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select

UI for single value selection

Using a dropdown for every single value select is just lazy. You end up with bloated, long forms and a disastrous UX. You’ll bring pain and agony into the user’s life and make the whole experience tedious. Nobody likes to fill out forms, and nobody likes long, monotonous processes. Luke Wroblewski writes about why Dropdowns […]

Tabs in mobile apps | UI Pattern

Tabs in mobile apps

Tabs help organize content on a high level and makes it easy for the users to figure out navigation. It has to communicate relationship and context. It provides an elegant solution to the age-old problem of navigation plus it can also segment data based on a given criteria. In both cases it has to: Show […]

opt-in-out

Defaults save lives

You can use defaults to take the burden of choice off the user. Ultimately you are removing friction from the process of completing tasks, filling out forms. Finding good defaults should be a process rather than a task. Use the data that is already available to you, like location, language, date and time, connect with […]

rating-content

The UI and UX of rating content on mobile

You want to let users democratically decide which content is better, which products are worth while and let them rank items in a way meaningful for them. This gets back to empowering users and letting them use the content in a natural way. When rating content, you might be doing it for yourself or for […]

lazy-signup

Put value first with Lazy Signup

Setting up for a new service requires work. Even entering your email and hitting a button is work. It would be great to have everything magically set up, but we’re not there yet. Try an app or service requires mental effort from the user. If there is too much work needed, people will give up […]

password

Password fields

Passwords are pretty straight forward. Just ask for it and stick another field for the user to confirm. Don’t forget to require some obscure logic to have lowercase characters, at least 3 uppercase and 5 special characters while also being meaningful, since all the gibberish can be easily cracked by brute force algorithms. Oh and […]

favorites

UI for Favorites

Wanting to remember things is very human. We want to know what we saw and where we saw it. This goes back way before computers or mobile and we solved it many different ways before. Starting with writing on walls to carving in wood to putting it down on a napkin or on a post-it […]

Numeric values

Numeric Values

Entering numbers on a mobile phone can be cumbersome. Small touch areas on the keyboard and too many interactions are killing your conversion rate. Traveling with two kids? Planning your next holiday shouldn’t be this dreadful. Avoid the depth of multiple dropdowns for picking if it’s one, two rooms or “other options”. Then select the […]

Bottom Navigation

Bottom Navigation

First and foremost we are designing for humans. Machines can see beneath the curtain, crawlers can build a semantic map of your content and can reach under crazy contraptions for navigation, but humans only understand what they see. And don’t assume they will instantly understand everything that is visible to them. Incrementally improving something that […]

The UI of Date Ranges

The UI of Date Ranges

You may want to look into the future or dissect the past, when searching for some data it is likely you want to do it by filtering on some kind of dates. Don’t be lazy and render 3 dropdowns for month, day and year. That just shows you don’t care for the user. As Luke […]