrey Bunting firmly committed itself to the low-cost Fiverr freelancers service for squeezing all the juices out of designers and cheating customers. Ico-D article on the same topic .

Subscribe to the digest on Facebook , VKontakte , Telegram or by mail - there fresh links appear every week. Thanks to everyone who shares the links in the group, especially Gennady Dragun, Pavel Skripkin, Dmitry Podluzhny, Anton Artemov, Denis Efremov, Alexei Kopylov, Taras Brizitsky, Evgeny Sokolov and Anton Oleinik. Special thanks to the Setka team for the editor and Alexander Orlov for the visual style.

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