Simon Willison’s Weblog

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25 items tagged “ui”

2013

How long should I budget for an experienced designer to design a responsive ecommerce store?

There’s no single answer to this—it depends on the scope of the project. A one-page store selling 3 items is quicker to design than a thousand page store with dozens of category homepages etc.

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What are the best web design and web development conferences/ meetups in Central & Eastern Europe (2013)?

We have a list of Web Design conferences and events in Central and Eastern Europe on Lanyrd—you might find our full list of Conferences in Central and Eastern Europe useful as well.

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What would be the best design conference to attend in 2013?

That’s a pretty tricky question to answer... there are a lot of excellent UX conferences around (we’re listing 69 upcoming UX events on Lanyrd at the moment, and more get added frequently). A few things you should consider:

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2012

How do you make an existing web application more mobile-friendly without rebuilding it?

Learn about responsive web design. Provided your site is built reasonably well using CSS for layout there is a TON of stuff you can do with CSS media queries to make your site work better on small screen devices. For example, using media queries to detect small screen (mobile) devices you can...

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What’s the best app to present animations and/or interactions for a UI/UX project?

I’ve seen designers use both Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote for this purpose to great effect.

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Which sites do a good job of guiding first time users?

The Twitter sign up process is fascinating, and constantly evolves. I create a new Twitter account every six months or so just to see what their latest iteration looks like.

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What activities, games or examples have you used to persuade developers that they are different from ’real’ users?

I doubt there’s anything as effective as getting them to watch a well-run usability test—either a video, a fancy one-way glass setup or just having them quietly observe a zero-budget testing session in a coffee shop.

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2011

What are some good user interface/user experience workshops/conferences coming up this March(p.s. distance isn’t a factor, I’m willingly to travel)?

We have a list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-ex...—the best option in March looks to be Adaptive Path’s MX conference: http://lanyrd.com/2011/mx/ / http://mxconference.com/

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What are the best free resources to begin learning UX design?

We’re collecting videos and slides from conference sessions covering user experience on Lanyrd—here’s 10 videos and 14 slide decks:

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2010

What UX/UI conferences in the SF Bay area are worth attending?

BayCHI is excellent from what I’ve heard: http://www.baychi.org/

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To what extent is it still valid to assume that your web app users are stupid?

They’re not stupid, but they’re probably WAY less web literate than you might expect—unlike you, they haven’t spent their entire career learning how the web works. See the famous “What is a browser?” video the Google Chrome team released:

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Why do so few companies use the Dojo Toolkit?

Dojo is fantastic software, but it does a lot more than the other libraries and consequently has a much higher learning curve. It’s advanced features may serve as something of a disadvantage for achieving more widespread adoption—most developers don’t need the more advanced abstractions provided by Dojo when they start their projects, and by the time they DO need that stuff they’ve already written a ton of code using another library!

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The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data. # 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm

2009

A piece with a lot of screenshots about the close tab behaviour in Google Chrome. If you click “close” with your mouse, Chrome doesn’t resize the remaining tabs until you mouse away from the area. This means you can click “close” multiple times without having to chase the close button. I hadn’t noticed this, partly because Chrome doesn’t do it if you hit Command-W. They even switch the position of the close button in RTL languages such as Arabic. # 11th December 2009, 9:19 am

Chromium OS User Experience. The 2 minute UI concept video is probably the best way to understand the ideas behind Google’s Chrome OS. # 19th November 2009, 10:12 pm

pudb. A full-screen, curses console based visual debugger for Python, built using the urwid console UI library. # 1st November 2009, 12:09 pm

Collection: Search Patterns. Peter Morville’s enormous collection of screenshots of search engine interfaces. # 30th July 2009, 12:35 pm

2008

Showers and UI design. UI issues aside, why is it so hard to build a shower where the settings for freezing cold and scaldingly hot are more than a couple of millimeters apart? # 14th December 2008, 8:21 am

2007

CSSEdit 2.5 Out Now! (via) Like John Gruber says, this is the best implementation of application tabs I’ve ever seen. # 23rd April 2007, 8:26 pm

Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows. Interesting graphs that break down browser window maximisation by operating system. # 17th April 2007, 4:22 pm

factoryjoe: Design Patterns. Chris Messina’s collection of user interface design pattern screenshots, collated on Flickr. # 10th April 2007, 11:22 am

How to beat Google, part 1. Rick Skrenta with 12 steps to taking on Google in the search engine space, including some great insights in to smart UI design. # 27th March 2007, 12:02 am

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces. # 22nd January 2007, 9:39 pm

Apple’s Next-Generation Themes. Cabel’s spotted an Apple patent with screenshots of their in-house tool for creating resolution independent user interface themes. # 8th January 2007, 11 pm

2004

Race conditions in security UI. A vulnerability that is even more effective against advanced users (i.e. fast typists). # 2nd July 2004, 4:14 pm