748 articles on Design & UX.
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask how you can prove the value of a Design System and how you can pitch it effectively to stakeholders. Vitaly talks to Ben Callahan to find out more.
A Q&A with the design and research leader on the heels of Figma’s integration with Microsoft Teams.
With the “Back” button, users often get confused and frustrated. How to design a better back button UX and where to put those “Back” buttons in our interfaces.
Christine highlights some of Figma’s features and possibilities to help you build a design that aligns with code as much as needed and improve your team work.
The power of framework-specific UI libraries, such as Skeleton, can lead to more productivity using the combined ability of Svelte and Tailwind to build modern web-based apps.
In this episode, we ask how you can affect change to UX design in large organizations stuck in their ways. Vitaly talks to Marko Dugonjić to find out.
In this article, Catherine Houle and Ilknur Eren share how their organization “Understood” removes barriers for people who learn and think differently by combining accessibility and usability in their processes. They also cover basic steps on how to fix common accessibility issues.
20+ updates across everything from shortcuts to design features.
A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam
Design is one of those disciplines that has a very low barrier to entry. But what isn’t so easy is acquiring the softer skills that you’ll need when entering this job market. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a mentor or a guide, which is why we often have to rely on “working it out” by ourselves. In this article, Luis Ouriach tries to help you in this task so that you can walk into the de
With Event Scheduling for Waiting Room, you can protect your servers from being overloaded during your event while delivering a user experience that is unique to the occasion and consistent with your brand
The hype surrounding the metaverse is making many companies and people, including designers, experience FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). As a designer, you may be tasked with figuring out how your company should approach the metaverse or thinking about designing for the metaverse. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will discuss a few steps he recommends before diving headfirst into any design for the metav
Using a data visualization case study, we will explore how an accessibility-first approach led us down the path of creating a better visual design for charts. Throughout the article, we will highlight how we used the seemingly constraining [Web Content Accessibility Standards](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/) (WCAG) to become an empowering factor in our design process. We will also discuss how this
Pricing pages can be complex and confusing. Let
In this article, John Scott Bowie shares the story of 40 years of attempts to advance corporate UX maturity that — after numerous initiatives with marginal results — culminated in a breakthrough project that accelerated a company’s UX maturity from “Emergent” to “User-Driven” in less than a year.
The next decade of design jobs just got an upgrade.
A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam
Overcorrecting for one form of disability may unintentionally negatively impact the experience for other forms of disability. For example, partially visually hidden link names may work great for people who use screen readers, but this approach can be problematic for people who rely on voice control software. Because of this, your designs need to be flexible and adaptable, as well as accommodate th
User interface designers work with tables on a daily basis. The table is often a complex combination of text components, lines, rectangles, and icons which could be very difficult to work with, especially if you also need to support different screen resolutions, change the order of columns, and use real-life content. In this article, Andrii shares his approach to managing tables in Figma with a bi
The physics behind spring animations
All the data in the world won’t do anyone any good if we can’t make sense of it. Or better yet, make it sing. This edition of Web Design Done Well showcases magnificent examples of data visualization on the web, and closes with some of the countless resources available to those who want to learn to make their own.
Learn why the GitHub Design Infrastructure team built a dedicated color tool and how they use it to create new color palettes for GitHub.
Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field discusses our new partnership with Google Chromebooks
In this article, Ken Harker explains what third-party resource requests really are and which common optimization strategies can help reduce the impact on the user experience. By carefully considering how third-party requests will fit into your website during the design stage, you’ll be able to avoid the most significant negative impacts.
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask why accessibility really matters and why it is so important to get it right. Smashing’s Vitaly Friedman talks in-depth to Sara Soueidan to find out.
Great content on an interface “just works”; it disappears into a delightful user experience while leading happy users to success, whatever it is they’re trying to get done with a given product
In this article, Vijay describes his learning experiences during the design stages of creating his 3dicons image library (a free library for product screens, social media posts and marketing campaigns), which you can download and use for free.
Announcing a prototype screen reader beta
“Should I use pixels or rems?”. In this comprehensive blog post, we'll answer this question once and for all. You'll learn about the accessibility implications, and how to determine the best unit to use in any scenario.
Web design should be fun and accessible for anyone. After all, when we build a new website, our primary goal is to share our idea, product, or service with the world, not to dive into solving technical problems. Let’s take a closer look at how you can create your very own WordPress site up and running created and hosted with the [Elementor Cloud Website](https://elementor.com/features/cloud/?utm_s
An overview of Shopify Flow's new orchestration language Maestro, highlighting its design and implementation as well as how neatly it integrates with and addresses the requirements.
Announcing the winners of the first-ever Figma Community Awards
In this article, Denis Studennikov will be taking a closer look at a design case study and discuss possible reasons why its customers abandon their online shopping carts and what solutions are recommended in each particular case.
How difficult can it be to design a bulletproof language selector? It’s not as straightforward as one might think. We need to avoid redirects, decouple our language and country presets, allow for overrides, and use non-modal windows. Can we fix it? Absolutely! We just need to decouple presets, allow for overrides and allow users to specify their intent.
As developers, it can be tempting to grab a pre-styled UI framework like Material UI or Bootstrap. Seems like a great way to outsource design and save a bunch of time, right? In my experience, this is an unrealistic expectation, and things don’t quite work out that way.
A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam
We should be able to measure how well a particular design solves a particular problem. Let’s explore design KPIs that capture user’s experience, how to measure them and how to keep both users and business stakeholders happy, over time. In this [series of articles](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/design-patterns/), we highlight design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. Y
Given our increasing dependency on digital interactions, advocating for good UX will become increasingly necessary, as our reliance on digital tools continues to grow. When bad UX has lingered in a product for so long, it can feel like a mountain to overcome. In this article, Ceara Crawshaw shares her advice on how you can invoke joy and assure the quality in the work done on product teams.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for any UX designer. It helps create a product and understand the people who use it. In this article, Marli Mesibov takes a real-life example of an app she helped to build in 2017 and explains five steps you can use to help you build a story into your user experience.
Carousels have plenty of accessibility issues, they often exhibit low click-through rates, can be very disruptive when auto-advancing and people frequently scroll past through them. In this series of articles, we highlight design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. You can find more examples in “Smart Interface Design Patterns”, a 10h-video course with 100s of hand-picked examples
Breadcrumbs UX are often neglected, but they can be extremely helpful when designing a complex navigation. We can improve them with sideways navigation, clearer breadcrumbs paths and accordions on mobile.
How Figma is expanding internationally
Good interface design shows the right things at the right moment. We need to understand when to display a call to action, and how to build a relationship with the user before promting them to act.
iCloud Private Relay is an Apple service for browsing more privately and securely. Learn how to ensure the best user experience using iCloud Private Relay.
A round-up of updates and improvements to Figma and FigJam
As a design community, we all can’t be silent in these times. We need to be united in our fight against the war, for democracy, for those dreams that children are entitled to have when they are growing up. It’s our obligation to help as much as we can. **We are donating all proceeds** of the “[Interface Design Checklists PDF](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/printed-books/checklist-cards/)” to sup
A useful little UI widget. Click the add-to-calendar button, get a list of calendar apps, the user selects which one, and they get a download.
Think of color spaces as a physical map where individual colors are points on the map. Gradients walk from one point on the map to the next.
Introducing new plans for FigJam and Figma Enterprise
It’s shipping! Meet “Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces”, our brand-new guide with guidelines and best practices to improve usability and accessibility on mobile. 400 pages. For designers and developers working with mobile UIs. Jump to details and get the book right away.
32 updates across everything from shortcuts to design features
Administration experience is often assumed or glossed over in software because 99% users never engage with it directly. Yet this is one critical area that, when used effectively, can tie closely to a company’s business strategy and affects the bottom line. In this article reveals how something as trivial as administration in both software and As-a-service can be either a booster or bottleneck to a
How we tested, iterated, and rolled out updates to comments in Figma
What goes into creating a successful design system? How can you take your testing workflow to the next level? And what smart interface design patterns could help you enhance your UIs? Let’s figure it out. With our [online workshops on front-end and UX](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops).
If you are a beginner at design and are willing to learn UI (user interface), UX (user experience) and product design, then this article is definitely for you! In [Part 1](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/01/ten-tips-aspiring-designer-beginners-part1/), Luis Ouriach shared advice he wished he had when starting out in his career. In this second and last part of this series, Luis continues shar
Every so often, I accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Accessibility is one of them! Here are 8 helpful accessibility links.
A meaningful user experience is what can set your site apart from others. But what makes an experience truly meaningful? And how to achieve that? The tools, tips, and resources in this post not only help you to come up with a UX strategy that works for you and your team but also to circumvent potential UX pitfalls.
Modern HMIs are transforming the way we interact with our vehicles. A car becomes a gadget that we use in a similar way as we use our phones. Users expect a lot of HMI, they even evaluate car experience based on the experience they have with HMI. In this article, let’s look at some ways to help us satisfy users’ needs with proper design.
The trends, insights, and surprises that we saw in Figma and FigJam this year
Before we can talk about how people interact, much less how to take advantage of that knowledge and design, it’s important to understand a bit about the history, the technology, and what today counts as a mobile touchscreen device at all. Touchscreens and our standard paradigms of interaction are not the same as the real physical world; touchscreen behaviors are as learned as the use of a mouse or
