As we head into Thanksgiving, I’m reminded to be grateful for bad UX because it shows the value of good design and lets me do what I love. This is the last week to enter the November giveaway for a chance to win a free Rosenfeld Media book. I’ll announce the winner next issue, as well as a new contest, and another guest curator.
Have a great weekend and enjoy the turkey,
— Kenny
Articles
7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI
Are you a UX designer that wants to improve your visual aestetics? These 7 rules by Erik Kennedy will guide you in creating beautiful UI. Part 2 is here.
UX for the Enterprise
Do you design the UX of internal tools for your company? Jordan Koschei takes us through common problems and how we can improve people’s lives by giving internal tools the same attention as consumer interfaces.
How I Got Hired by DigitalOcean
See how Joel Califa went above and beyond when redesigning a flow through critique, user interviews, sketching, and design.
5-Steps For Getting Started Measuring The Customer Experience
Using a simple 5-step framework, you can focus on what’s real important in the customer experience and figure out if you should fix some bugs or develop a new feature.
Lifecycle Emails: Magic Pixie Dust for User Onboarding
Unless your product is super basic, there’s a very good chance that a new user won’t get to experience all the value you have to offer in their very first sitting. Enter lifecycle emails.
Sponsored Link
The World Usability Day Giveaway – A competition worth ENGAGING with
Optimal Workshop is celebrating World Usability Day 2014 by giving away $30,000 of UX tools and services to one lucky winner. The Ultimate UX Toolkit consists of annual subscriptions to companies such as UserTesting, Crazy Egg, Loop 11, and Rosenfeld Media.
Enter by uploading an image of something you find engaging (online or off) and a description of why it engages you. Read more
Interested in sponsoring a future issue? Contact me.
Tools & Resources
Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines: Designing for Apple Watch
If you are planning to design for the Apple Watch, you should read these guidelines. A lot of the same principles are found in the Android Wear guidelines.
Website Style Guide Resources
A comprehensive list of articles, books, examples, podcasts, talks, tools about styleguides.
Form by RelativeWave
I’ve mentioned Form before but they were just acquired by Google and now offering their prototype tool, which used to cost $80, for free.
Zeplin
A collaboration app for UI designers & frontend developers to quickly turn your designs into powerful specs and guidelines.
Precursor
A real-time collaborative idea tool. Share your URL to collaborate and you’ll instantly have multiple people working in the same document.
Moleskine Smart Notebook
As a fan of Moleskine notebooks, this looks promising – instantly turn your hand-drawn sketches into fully workable vector files accessible within the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Media
Slides: Mobile Design at Gilt
Gilt Senior UX Designer David Park and Senior Interactive Designer Christopher Barr presented on Mobile Design at Gilt and went through the company, UX, and design process, UX/UI patterns, responsive design, and inspiration.
Mobile Navigation, Conversion, Input, & More
If you can set aside two and a half hours, watch this seminar from Luke Wroblewski on optimizing mobile experiences for conversion using design.
Convey UX 2014 Videos
Convey UX is the essential conference for UX practitioners to share and learn. Their upcoming conference is at the end of January but you can watch videos from their 2014 conference.
Portfolios
Christine Walthall
Christine Walthall, a UX designer based in NYC, has case studies detailing the project, her role, her process, and examples of the many deliverables.
Tiffany Ho
Tiffany Ho, another UX designer in New York, shows off her work through images of sticky notes, sketches, usability testing, and more.
Jobs
UX/UI Director at Bungie, Inc. (Bellevue, WA)
Bungie is seeking an experienced UX/UI director with impeccable design sensibilities, a solid technical background, and an unyielding drive to craft beautiful, world class UI systems.
Last But Not Least
Pixactly
Test how well you know your pixels by drawing a box that matches the dimensions given and receive a score based on how close you are.
“If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Llyod Wright, and Pablo Picasso could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?”
— Paul Heckel
