Web design has come a long, long way since the 1990s, when things like GeoCities and AOL dominated the Internet. Design itself has evolved, along with a deeper understanding of principles like usability and the user experience. There certainly hasn’t been a lack of studies examining everything from typography and site speed, to content above versus below the fold.

The Nielsen Norman Group is one of the premier user-experience consultations on the planet. It’s been in business for decades, conducting study after study on design, usability, and UX. In one of its earliest studies from all the way back in 1996—when “Friends” and “The X-Files” were still on TV—they identified 10 web design errors that were hugely problematic back then, in the very early days of the web.

You’d think that, 20 years later, as design has gotten more sophisticated and information about design has become much more accessible, designers would learn to avoid design mistakes, but a recent, large-scale usability study from 2016 by the NN Group found just the opposite to be true.

Instead of learning from past mistakes, designers have been continually repeating them throughout the decades. In fact, if there’s one thing that’s certain in web design, it’s that these errors continue to persist because designers keep forgetting the basics:

• Enabling users to find information
• Enabling users to read that information
• Enabling users to understand where to click and where the destination is

A lack of clarity

One of the most stubborn errors designers continue to make on websites is not sympathizing with the need of users to clearly and easily understand what the site or its elements is about.

The study identified these mistakes surrounding a lack of clarity:

• Unexpected locations for content
• Competing links and categories
• Hidden fees and prices

The study revealed how too many designers put content in places that users aren’t familiar with based on ordinary browsing habits. For instance, inaccurate or inappropriate category names that failed to match the expected content within the categories was a recurring problem.

Another issue was navigational categories or links that sound similar to each other, which hampers users from finding the information they want. In such a case, your users will likely end up leaving your site and going somewhere else, where content is sorted much more clearly.

Hidden fees and prices will also hurt your conversions because no shoppers want to feel like they’re being treated dishonestly. When it comes to money, your users want to know about everything they’ll have to pay for up front, at the beginning of a transaction. This refers to prices, subscription fees, convenience fees, and anything else where money is involved. From a pure design perspective, it’s a huge mistake if hiding fees and prices causes a loss of customers and transactions.

Overstock is a great example of full disclosure: note how big and bold its pricing information for products is.

UX problems

How easy your site visitors find that it is to actually use your site is integral to whether or not your site has good UX or not.

The NN Group’s study found these UX-related design mistakes that just won’t go away:

• Islands of information
• Link repetition
• Stranding users on microsites
• Inadequate search results
• Flawed filters and facets

Two big design errors are isolated pockets of information on any given page that fail to link to other, related information on different pages and forcing users to repetitively click on what amounts to the same types of links to get specific information. Both design errors inconvenience your users by failing to provide them with the information they’re looking for in context.

Many sites feature subsites (think Yahoo). The problem is that some of these subsites provide users with no way of returning to the main site, creating a headache for them and stranding them where they don’t want to be. Yahoo is actually an excellent example of a main site and subsites done right, as users are never stranded and can always click on the home button to return.

On the issue of search, unfortunately, a lot of sites still either fail to search the entire site for search terms or return results that fail to even match users’ search terms in the first place.

And while filters and facets (essentially filters for various attributes of objects in a set of content) are well-intentioned, they’re much of the time either tagged incorrectly or are insufficient, thereby creating confusion.

Information architecture foul-ups

Information architecture should, in many ways, be the heart and soul of good design. Essentially, it’s what helps users understand your site environment and content quickly, so they find what they want. It involves labeling, organizing and structuring your content in the clearest way possible.

The usability study again found stubborn, repeated mistakes designers still make in this area, just as they did 20 years ago. These include:

• Overwhelming users with excessive information
• Presenting users with hidden links

Studies show that users don’t really read web content; it’s more like they skim or scan said content instead. That’s why content should be chunked, in small and short paragraphs, and broken up with everything from bullet points to enumerations for better reading. The last thing you want to do is put huge blocks of text before your users.
Wayfair.com is a case in point for how to present information to visitors. Note how its content is easily digestible, as it’s efficiently broken up.

On the problem of hidden links, you’d be surprised at how many times designers hide links to relevant site content—for example, the menu of a restaurant—in the same column as ads leading to external links. The long and short of it is that most users won’t be able to find such relevant links amidst all the ads, which makes considering the placement of relevant links extremely vital to design.

Will it get better soon?

Part of the problem is that many designers just aren’t usability experts, but that’s no excuse. When you’re designing, you have to be obsessed with providing your users with a superb UX. Otherwise, your site’s usability, conversions, on-page time, and sales simply drop—and no client will tolerate that.

It will be interesting to see if, in another 20 years, we still see studies like these, talking about how design errors from decades ago are still haunting our web-design community.

LAST DAY: Woodford Bourne PRO Family of 18 Vintage Grotesque-Style Fonts – only $15!

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Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. We’ve got you covered with The Sketch Handbook which is filled with practical examples and tutorials that will help you get the most out of this mighty tool. In today’s article, Christian Krammer gives us a little taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life. — Ed.

Music plays a big role in my life. For the most part, I listen to music when I’m commuting, but also when I’m exercising or doing some housework. It makes the time fly, and I couldn’t imagine living without it.

However, one thing that has always bothered me is that the controls of music apps can be quite small and hard to catch. This can be a major issue, especially in the car, where every distraction matters. Another issue, in particular with the recent redesign of iOS’ Music app, is that you can’t directly like tracks anymore and instead need to open a separate dialog. And I do that a lot — which means one needless tap for me.

The post Designing A Responsive Music Player In Sketch (Part 1) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

As all of us should know by now, searching on the web is not anonymous. Especially the top dogs of the search branch store lots of data regarding your search requests and even beyond that. Peekier doesn’t do that.

Huh!? Search Engines Know a Lot More About You Than You Think

Due to the pooling of useful services into one Google account, the search engine giant from Mountain View is the service that almost knows more about you than you do. Only if you own, and use, a Google account, that is. In your Google account, the data from all the different services is pooled, which allows for detailed evaluations.

But even if you only make use of the Californian search engine, while picking alternatives to the other services, you’re already disclosing a lot about yourself. Google uses cookies in order to be able to recognize you each time you visit. Google determines your preferences according to your search requests, and displays respectively fitting ads.

Should you be logged in while searching, you’ll obviously give the operator a lot more information than you would if you simply searched. Nonetheless, you’re still revealing your IP address, as well as the used browser, and your search requests are also stored.

The owners of the pages you clicked on in the search results also gain data from you. They know where you come from, and what you looked for. Now, they immediately place their own cookie, and a basic profile has been created.

Peekier Thwarts the Data Collection Frenzy

The brand new search engine Peekier has a very different way of handling the mentioned aspects. First off, it doesn’t place cookies, and doesn’t save your IP address or any other information.

The results are mainly taken from Bing, which is why you can actually consider Peekier as a true alternative to Google, just by looking at the quantity and quality of the search results. The search keywords are not saved, and aggregrated into a history either. However, they are stored for service purposes, but in a way that prevents them from being assigned to a user.

The data protection focus continues on the search result page. In contrast to other providers, Peekier gives you a preview of the website that you may want to visit. If you were to check the listed pages on Google, looking for specific information, you would have to call them up one by one, spreading your data on the web with a watering can, although, in most cases, the accessed page won’t even contain the information you were looking for.

This is different on Peekier. Here, you click the preview. Now, an overlay with the scrollable page content, which the search result would lead to, is opened. This is where you get to check if the page is actually relevant. Within the preview, all links are deactivated, preventing you from accidently jumping somewhere you didn’t want to go to.

The search results can be refined even more by clicking one of the tags that Peekier integrates into the search bar, as soon as the search results are set. As usual, Peekier suggests keywords as soon as you start typing in the search bar.

If you decide that you want to call up a particular search result, this is done via the link above the preview window. At that point, the accessed page will know where you’re from, but not what you looked for.

On top of all the data protection features, Peekier simply looks good. The entirely flat design makes Peekier look more elegant than other search engines. Subtle animations show that the system is alive, and are visually pleasing. The search result page is displayed as a configurable grid, reminding me of Pinterest in a way.

Due to its card-based design, Peekier looks great on both desktop, and mobile devices. Even the detail preview works fine on mobile devices, allowing you to check out the page before actually visiting it.

See for yourself. The discussion on Peekier over at Hacker News is interesting as well.

Tyler Gaw documents his process of moving off Sass and onto PostCSS, but keeping most of the code the same. That meant making sure he was using PostCSS plugins that would replicate most of Sass’ functionality, like nesting and mixins and whatnot.

Tyler is sold. I find it an interesting experiment, and it’s cool to know it’s basically possible, but I’m definitely not sold yet.

Now instead of just having Sass as a dependency, which is an active healthy project, you have a whole bunch of plugins with different authors as dependencies. And for what? Assuming you use libsass, you don’t get any speed. If you like some particular PostCSS plugin, using Sass doesn’t prevent you from using that also. One thing I definitely wouldn’t recommend is preprocessing those custom properties, as those are not interchangeable things.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

From Sass to PostCSS is a post from CSS-Tricks

My name is Mason Ellwood and I’m currently working on Flatiron School’s Online Full Stack Web Development Program. Each week, I’ll be writing about my experience, what I’m learning, and tips on learning to code.

When going through this school, I want to stress how important it is to take VERY elaborate notes. It has saved me immense time while completing lessons that I have encountered so far. So here is my book unveiled to you for the first time ever: A Comprehensive Guide to Flatiron School’s Online Web Developer Program.

My very unspecific title, I know. But while writing my “book”, I have learned how to better teach myself. I have included basically every concept that was new to me and serves as a review of what I know now. And when I say comprehensive I mean….

I currently am on page 60 of my book, and am not sure if it will make it on the “Opera Book of the Month Club”, but it serves its purpose. Enough about that, and let’s get into it! Like I said in the last post, I will be skipping ahead quite a bit, so I can catch up to where I am currently within the school.

Puts and Prints

Puts or “out*put s*tring” and print are used to display the results you write within the console. Without this and by default ruby will not display any output. It is a way to specifically display data you want to the console. The main difference between these two are puts adds a new line after executing and print does not. Remember you can test this with the IRB workspace.

A return value is the data returned to the program by the execution of a method. By default, every method in Ruby returns a value, which is the outputting of the last statement in the method.

As you can see by this, there is the assumption that is should output b, c, and d. But by specifying return will disrupt the execution of your method.

Methods and Arguments

When writing your own methods you will encounter arguments that need to be met, so your method will pass. This is created by adding an argument list to the end of your method name by using ().

This allows you to place a user dependent variable within your method, making it dynamic. The above code allows the user to replace x with whatever we want x to equal. X in this example is considered a bare word within the argument list. Allowing us to puts “hello” x amount of times. Once the method has been defined, you now NEED to pass a variable to the bare word when calling the method or else the method will fail and you will receive an argument error.

Which basically says, not all arguments have been met in order for the method to pass. You can also add as many arguments as you would like, by separating them with commas. Arguments create a local variable that can be used within the method when you name an argument, you are then defining what bare words you want to use to access that data

This concept allows you to create dynamic reusable code, remember to work towards the concept of DRY (don’t repeat yourself).

You can also add default arguments to your bare words, try to always use optional or default arguments within your methods. Using the equal sign within your argument list next to each bare word you would like to assign, you can create a default argument making your code more dynamic. But you must place bare words with default values at the end of the argument list. This is considered good practice or your code can return unexpected values.

By default the above method, only outputs the phrase created by the user one time, but can be reused and retold to display phrase as many times as you would like. Remember though, if you set your bare word default to an integer it does not need quotes, if the default is a string it needs to be specified as such with quotes.

Read More at My Journey Of Learning Programming Through Flatiron School #5