Osvaldas Valutis is right, using the to trigger the native browser functionality is the way to go. Then style up the label as needed, enhancing with some JavaScript if you like. Same concept as the checkbox hack.
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Styling & Customizing File Inputs the Smart Way is a post from CSS-Tricks
The short answer is “yes”, but it is not as straight forward as that; not all web designers need to be UX designers or UI designers, but they should all have some sort of basic UX understanding since their designs play a significant part in how users experience a product or service.
When a user visits a website or app, the first thing that they experience is the design. Design plays a huge part in shaping the user experience while supporting the brand’s voice and character.
Without… basic user experience…companies may end up with a lovely looking website; but zero conversions
While platform, app and product companies most always hire a UI Designer, web designers usually design websites. Websites, however, are not that different from an app interfaces: there is a menu that guides the user through the content and, ideally, through a funnel; the user needs to be able to understand where the brand wants them to go with an easy to follow intuitive flow.
Without implementing at least basic user experience elements in website design, companies may end up with a lovely looking website; but zero conversions, high bounce rates, and disgruntled visitors.
Blogs and news sites are talking about the “death of web design”, claiming that web design and web designers are a part of the past. The idea behind this trendy topic is that web designers can no longer be just web designers. They are either UX designers or web developers that can design. Companies, and especially startups, want to hire one person to take care of their design requirements without having to hire a UX expert as well.
Today, more and more marketers and companies are beginning to realize the importance of investing in creating a great user experience for their audiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Digital walkthroughs are added, support channels are optimized, and content is written with the user in mind. This has a direct affect on all stages of the customer lifecycle.
When putting an emphasis on user experience throughout the acquisition channels, conversion rates instantly increase. This is done by making the conversion funnel from ads, blogs, or social posts, to a landing page, easy to understand and visually pleasing to the user.
Users that need to spend time finding the next step in the funnel will move on to a competitor. While content plays a huge part of the conversion cycle, web design is the first impression the user gets and they need to instantly know where the company wants them to go in order to move forward.
Customer support is often neglected, or seen as something that requires less investment. It is not something web designers usually think about, but they should.
Once a customer purchases or subscribes, it is important to provide them with the best possible service and support in order to lower support expenses and increase customer satisfaction. One of the ways a lot of companies get this done is by creating a support interface or website for their existing clients. The design of this site needs to be easily understandable, it needs to take into consideration the audience demographic, and it needs to help them get to the information they need easily without having to request human support via chat or phone.
The last part of the customer lifecycle is user retention. It is all about getting the customer to continue paying for the company’s services or products. This relies completely on a user experience that promotes customer satisfaction and web design plays an important part throughout every step to help lead to this point.
Today’s web designers need to think like user experience experts and create designs for their clients. It is easy to fall into the trap of creating something “pretty”, when in reality the purpose of the design is to enhance the audience’s experience. Steve Jobs said, “If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem”.
Every web designer works a little differently. Many prefer discussing the clients’ needs, going over their existing visual branding language, and sending over one or two designs for approval. UX changes that process a little bit and adds a few more steps in-between.
Here are a few things to consider: Discussing UX with the client is important. If the client is experienced in UX and there is a marketing team to work with, that makes things much easier. Otherwise, it is the web designer’s responsibility to discuss the importance of enhancing the user experience, understand what the client is looking for in the design and what the purpose of the website is (generate leads, provide information etc.), and what the brand language is.
The most important information a designer needs in order to create a UX-oriented design is the audience. Don’t just ask what their age, gender, and income is. You need to know where they hang out, what they like to buy and do, and what appeals to them visually. Once the web designer has all of the information at hand, they can create a template or rough design of what they suggest, show it to the client and explain why this specific structure was chosen. It should support the goals discussed in the previous point with the user experience in mind.
Take the entire conversion funnel and customer lifecycle into account so that you create a design that is consistent for the user
After the rough design is approved, that is the time to dive deeper into the design itself. Choose the colors and visual elements based on the brand language and what you know will appeal to the target audience. Make sure that the website is easy to navigate through by showing it to a few people who are not familiar with the brand and what it offers. Take the entire conversion funnel and customer lifecycle into account so that you create a design that is consistent for the user.
User experience is not something you learn once. It is ever changing, intuitive, and involves a lot of trial and error with every new audience you encounter. However, it is important to understand that user experience is a part of everything a company does, or at least it should be. Every action taken should have the user experience in mind and it all starts with the design.
Web designers that can offer user experience expertise and thinking in their design strategy are worth more to companies and are in higher demand.
Featured image, UX design image via Shutterstock.
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The Midwest UX conference reappears again in 2015 with three days of exciting talks and workshops. User experience is a hot topic among all interface designers and this conference will cover everything you’d want to know about the subject.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will be home to this event through October 1st-3rd. The whole program has already been mapped out and you can view the schedule right from the conference website.
This is a rather intruiging event because it offers so much more than just keynotes(although yes, it does have those). Some of the more alternative sessions include hands-on sessions, portfolio reviews, workshops, or general social gatherings.
General admission & workshop tickets are still on sale so register now if you want to reserve your spot.
The Midwest UX conference draws people from all over the US and many other western countries so it’s a great place to meet people and share ideas on all areas of interface design. Plus the various workshops offer a great way to learn more about user experience without needing more than some rudimentary knowledge and your laptop.
Not everyone will be able to attend MWUX but everyone can keep up with the latest happenings through their Facebook page or via live Tweets on the official Twitter account @midwestUX.
Read More at Midwest UX 2015 starts in Pittsburgh early October
As more and more people embrace the smartphone age, the number of consumers online continue to multiply each day. Unlike their counterparts on desktops and laptops, the average smartphone user has gradually bid farewell to the traditional browser.
They now favour mobile apps.
Because of this you may think a mobile app would help put your business in your customer’s pockets. After all, a report from Flurry states that in 2014, 86% of time spent online via smartphones are spent using apps.
However before taking the plunge you should first consider the pros and cons.
There are many advantages to creating a mobile app and using it as a channel to promote your business.
These advantages include the following:
1. More features, more fun!
Mobile apps are software specifically developed to run exclusively on a smartphone or a tablet. App developers wield more control over how content is displayed and can make the most out of the smartphone’s existing functions. This can impress prospective customers. For example, an app can utilize the phone’s camera to take pictures of the customer with the product; or use a GPS location function to offer location-based rewards.
2. A more convenient user experience.
The smartphone market is growing exponentially and with it comes an evolution in online consumer behavior. By having an app developed you can deliver both an improved user experience that can point a prospective customer to accomplish a specific action. This may mean getting them to sign up and create an account or subscribe to a service.
That better user experience even extends offline. Unlike a website, some apps offer offline access for their users enabling consumers to access data or use specific features even if they don’t have Internet access.
This is perfect for those who live in areas where wireless connectivity is problematic.
3. You can generate revenue through your app.
It’s not cheap to have an app made. However the cost of developing an app may be offset through various means.
For example, customers may be asked to pay a small fee to download an app. Mobile ads can be also added to the app with other non-competitor businesses paying for the chance to be advertised on it.
The app itself can be linked to an online payment platform to allow customers to purchase products or services through the app. This can lead to faster transactions and higher conversion rates.
4. In-app search and the app store.
Mobile apps make your business easily accessible to clients. Other than the ease of use that an app promises, it also allows you access to an online space frequented by younger users: the app store.
Whether on iOS or Android, app stores allow people to stumble on your business when they’re using that store’s search. This Moz article quotes two studies—one by Nielsen and one by Forrester—showing that around 61% of consumers find apps through the app store search.
App store listings also appear as separate entries on Google’s search rankings, allowing more people to see your business.
In-app searches also provide substantial results. According to a 2013 Google report, 26% of smartphone users start their online searches using a branded app.
5. Build your brand and get recognized faster through social media.
You can help increase awareness of your brand through an app. Other than being featured in the app store as suggested earlier, apps can be also linked to social media platforms.
Through apps, your customers can easily post, share, or tweet about your services. You can also design social media contests specifically for the users of your app.
6. Stand out from the competition and propel growth.
According to the “The Mobile Revolution: How Mobile Technologies Drive a Trillion-Dollar Impact” study by The Boston Consulting Group and Qualcomm, the fastest-growing small and medium-sized businesses are those that continually adopt advanced mobile technologies.
SMEs that use mobile services more intensively account for 25 percent of the market, with their revenues growing up to two times faster than their competitors.
7. Additional security for your customers.
Mobile apps go through a stringent approval system before they’re placed in the app store.
This assures customers that their personal data is secure; that their smartphones won’t get infected by viruses or malware if they download your app. Consumers may also download updates for the app safely if done through the app store.
Despite the list of advantages, not all businesses or organizations need a mobile app.
Before rushing out to have one developed, first assess the following:
1. The high cost of developing an app.
Mobile apps take more time and money to develop than a website. For starters, you need to have at least two versions developed—one for iOS and one for Android. Then you also have to take into account that you may need to hire a separate team to have the app developed since web development is different from app development.
According to a 2012 Mashable article, the minimum cost to develop an app would be around $10,000. And that is for a very simple app. For apps that have more features, the price would be around $20,000.
If your business cannot spare the resources for this project it is best to optimize your website for mobile instead.
2. The complex app development process.
The kind of OS—whether iOS or Android—isn’t the only thing that developers have to consider when having an app made. Developers also have to account for different screen sizes across devices for both platforms. And it gets more complicated for Android app development since there are many versions of Android currently out on the market.
And even when they’re done, developers must be able to secure the approval of the app stores before the app becomes available for download. If their app is rejected it’s back to the drawing board.
3. Complex maintenance.
It’s not done even when the app has been launched in the app store. Mobile apps require a long-term investment due to the need for updates, especially critical ones such as repairing security vulnerabilities or to ensure compliance with new iOS or Android releases.
Not providing updates may cause the app to malfunction or be rendered unusable when a customer updates his or her phone to the newest OS.
Since code cannot be simply reused across different devices, developers may have to rewrite parts of the app for an update.
4. Profit-sharing with the app store.
If you are considering using your app to drive revenue, either through paid downloads of the app itself or via the purchase of services through the app, then be aware that app stores get a substantial cut of the pie. According to a Cnet article the Apple app store gets around 30% of revenue if you use Apple iTunes as the payment method for your app.
And that’s on top of sales tax.
5. Additional requirements for marketing.
You will still need to promote it so that your previous customers and the general public can download the app.
You may need to update your marketing collaterals online and in print. Some businesses even create on-ground events revolving around the launch of an app. And the standard SEO for websites would not work for an app.
You may need to think about app store optimization with a whole new set of tools that you can use to promote your app.
6. Challenges in tracking and fetching data.
The same security that an app may provide regarding a consumer’s data can be a challenge for businesses as well. For starters, fetching data from the app to track metrics and get data is a different matter.
For example getting Google Analytics to work on an app is different from the website. Developers should integrate the Google Analytics SDK for Android and iOS for this platform to be able to fetch data.
Then you would also have to set up a different set of goals, events, etc. While in the long run all these data are beneficial, it does require a lot of time and effort to set up.
7. Customer impatience.
Mobile apps may offer an engaging user experience for customers, but in turn customers end up expecting more from any app out in the market.
Your app must be flawless the first time the customer uses it. Else you may not as well bother creating one. A bad mobile app is worse than no app at all.
Building an app can be a huge investment. A lot of business owners often jump to the erroneous conclusion that they need an app because it’s the “in” thing to do.
You should only pursue the development of a mobile app for your business after thinking through the following questions:
It may be also necessary to create a survey asking your loyal customers if they would consider using your app. Your decision to create an app should be motivated by your customers.
This would also help determine the platform your app should be first released on and the features that your app should have.
You also have to keep in mind that having an app is not an excuse to neglect your website. Multi-channel marketing is important in this day and age with prospective customers accessing your business from different channels.
Is having an app essential for businesses nowadays? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Author Bio: Vincent Sevilla is a professional graphic designer and web designer for Websitesetup.org, and he also has a background in online marketing. You can follow him on Twitter @easyvince and on Google+.
Read More at The Pros And Cons Of Building A Mobile App for your Business
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It’s 2015 and your choice of browser has proven to be as important as your choice of operating system. Dedicated apps may be competing against browsers on mobile devices, but that is hardly the case in the desktop environment. On the contrary, each year more desktop browsers appear, and some of them can change the way you browse the Internet for the better.
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera dominate the world’s desktop browser market. Whichever statistics you check (NetMarketshare, StatCounter’s GlobalStats or W3Counter), you’ll notice that they often contradict each other in declaring which browser is leading the race. However, no matter which method is used to determine usage share, all sources agree that those five browsers do not own 100% of the world’s desktop browser usage. They may be the most popular, but they are not the only options available for accessing the Internet. So, what about the remaining share?
The post Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Edge? Impressive Web Browser Alternatives appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
SVG has a element which essentially means: go find the chunk of SVG that has this #identifier and kinda clone it and put it right here. It’s an essential indgredient to an SVG icon system. There are some things to know about this that we haven’t covered before.
<!-- Reference IN THIS SAME DOCUMENT -->
<svg>
<use xlink:href="#icon-1"></use>
</svg>
<!-- EXTERNAL reference -->
<svg>
<use xlink:href="sprite.svg#icon-1"></use>
</svg>That that #icon-1 identifier likely references a symbol in that file, like…
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<symbol id="icon-1" viewBox="0 0 1024 1024">
<title>Kinda like alt text</title>
<path class="path-1" d="..."></path>
</symbol>
...
</svg>Also that it’s really simple to work with. You put the correct file path to the file (the “SVG sprite”) and reference an identifier and it just works. You can have your server set to serve that file with all the correct headers such that the browser will hang onto it like it would any other asset you want to cache.
Most browsers that supported inline SVG supported this, so it was almost usable, with the major exception of IE. But they have now fixed that in Microsoft Edge. Edge doesn’t have massive market share yet, but it is the future on Windows, so eventually we’ll be able to start using this without any extra work.
This concept eluded me, and is why I wanted to write this article.
I thought the external reference was the ultimate solution because it could do everything inline SVG referencing SVG in the same document could do. But unfortunately, it can’t. SVG references this way has it’s own separate DOM. It goes beyond the regular Shadow DOM boundary that all is subject to.
With this:
You could write CSS (in the same stylesheet you use for the rest of the site) to color it:
/* This works.
It will cascade this fill through the shapes,
as long as there are no presentational fill
attributes on the shapes themselves. */
.icon-1 {
fill: red;
}You can still do this with an externally referenced , actually. But you can’t style individual shapes like you could before.
/* You could reach individual shapes
to style because they share the same DOM.
But this WON'T WORK with externally referenced SVG. */
.path-1 {
fill: yellow;
}
/* This won't work either way,
because it crosses a shadow DOM boundary */
.icon-1 /* ~shadow~ */ .path-1 {
fill: yellow;
}You can’t get your hands on the internal shapes at all when you externally reference. For example, from the HTML document:
<script>
var shape = document.querySelectorAll("path-1");
console.log(shape);
// [ ] (empty set)
</script>Here’s a gist that kinda belabors the point.
The fact that cascading in a single color still works makes it pretty useful. Most icons tend to be single-color. And you can have different single colors still.
Tab Atkins in his crazy future thinking ways has documented some potential future ideas called SVG params:
.foo {
background-image: url("http://example.com/image.svg" param(--color var(--primary-color)));
}That’s a CSS example, but presumably something inline SVG could use as well.
SVG `use` with External Reference, Take 2 is a post from CSS-Tricks
The design industry has been rocked by some amazing conferences and we can expect a whole bunch of incredible events gathering in Q4 of 2015.
Design Matters is a digital design conference hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark that runs for the last two days of September. It includes a full schedule of speakers and breaks for networking with other attendees.
Much like other design events, the purpose is to learn but also to share ideas with others. It can be fun to strike up a discourse on related subjects and compare notes with other designers.
The list of speakers is rather extraordinary featuring companies from all around the world.
All single-day passes have already sold out but you can still order a pass for the full 2-day event from the registration page.
If you’re unable to make it but want to keep up on conference news you can visit the Design Matters Facebook page with links and related photos of the event.
Read More at Design Matters 2015 Conference in Denmark’s Capital
When first leaping into a new subject there’s often a bit of hesitation. This is natural as humans don’t often like to fail, so it’s tough to get started and pursue something on own our.
Thankfully a new website Mybridge makes the process a whole lot easier.
You can select any subject matter from development, design, or marketing to get a series of highly-voted learning resources. These could include videos or might be text-based tutorials – the point is to mitigate the hardship of searching online for quality educational materials.
Beyond typical categories you’ll also find specific learning tracks. These range from AngularJS to Sketch 3 and even startup development.
Given enough time & dedication you’ll be able to learn any number of skills with the help of these curated resources. Sort through trending submissions, highest-rated links, or even user-created collections.
Mybridge seems to be the ultimate tool in self-learning for technologically-inclined people.
The site does not require an account to browse, although you do get extra features like personal tracks & collections. Plus Mybridge is completely free so there’s no downside to getting started on the site.
Read More at Mybridge curates the Best Learning Tools for Designers & Developers
Version control has become a must-have technology for programmers & web developers. Over the years it has become much more influential and now it’s a practical powerhouse of tools for managing revisions, updates, and changes to any codebase.
The most popular choice by far is Git which happens to be open source and the main insipiration for everyone’s favorite code repository GitHub.
With a little practice Git can become like second nature – unfortunately many are turned off by Git’s complex methods of shell management and bash-style code snippets. From an outside perspective this can be intimidating but once you give it a shot you may be surprised how you ever lived without version control.
If you’d want to learn Git from scratch I’d recommend GitHub’s free online tutorial. It covers all the basics and it runs right in your browser without installing anything.
But in a real working environment the problem always comes back to solving issues with Git or figuring out how to do a particular command. Frustration is what drives users away back to their more traditional dev routine. But thanks to First Aid Git this should no longer be a concern!
First Aid Git behaves like a search engine with hundreds of Git commands saved into a database. You can search by keywords to limit questions and try to find the perfect answer to your current predicament(you’re likely to have more than one).
All answers were pulled from Git’s documentation along with helpful users on Stack Overflow. There’s also an about page if you want to read more.
So if you’re a developer of any kind and still don’t understand how to use Git, please give this a try! You’ll be surprised how much you can learn with just a week’s worth of practice.
Read More at First Aid Git is your Free Search Engine for Git Help
Most web developers know of Opera as a major player in the web browser market. Opera was built in Norway in 1995 under Opera Software. This year celebrates two decades of growth, innovation, and wonderful memories for Opera users.
As with many other large milestones we’ve seen a complete rebranding of Opera’s identity for this latter portion of 2015.
The logo has been completely redesigned along with an update to the company’s style as simply “Opera”(as opposed to Opera Software).
One of Opera’s related companies Opera Mediaworks is also undergoing a similar transformation. It seems Opera as a whole is really pushing for a new identity to represent their movements beyond 2015.
Opera never stands still, so it was really important for us to make our new brand something that could endure and grow with us. We have new solutions and products in the pipeline, and we want them fit into the new identity organically.
Users will first see the new identity roll out onto mobile apps within the coming days/weeks. Over time other programs will be fully updated with Opera’s 20-year celebratory rebranding.
The company also released a brief video of digital effects to market the new brand. You can check it out below & if you like it be sure to share this exciting news with other designers around the web.
Read More at Opera reveals their newest Rebranding & Logo Design
