What should I do, if I am continuously dissatisfied with my graphic and web design work?
This is completely normal. I have ran my own design studio for five years and have been designing for ten years.
What you describe is exactly how I feel about most of my work. I like it as I work on it, but a couple of months after delivering I start getting bored by the designs and spot flaws, etcetera.
This is due to the fact that design is an ongoing process. A design, whether it’s a typeface, a website or an identity, is never finished. There is no end to it. Every time you look at something, you spot different aspects of it, and your mind automatically comes up with solutions and improvements.
I believe this is inherent to a creative mind, and thus something you’ll have to learn to live with.
As for the portfolio: get over it. Put the projects you are really satisfied with upon delivery in it and accept that everything *could* be improved. Most importantly; when you present your work, don’t mention the flaws you see in it. You’re the only person aware of them because no one on earth sees your work more than you do. Instead, talk about the process, the choices you made and how you got to where you are. Also mention how your design fills in the wishes the client had and what you were briefed in the first place.
And last but not least: cherish your creative, opinionated and critical mind. It might seem a burden at times, but it really is a blessing.
How effective are carousels as a way of showcasing website content?
Carousels, especially the auto-forwarding type you seem to refer to, are not an effective way of showcasing website content according to Jakob Nielsen’s studies, explained on this alertbox post: Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility
They require a learned behavior of sitting still and viewing the carousel contents, and nobody these days actually want to do that. Or then they need to bother to actually manually flip through the carousel, and that isn’t even always possible. People connect this type of content to commercials and advertisements: you can’t do anything about them, you don’t know what’s coming next, they are not likely to have important information. In a word, it’s a form of banner-blindness.
IMHO, if carousels relate to any kind of TV experience, it’s the commercial. Do you want to go there?
People land on your page for a purpose. Your auto-forwarding carousel is just as likely to hide the information the user is searching for, as it is to showcase it. People don’t first wait to see if there is an interesting carousel to scan the page, they start scanning the instant the page loads. Watching a carousel is the kind of passive behavior that people usually do not like to indulge in on a site, they want to actively scan the page. If what they are looking for does not show up, they will then leave. You need to know WHY people are landing on your page, and give them the things that they are looking for.
That said, if you are trying to do something that bridges the gap between TV and Web, you might indeed have a case for carousels. If people are landing on your site to check out whether you have the newest shows or movies or other cool content there, you might do well with a carousel that showcases all of your most popular / newest content.
But note that the carousel should not be showcasing features of your site, but rather content, and the content needs to be of a certain kind and of the same kind. So you might have a carousel that showcases the coolest hotels, or a carousel of the best movies, or whatever. So then the user can go: “Oh, they have hotels / movies / whatever on this site”, based on whichever of the items they see, and not miss any vital feature through not watching the whole carousel.
But still, wouldn’t there be a more modern way of achieving the showcase effect? What’s the most important reason a person would be on that page? Make that stand out and keep the other things secondary. People always scan your page – the thing is that they do this in a very very short time. If your page manages to catch their attention with what they are looking for (or something else that is REALLY interesting), they will stay. If it doesn’t, they will leave. 🙂
Who needs an external on/off Wi-Fi button?
It puzzles me that there are Laptops which are shipped with external physical Wi-Fi buttons. I see no real use of it, but it might have a historical explanation?! The only time one notice the external button is when one accidentally pushes the switch off, resulting in no data connection and “the internet is lost”. So my question is simply “Who needs an external on/off Wi-Fi button?”
How many characters should typical address fields allow on an international website?
On an HTML form, What is the maximum amount of characters that should be allowed for:
Street Address 1
Street Address 2
Town/Suburb
State/Province (I would have drop downs for main countries, but I can’t list every one in the world)
Post…
What should be my first steps as Director of User Experience?
I’d be thinking about doing all of these things.
- Meet everybody – not just the designers. Pay especial attention to any person or group who touches customers – sales, customer support, technical authors, etc. – or who drives product direction – CEO, product managers, etc.
- Get everybody to tell you stories. About how the company started and how the product got to its current state. Almost nothing about the company culture gets written down – especially in early stage startups. The quickest way to get a handle on the company and its politics are to listen to peoples stories about how the company got to where it is now. They may not be true – but they will be useful.
- Who are you replacing and why? You might not be replacing somebody with your job title – but people will have been trying to do the work. Find out who those people are. Listen to the stories they have to tell. The company didn’t promote from the inside. Figure out why.
- More leading. Less doing. Remember as a director your job is not to do all of the UX work – it’s to lead all of the UX work. Designers seem more susceptible than most to the sin of micro-management.
- Figure out what the company believes their product vision(s) are. What do people think they are building? Do not be surprised if different parts of the company have different ideas of what this is.
- Figure out what the company believes their customer(s) are. Who do people think they are building for? Do not be surprised if different parts of the company have different ideas of who these are.
- Figure out who the company’s customers really are, and what they think the product vision is. Do not be surprised if these differ from (5) and (6).
- Look before you leap. The temptation to immediately jump in and start fixing things is worth resisting. Watch how things normally run for a week or two first. Figure out what the biggest problems are – not the most obvious ones.
- Get alignment as a first step. Get everybody on the same page on the direction of the product and the customers it serves. This doesn’t have to be final. It doesn’t even have to be vaguely correct. But it’s much easier to move everybody once they’re in a group heading in the same direction.
What should be my first steps as Director of User Experience?
If there are other designers who report to you, set up regular 1-on-1 meetings. They’ll tell you where the problem spots are.
Arrange interviews with users. They too will tell you what the problems are.
Meet with the executives. What’s their vision for the product?
Armed with this knowledge, map out where the product needs improvement and then pick something small to get an easy win right off the bat. if there’s been no one in your position, it’ll be good to demonstrate value quickly.
What is a proper verb form to use for a Web App?
I’m creating a web app for services like CRM, Helpdesk, etc, and I’m wondering what might be the best verb form to use to address users… Why?
There will be a lot of tooltips, help guides, instructions, etc, and most importantly…command bu…
Form for inputting operating hours of a business
I am designing an interface where restaurants need to input their operating hours. I am thinking of using a slider control for timings for a single day, and then let the user choose days of the week on which that timeline wou…
Design: What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design?
Here’s a pretty good resource for learning UX/UI design, if I do say so myself.
There is a difference between UI design and UX design. There is a lot of overlap though, so I’ll try to bundle them together. Here it is, in ten simple steps.
#1 Discover the problem
Far too many designers sit down to work on a new project without doing any research at all. Their thought process usually goes something like this….
No. Stop.
I’m sure your new CSS technique is wonderful but the point of designing an interface or experience is to solve a set of problems. As much as I’m partial to CSS animations and Proxima Nova, these things are more improvements to solutions than they are solutions to problems.
Stop looking at websites and wincing at misaligned elements, native fonts and ugly color schemes. Start looking at websites as solutions, solutions to problems. Problems might include:
– Not optimized for mobile
– Not accessible to screen readers or color blind people.
– 12 second load time
– Value of the app not immediately obvious
– Too many steps in sign up flow
#2 Get to know your users
It’s much easier to solve problems when you first figure out who is experiencing them. Find out as much as you can about your users before you start.
– What is their average age?
– What browser do they use?
– How did they find your site?
– What do they want from your site?
– What does your site want from them?
#3 Learn to wireframe properly
So, now that we know who our users are and what problems they are experiencing, we can start redesigning our homepage, right?
Wrong.
One of the most common mistakes I see in UX design is the reflex to automatically start with the homepage. It’s tempting to guide the user from the homepage to where you want them to be. However, in a lot of cases, the homepage is not always the landing page. Perhaps your blog is where most users begin their journey.
Open a Google Doc. Make a list of all your site’s entry points. Now, starting with the most important entry page, take your pen and paper and start adding content. Let’s pretend we’re wireframing our blog.
So, we need a heading, the article body, the date, th…..wait. Do you really need to add the date? Does the date affect the relevance of your article? If so, add it. If not, leave it out. Keep going until you have all the necessary elements added.
Now you want to start thinking about where to guide the user. Maybe you want them to tweet your article? Maybe you want to show them related articles. Maybe you want to guide them to your homepage? Offer too many options and they will probably do nothing. So choose wisely.
Make sure every single piece of content you add has a valid reason for being there. It must serve a purpose, solve a problem. If it doesn’t, remove it.
Rinse and repeat with all other entry points. Regardless of where the user enters your site, it should be easy for them to complete their tasks and reach the desired goal.
#4 Communicate effectively
It is your job to communicate the information your users want in the quickest, most effective way possible.
Video and images are very effective forms of communication. Study well designed websites and see how they frequently use images and icons to communicate.
Don’t make your users work any harder than necessary. Most users scan websites rather than read them. Give each section of the page a heading, so users can quickly scan to the section they’re interested in. Make sure you keep your headings short and sweet. Experiment until you have effectively communicated what you’re trying to say in the simplest way possible.
Too long winded.
Better.
Bleeding edge.
#5 Guide your users
When a user lands in your app and doesn’t immediately see how it can benefit them, chances are they’re gonna leave and won’t be coming back anytime soon. Don’t base all your design decisions on how the app will perform when it’s full of data. Design the journey.
#6 Encourage your users
When a user makes a mistake, don’t just inform them in a cold manner and leave them to figure out the solution.
If you do this, they will blame you and you will lose their trust instantly. Instead, let them know they made a mistake in a polite, even perhaps humorous way and then point to the solution.
#7 Reward your users
Likewise, when your users do something right, reward them. Don’t just inform them of their success like any robot would.
Congratulate them in a human tone. Reward your users and they will feel compelled to use your product. Make them feel loved. In turn, they will love your product.
When the user’s experience is greater than the user’s expectation, trust is established. Establishing trust as early as possible is paramount to providing a good user experience.
#8 Learn the basic fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, Python etc.)
Enough said.
#9 Learn visual design
Lots of UX designers think they don’t need to know about color or typography. Others say it’s a complete waste of time. It’s not. The problem is, designers are frequently using visual solutions to solve UX problems. If your users are having trouble completing the checkout process, making your buttons a little shinier is not going to help.
However, assuming you have your user flows in good order, improving your visual design will help your users trust you more.
Gaining a good understanding of visual concepts will not only empower you with the ability to design awesome buttons.
Layout, balance, alignment and contrast are essential skills when it comes to figuring out the most efficient way of organizing information on a page.
#10 Study. Study. Study.
There are countless resources out there for learning about design. Here are just a few to get you started:
Resources
Smashing Magazine
Aarron Walter (aarron) on Twitter
Paul Irish (paul_irish) on Twitter
Responsive Design
Ryan Singer (rjs) on Twitter
Chris Coyier (chriscoyier) on Twitter
www.designskool.com
CSS-Tricks
AaronRobbs (AaronRobbs) on Twitter
Designing for Emotion
Welcome | Voice and Tone
Dribbble – Popular
iOS Mobile Patterns
The Main Tap › PatternTap
Google
Designer News
Awesome Sites
http://mailchimp.com
https://yourkarma.com/
http://facebook.com
http://layervault.com/
Good luck 🙂
Should we ask for name on card even though it’s not required for credit card payments?
The name on card is not used when processing credit card payments. Paypal does not ask the user to enter the name on card when saving a card to the “wallet”, while Amazon.com does.
The benefit of asking for it is that the user can feel mo…