Believe it or not, dark backgrounds in UI web design are beneficial in many different ways. Depending on the overall theme of the web page, it may or may not be a good fit for the job. Instead of debating whether or not you should use a dark background in UI, let’s talk about why they’re always a beneficial choice.
The aesthetic
In recent years, dark colors have taken not just the web design world by storm, but design as a whole. People are reverting to darker colors now more than ever. There are many reasons for this, but it’s mainly for the wild contrast.
Let’s say you want an image to stand out. Typically speaking, most images are lighter in color. There’s no better way to make sure someone sees it than to drop it on a dark background. It’s definitely a simple technique, but it’s also one of the most effective.
You do have to be careful, though. If your text isn’t light enough, or if it’s too thin, it will be unreadable. But, if you’re using normal sized fonts, you should be okay.
Dark backgrounds save
What do I mean by that? Well, dark backgrounds are proven to save electricity and be less harsh on your eyes. Think about all the “night-mode” options we have for our devices nowadays. All that they really do is change the backgrounds from a light color, to black. Dark backgrounds produce less light, and therefor save energy and our eyes.
In addition to being less harsh for your eyes, a lot of medical conditions can be triggered by bright flashes of color. It’s highly unlikely, but it’s something to definitely consider.
Although dark backgrounds are the go-to for web designers, there are some cases when they aren’t necessarily ideal. Here are a few examples and reasons the dark side may not be a good choice:
If the screen the background is being displayed on isn’t backlit, the text will be impossible to read.
If there’s too much ambient light, the light colored fonts will be washed out, and all you’ll see is the dark background.
Like I stated before, if the fonts are too thin, they will be overtaken by the darkness, and you won’t be able to see them.
In some cases, small screen scratches are more visible with darker backgrounds.
As you can see, the advantages of a dark background in UI greatly outweigh the disadvantages. You can technically consider this use of dark backgrounds a trend, but I definitely don’t see it ever going away.
What do you think? Are dark backgrounds in UI here to stay, or will something else take their place? If you like information like this, and want to keep up with the latest web design trends, be sure to stay tuned to Webdesignledger!
Server Side Rendering (SSR) is a very useful technique that makes web apps appear faster. The initial HTML is displayed before the JavaScript is parsed and, while the user is deciding what to tap on, our handlers are ready.
Server side rendering in React requires additional work to setup and has server costs. Furthermore, if your server team cannot have JavaScript running on your servers, you are stuck. It significantly complicates the CDN setup especially if you have pages that require login and where the user’s information is managed.
I want to walk through a new concept called Render Caching. This is a cool trick that can give users an instant performance boost just like that of SSR without having to resort to writing code on the server.
What is Render Caching?
The migration from static HTML pages to Single Page Apps (SPAs) has left a gaping hole in the entire concept of caching that the web has traditionally relied on. While browsers optimize delivery and rendering of the initial HTML, an SPA leaves them blank to be filled in later.
Render Caching optimizes the SPA render and can significantly improve the perceptible load time of web pages. It does that by caching the rendered HTML in the browser for next load and can provide that display without the JavaScript parsing that eats up our display time.
Enabling Render Caching
We mentioned earlier that setting up SSR for React requires additional setup and server costs. Render Caching avoids those burdens.
It takes a few steps to set it up. Let’s break it down into digestible pieces.
Step 1: Determine the correct caching state
Figure out the conditions for the current page where it would render the same when a user opens it on the next visit.
For example, you could create a JSON object with the current build number or a user ID. The key is to ensures that the state is encapsulated in the URL, local storage or cookies and do not need a server call for.
Step 2: Setup API calls
Ensure all API calls happen before the render call to react. This makes sense in regular use cases as well where we want to prevent the page from changing under the user which causes flickers.
Step 3: Cache locally in the unload handler
Now add a unload event handler to the document. Store the current DOM in localStorage/indexDB.
That looks something like this, using a build number and a user ID to determine the caching state covered in Step 1:
window.addEventListener('beforeunload', () => {
// Production code would also be considerate of localStorage size limitations
// and would do a LRU cache eviction to maintain sanity on storage.
// There should also be a way to clear this data when the user signs out
window.localStorage.setItem(`lastKnown_${window.location.href}`, JSON.stringify({
condition: {
userId: "<User ID>",
buildNo: "<Build No.>"
}
data: document.getElementById('content').innerHTML
}));
// If you want to store data per user, you can add user ID to the key instead of the condition.
Step 4: Restore the last known state on load
Next up, we want to pull the last known state from the browser’s local storage so we can use it on future visits. We do this by adding the following to the HTML file (e.g. index.html below the document’s the body tag.
This is where the rubber meets the road. Now that we have the user’s last known state visible in the DOM, we can fetch the full content and render our app in that state by updating the top level of React’s render with hydrate conditionally. Event handlers will become functional once this code hits but the DOM should not change.
import {render, hydrate} from "react-dom"
if (window.hasRestoredState) {
hydrate(<MyPage />, document.getElementById('content'));
} else {
render(<MyPage />, document.getElementById('content'));
}
Step 6: Go Async all the way
Turn your script tags from sync to async/defer for loading the JavaScript files. This is another key step to ensure a smooth loading and rendering experience on the front end.
That’s it! Reload the page to see the boost in performance.
Measuring improvement
OK, so you did all that work and now you want to know just how performant your site is. You’re going to want to benchmark the improvements.
Render Caching shines in situations where you have multiple server calls before you know what to render. On script-heavy pages, JavaScript can actually take a lot of time to parse.
You can measure the load performance in the Performance tab in Chrome’s DevTools.
Measuring rendering in the Performance tab of Chrome’s DevTools
Ideally, you’d use a guest profile so that your browser extensions won’t interfere with the measurements. You should see a significant improvement on reload. In the screenshot above, we a sample app with an async data.json fetch call that is performed before calling ReactDOM.hydrate. With Render Caching, the render is complete even before the data is loaded!
Wrapping up
Render Caching is a clever technique to ensure that the perceived speed of re-fetches of the same web page is faster by adding a caching layer to the final HTML and showing them back to the user. Users who visit your site frequently are the ones who stand to benefit the most.
As you can see, we accomplished this with very little code and the performance gains we get in return are huge. Do try this out on your website and post your comments. I’d love to hear whether your site performance sees the same significant boosts that I’ve experienced.
If you haven’t smiled yet today, you’re about to. That’s because photographer Seth Casteel — the man behind the NY Times bestseller and viral sensation Underwater Dogs — is back with another installment of his series that promises to be even more adorable than the first.
How could this possibly be, you ask? Well, for this second iteration, Casteel taught 1,500 puppies how to swim, making the resulting photo book so squee-inducing you might just explode from all the cuteness.
The 72 underwater photographs Casteel captured over the course of these swim lessons have been compiled into the book Underwater Puppies, which is already available at Barnes & Noble for $13.65.
As with Underwater Dogs, Casteel captures that magical moment that the pups first enter the water, all excitement, enthusiasm, and in some cases reticence or wide-eyed surprise. It really is just about guaranteed to put a smile on your face:
Many of the puppies like Corey here, were from rescue shelters and had not experienced swimming or jumping into a pool.
CSS Shapes Level 1 has been available in Chrome and Safari for a number of years, however, this week it ships in a production version of Firefox with the release of Firefox 62 — along with a very nice addition to the Firefox DevTools to help us work with Shapes. In this article, I’ll take a look at some of the things you can do with CSS Shapes. Perhaps it’s time to consider adding some curves to your designs?
What Are CSS Shapes?
The CSS Shapes specification Level 1 defines three new properties:
shape-outside
shape-image-threshold
shape-margin
The purpose of this specification is to allow content to flow around a non-rectangular shape, something which is quite unusual on our boxy web. There are a few different ways to create shapes, which we will have a look at in this tutorial. We will also have a look at the Shape Path Editor, available in Firefox, as it can help you to easily understand the shapes on your page and work with them.
In the current specification, shapes can only be applied to a float, so any shapes example needs to start with a floated element. In the example below, I have a PNG image with a transparent background in which I have floated the image left. The text that follows the image now flows around the right and bottom of my image.
What I would like to happen is for my content to follow the shape of the opaque part of the image, rather than follow the line of the physical image file. To do this, I use the shape-outside property, with the value being the URL of my image. I’m using the actual image file to create a path for the content to flow around.
Note that your image needs to be CORS compatible, so hosted on the same server as the rest of your content or sending the correct headers if hosted on a CDN. Browser DevTools will usually tell you if your image is being blocked due to CORS.
This method of creating shapes uses the alpha channel of the image to create the shape, as we have a shape with a fully transparent area, then all we need do is pass the URL of the image to shape-outside and the shape path follows the line of the fully opaque area.
Creating A Margin
To push the line of the text away from the image we can use the shape-margin property. This creates a margin between the line of the shape and the content running alongside it.
In the case above, we have the image displayed on the page and then the text curved around it. However, you could also use an image as the path for the shape in order to create a curved text effect without also including the image on the page. You still need something to float, however, and so for this, we can use Generated Content.
In this example, we have inserted some generated content, floated it left, given it a width and a height and then used shape-outside with our image just as before. We then get a curved line against the whitespace, but no visible image.
Using A Gradient For Our Shape
A CSS gradient is just like an image, which means we can use a gradient to create a shape, which can make for some interesting effects. In this next example, I have created a gradient which goes from blue to transparent; your gradient will need to have a transparent or semi-transparent area in order to use shapes. Once again, I have used generated content to add the gradient and am then using the gradient in the value for shape-outside.
Once the gradient becomes fully transparent, then the shape comes into play, and the content runs along the edge of the gradient.
Using shape-image-threshold To Position Text Over A Semi-Opaque Image
So far we have looked at using a completely transparent part of an image or of a gradient in order to create our shape, however, the third property defined in the CSS Shapes specification means that we can use images or gradients with semi-opaque areas by setting a threshold. A value for shape-image-threshold of 1 means fully opaque while 0 means fully transparent.
A gradient like our example above is a great way to see this in action as we can change the shape-image-threshold value and move the line along which the text falls to more opaque areas or more transparent areas. This property works in exactly the same way with an image that has an alpha channel yet is not fully transparent.
This method of creating shapes from images and gradients is — I think — the most straightforward way of creating a shape. You can create a shape as complex as you need it to be, in the comfort of a graphics application and then use that to define the shape on your page. That said, there is another way to create our shapes, and that’s by using Basic Shapes.
CSS Shapes With Basic Shapes
The Basic Shapes are a set of predefined shapes which cover a lot of different types of shapes you might want to create. To use a basic shape, you use the basic shape type as a value for shape-outside. This type uses functional notation, so we have the name of the shape followed by brackets (inside which are some values for our shape).
The options that you have are the following:
inset()
circle()
ellipse()
polygon()
We will take a look at the circle() type first as we can use this to understand some useful things which apply to all shapes which use the basic shape type. We will also have a look at the new tools in Firefox for inspecting these shapes.
In the example below, I am creating the most simple of shapes: a circle using shape-outside: circle(50%). I’m using generated content again, and I have given the box a background color, and also added a margin, border, and padding to help highlight some of the concepts of using CSS Shapes. You can see in the example that the circle is created centered on the box; this is because I have given the circle a value of 50%. That value is the which can be a length or a percentage. I’ve used a percentage so that the radius is half of the size of my box.
This is a really good to time have a look at the shape that has been created using the Firefox Shape Path Editor. You can inspect the shape by clicking on the generated content and then clicking the little shape icon next to the property shape-outside; your shape will now highlight.
The Shape Path Editor highlights the circle shape (Large preview)
You can see how the circle extends to the edge of the margin on our box. This is because the initial reference box used by our shape is margin-box. You already know something of reference boxes if you have ever added box-sizing: border-box to your CSS. When you do this, you are asking CSS to use the border-box and not the default content-box as the size of elements. In Shapes, we can also change which reference box is used. After any basic shape, add border-box to use the border to define the shape or content-box to use the edge of the content (inside the padding). For example:
You will see the circle appear to become much smaller. It is now using the width of the content — in this case the width of the box at 150px — rather than the margin box which includes the padding, border, and margin.
The content-box is the edge of the content of the square we created with our generated content (Large preview)
Inspecting your element in Firefox DevTools will also show you the reference boxes so you can choose which might give you the best result with your particular shape.
Reference boxes highlighted in Firefox (Large preview)
The Position Value
A second value can be passed to circle() which is a position; if you do not pass this value, it defaults to center. However, you can use this value to pull your circle around. In the next example, I have positioned the circle by using shape-outside(50% at 30%); this changes where the center of the circle is positioned.
Something useful to know is that the same values can be used as a value for clip-path. This means that after creating a shape, you can clip away the image or background color that extends outside of the shape. In the example below, I am going to do this with our example gradient background, so that we end up with a circle that has text curved around from our square box.
All of the above concepts can be applied to our other basic shapes. Now let’s have a quick look at how they work.
inset()
The inset() value defines a rectangle. This might not seem very useful as a float is a rectangle, however, this value means that you can inset the content wrapping your shape. It takes four values for top, right, bottom, and left plus a final value which defines a border radius.
In the example below, I am using the values to inset the content on the right and bottom of the floated image, plus adding a border radius around which my content will wrap using shape-outside: inset(0 30px 100px 0 round 40px). You can see how the content is now over the background color of the box:
An ellipse is a squashed circle and as such needs two radii for x and y (in that order). You can then push the ellipse around just as with circle using the position value. In the example below, I am creating an ellipse and then using clip-path with the same values to remove the content outside of my shape.
In the above example, I also used shape-margin to demonstrate how we can use this property as with our image generated shapes to push the content away.
polygon()
Creating polygon shapes gives us the most flexibility, as our shapes can be created with three or more points. The value passed to the polygon needs to be three or more pairs of values which represent coordinates.
It is here where the Firefox tools become really useful as we can use them to help create our polygon. In the below example, I have created a polygon with four points. In the Firefox DevTools, you can double-click on any line to create a new point, and double-click again to remove it. Once you have created a polygon that you are happy with, you can then copy the value out of DevTools for your CSS.
As CSS Shapes are applied to a float, in many cases the fallback is that instead of seeing the content wrap around a shape, the content will wrap around a floated element (in the way that content has always wrapped around floats). Browsers ignore properties they do not understand, so if they don’t understand Shapes, it doesn’t matter that the shape-outside property is there.
Where you should take care would be in any situation where not having shapes could mean that content overlaid an area which made it difficult to read. Perhaps you are using Shapes to push content away from a busy area of a background image, for example. In that case, you should first make sure that your content is usable for the non-Shapes people, then use Feature Queries to check for support of shape-outside and overwrite that CSS and apply the shape. For example, you could use a margin to push the content away for non-Shapes visitors and remove the margin inside your feature query.
.content {
margin-left: 120px;
}
@supports (shape-outside: circle()) {
.content {
margin-left: 0;
/* add the rest of your shapes CSS here */
}
}
With Firefox releasing their support we now only have one main browser without support for Shapes — Edge. If you want to see Shapes support across the board you could go and vote for the feature here, and see if we can encourage the implementation of the feature in Edge.
Find Out More About CSS Shapes
In this article, I’ve tried to give a quick overview of some of the interesting things that are possible with CSS Shapes. For a more in-depth look at each feature, check out the Guides to CSS Shapes over at MDN. You can also read a guide to the Shape Path Editor in Firefox.
Creating great UX is a primary goal for all product designers. It’s up to the designer to make a process of interaction with a product as simple as possible.
Modern products try to achieve simplicity by following a fundamentally different approach called Anticipatory Design. This article is intended to make you familiar with the concept of anticipatory design, as well as share a few excellent examples of how anticipatory design can be used in practice.
What is Anticipatory Design?
Anticipatory design is a design that delivers what users want before they want it. It can be said that anticipatory design is one step ahead of users.
How Does Anticipatory Design Work?
Since making a decision requires some cognitive resources, it’s possible to save resources by removing the need to make a decision in the first place. The goal of the anticipatory design is not in helping the user make a certain decision, but to create a system where that decision is never needed — it happens automatically, and users might not even know that the system is doing it. Anticipatory design eliminates many steps that require user input and replace them with action which happen automatically (those actions are based on prior user’s behaviors and business logic).
Take booking a vacation trip as an example. In traditional UI you, as a user, are given a few options, and you need to select the one that is best for you. It sounds like a simple task, but in reality, you need to go through 2-3 important decisions such as selecting a flight, choosing a hotel, etc. Each of these major decisions can be divided into a few smaller decisions. For example, when you select a flight you need to figure out whether you like a morning or evening flight, what seat would you prefer, etc.
Rather than give a lot of options, an app that follows an anticipatory methodology will follow a radically different approach — it selects a flight and hotel automatically. All preferences such as favorite airlines, flight time and place for a hotel will be based on prior travel behavior. The only thing users need to do is to confirm that this decision is good for them.
What’s Required to Craft Good Anticipatory Design
Follow user-centered design approach. The roots of anticipatory design go into the user-centered design approach. The power of understanding context is the key to creating an anticipatory design — designers need to understand users and the obstacles they face. This understanding gives good insights into their needs. It is also necessary to obtain feedback from your users on a regular basis, in order to understand all potential pitfalls.
Focus on data processing. It’s important not only to collect data but also aggregate it into meaningful information.
Why Anticipatory Design has Suddenly Become Popular
There are a few essential changes happened in IT industry which made it possible to use the anticipatory design in practice:
Significant progress in data collecting and processing. Processing power finally reached the point where we can collect and analyze huge amounts of data. This ability to process significant amounts of data dramatically reshapes how we create experiences for our users.
Decision fatigue becomes a real concern both in real life and digital design. There are a lot of things users should decide over the course of the day. And when it comes to a website and mobile apps, it feels just great when we don’t need to rely on our ability to make effective decisions when interacting with products.
Practical Examples of Anticipatory Design
After reading all this information about anticipatory design, you might wonder how it can be implemented in your app. Here are a few great examples of how the concept of anticipatory design is working to make tasks faster and smarter:
Amazon and Personalized Recommendations
Amazon is a pioneer of anticipatory design. Amazon’s recommendations are data-driven — the service uses information it has about its users to suggest items based on past purchase history. Personalized recommendations are an essential feature of Amazon. Since Amazon is a huge e-commerce store, it might be hard for users to decide what product they want to purchase. Anticipatory design helps to narrow the spectrum of choice and direct user attention towards specific products.
Google Now and Predictions
Google Now is a digital assistant that responds to a user’s requests and questions. But the app does something more interesting for its users — it tries to predict user’s wants and needs based on search history. For example, if you schedule a restaurant reservation on your calendar, Google Now can send you timely updates about weather or traffic conditions.
Google Now makes recommendations based on past searches or information it has from user’s calendar. Image: SlashGear
Apple Music and Tailored playlists
Anyone who’s ever created a playlist knows how time-consuming this activity can be. Apple Music tries to simplify this task by picking songs you’re likely to enjoy. It offers personalized music playlists called ‘My New Music Mix’ to subscribers. Such playlists are based on user’s listening history.
Apple Music pulls together playlists of songs that have similar characteristics such as rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics, etc. ‘My New Music Mix’ is updated every Friday with new tunes. Image: Macworld
Nest and Automated Decision-Making
Nest is a well-known automated thermostat. Among many different competitors, this thermostat has one major competitive advantage- self-learning. The device learns user’s temperature preferences and then automatically adjusts the temperature in a room accordingly.
Nest is an automatic thermostat which learns users’ temperature habits.
The Pros and Cons of Anticipatory Design
Anticipatory design brings a lot of benefits for users. Today we are witnessing that anticipatory design is hitting the mainstream market in the form of frictionless design and design which has greater personalization.
At the same time, it’s crucial to understand that anticipatory design can limit discoverability. As choices become narrowed, the chances of users choosing something different or unexpected are reduced. This could potentially lead to a situation where users won’t be unable to divert from a pre-set path.
The ultimate purpose of most digital products is to make things simpler. Today’s user expects a straightforward route through a product — they want to be able to complete their goal as quickly as possible. If you can minimize the number of steps required to achieve the goal without affecting the quality of experience, then you can create an experience that will be good for your users.
Today, we’re going to be taking a look at a very unique design agency. It’s unique for many reasons: the name, the work, and the particular style they thrust into every project. Today, we’re going to be taking a look at Robot-food.com.
Who is Robot-food?
When you first visit Robot-food’s web page, you’ll notice quickly that they mean business, but they like to have fun with it.
“We are a strategic brand design agency, based in Leeds, following our instincts – not the herd.”
For the creative minds behind this machine, it’s not about how many projects they can take in a year, how much money they can make, are how fast they can complete a project. For them, it’s about presenting a quality product for a quality client. They go above and beyond to make sure you get exactly what you want, no matter how hard they have to work.
“For us, it’s not about chasing awards or cash cows. We court mutual success and work collaboratively with people, products and projects that we believe in. We are comfortable outside of our comfort zone and see naivety as a different perspective, not a disadvantage.”
What do they do?
Of course, talk means nothing if you can’t back it up with great work, right? Don’t worry, Robot-food has plenty to show off. Let’s look at a few of their projects:
“Beers, ciders, and spirits have never looked more confident. Easy to navigate, and hard to miss, Robot-Food set the bar for own label and delivered a range that feels like a genuine and credible alternative.”
Brooke Fletcher – Packaging Design Manager at The Co-op
“Bold flavor and authenticity are key cornerstones of our brand that Robot-Food have captured and reinforced in a unique distinctive design. The outstanding results build on strong brand pride and are sure grab the attention of both new and existing customers.”
Kevin Butterworth – Marketing and International Sales Director – Seabrook
“Excellent craft beer alone is not enough to be successful.
You need an impactful brand, too. Customers love the results, and sales have exploded. I call Robot-Food our fifth Beatle. Their work just goes to show what can happen when a great product is given a powerful brand.”
As you can see, Robot-Food has no shortage of great reviews. Time and time again, they have proven to be the perfect choice for a wide variety of clients in many different industries. Their creativity, dedication, and pure enjoyment for what they do has set them leagues ahead of many other design agencies out there.
If you enjoy the work that Robot-Food produces, feel free to contact them and send your brand light years ahead of the competition. If you enjoy content like this, and want to stay updated on agencies and designers, stay tuned each week to Webdesignledger.
After reading the title of this article, it might seem like it’s jumping the gun, but with retailers turning on holiday music and putting out holiday-related displays earlier and earlier every year, your consumers are primed to start thinking about the holidays earlier, too. In fact, a study done by the Tampa Bay Times revealed that in-store shoppers were exposed to holiday music as early as October 22 in 2017.
Of course, e-commerce handles the holiday season a bit differently than brick-and-mortar. It’s not really necessary to announce promotions or run sales in late October or early November. However, that doesn’t mean you should wait until the last minute to prepare your mobile website for the holidays.
In this article, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of what happened during the 2017 holiday sales season and, in particular, what role mobile played in it. Then, we’re going to dig into holiday design and marketing tactics you can use to boost sales through your mobile website for the 2018 holiday season.
Before we get started, I want to quickly add a disclaimer:
This particular section focuses on e-commerce statistics because this kind of data is readily available. Something like the total number of page visits, subscribed readers, and leads generated… well, it’s not.
So, although I only use data to express how important mobile was to 2017 holiday sales, keep in mind that the tips that follow pertain to all websites. Even if your site doesn’t expressly sell goods or services, blogs and other content-driven sites can take advantage of this, too!
Now, let’s take a look at the numbers:
Total Retail Sales
The National Retail Federation calculated the total amount of retail sales–online and in-store–to be $691.9 billion between November and December, a 5.5% bump from 2016.
Total e-Commerce Sales
Adobe put the total amount of e-commerce sales during that same timeframe at $108.15 billion in 2017.
Adobe’s stats on 2016 and 2017 holiday e-commerce revenue (Source: Adobe) (Large preview)
e-Commerce Sales By Device
Adobe takes it even further and breaks down the share of revenue by device:
Breakdown of desktop, smartphone and tablet sales for 2017 holiday season (Source: Adobe) (Large preview)
e-Commerce Sales vs. Traffic
While smartphone and tablet sales still trail those on desktop, there are a couple interesting things to note here. For starters, desktop revenue has mostly flatlined year-over-year whereas mobile continues to grow. In addition, there’s an interesting disparity between how much traffic comes from each device and what percentage of revenue it generates:
Traffic vs. revenue for desktop, smartphone, tablet (Source: Adobe) (Large preview)
Pay close attention to desktop and smartphone. As you can see, more visits stem from smartphones than any other device and, yet, desktop leads the way in conversions:
Statista shows the breakdown between desktop, smartphone, and tablet conversions in Q1 2018 (Source: Statista) (Large preview)
Is this indicative of a lack of trust in smart devices to handle purchases?
In all likelihood, it probably isn’t. Data from other sources indicates that on holidays, in particular, mobile reigns supreme in terms of visits and conversions:
Thanksgiving Day: 62% of traffic / 46% of purchases.
Christmas Day: 68% of traffic / 50% of purchases.
Also, let’s not forget to take into account the strengths of mobile devices within the shopper’s experience. According to the four micro-moments as defined by Google, a large number of mobile users commonly search for the following:
“I want to know.”
“I want to go.”
“I want to do.”
“I want to buy.”
The second and third are clearly indicative of a searcher’s desire to find something outside their devices (and their homes) to spend money on. That might even be so for the fourth, though it could also be an indication that they want to do their research on mobile and complete the purchase on desktop.
Either way, we know that smartphones tend to be a primary facilitator in the customer’s journey and not something that’s putting an end to the shopping experience as a whole.
5 Tips To Prepare Your Mobile Site For The 2018 Holiday Season
While the overall numbers indicate that desktop is the leading platform for holiday sales, it’s not a universal rule that can be applied to each and every day in November and December. This is why your own data will have to play a big role in the design choices you make for your mobile site this season.
You have to admit, no matter how stressed or unhappy you might feel around the holidays, there is something nice about encountering just the right hint of holiday “cheer”. And that’s one of the keys to doing this right: finding the right amount of holiday flavor to infuse into your website.
Before we get into what you can do to spruce up your mobile web design, I want to remind you that security and speed are critical elements to check off your list before November gets here. These might not be in your realm of responsibilities, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on them.
If you’re doing all this design work in anticipation of boosting conversions over the holidays, don’t let it all be for nothing by forgetting about performance and security essentials. To protect your site from potentially harmful traffic surges, start with this front-end performance checklist. With regards to security, you can use these security improvement tips.
Now, let’s talk about the five ways in which you can prepare your mobile website for the 2018 holiday season:
1. Study Last Year’s Data
If your website has been live and actively doing business for more than a year, you need to start with the data from 2017. Using Google Analytics and your CRM platform, locate answers to the following questions:
What was the prominent device that generated traffic? Sales?
Google Analytics allows you to divvy up traffic based on technology in a number of ways:
Under Browser & OS, you can sort visitors by browser:
My business really isn’t affected by the holidays at all… except that I know things are going to be super quiet on and around Thanksgiving and the major holidays in December. This is still important information for me to have.
For businesses that directly sell products or services through their site or content-based sites that plan publication schedules based on traffic, you’ll likely see a different trajectory in terms of highs and lows.
When did sales start to increase (if they don’t coincide with traffic)?
Again, for some of you, the matter of sales is irrelevant if you don’t offer any through your site. For everyone else, however, use the Google Analytics Conversions tab along with sales logged through your payment gateway or CRM to check this number.
Just remember that you have to activate the Conversions module in Google Analytics if you want it to track that data. If you didn’t remember last year, put it in place for this year.
Did the holiday uptick remain consistent until the end of the season or were there temporary dropoffs?
Much of this has to do with how you promote holiday-related events, promotional offers or content through your website. If you consistently market around the holidays from November 1 to the end of the year, you should see relatively steady traffic and sales.
Some days, of course, may be slower than others (like during workdays or earlier in the season), so it’s good to get a sense for the ebb and flow of your site’s holiday traffic. On the other hand, your website might be a major draw only on special sales days and the holidays themselves, so you can use this data to harness your energy for a big push on the days when it’ll have the greatest impact.
Try to identify patterns, so you can plan your design and marketing strategy accordingly.
When did traffic and sales return to their usual amount?
At some point, your site is going to see a dip in activity. There are some businesses that embrace this.
Let’s use Xfinity as an example. Around mid-November of last year, this is the holiday-centric message the top of the home page was pushing:
Xfinity promotes ways to make your home holiday ready (Source: Xfinity) (Large preview)
A month later, on December 9, any mention of the holidays was gone and replaced by a promotion of the upcoming Olympic Winter Games.
One can only assume that a major sporting event like the Olympics helps Xfinity sign more subscribers than trying to capture last-minute sales for the holidays.
Logically, this makes sense. December is a busy time for families. They’re planning travel, purchasing gifts and running around town in preparation for the upcoming celebrations. Most people probably don’t have time to set up a new cable or Internet package and wait around for Xfinity to configure it then.
Bottom line: it’s okay if your holiday-related traffic and sales drop off earlier than December 31. Study your data and let your user behavior guide you in your mobile design and promotion strategy.
What were the most popular sources for mobile traffic?
It’s actually not enough to identify the most popular sources of mobile traffic for your site. Sure, you want to know if organic SEO and social media promotional efforts worked to bring traffic to it… but it won’t really matter if those visitors abandoned the site without taking action.
When you start digging through the ways in which you acquired mobile visitors, make sure to review the sources and keywords used against other telling metrics, like:
Bounce rate
Time on site
Pages visited
This will give you a good sense for what sources — e.g. keywords, PPC ads, social media content, promotional backlinks from other sites — that attracted high-quality leads to it during the holiday season.
What were the most/least successful promotions?
One more thing to look at is what exactly performed the best between November and December with mobile visitors.
Did you run a pop-up promoting free shipping that was dismissed by most mobile visitors, but greatly taken advantage of by those on desktop? Did your custom home page banner touting an upcoming Black Friday sale get more clicks than the home page banner otherwise does at other times of the year? And what pathway resulted in the most conversions?
Dig into what exactly it was that appealed to your mobile visitors. Then, as you work on this year’s plan, focus on reproducing that success.
2. Assess The Navigation
The navigation plays two important roles on a website:
High-level tabs inform visitors on what they’ll find on the site; essentially answering the question, “Is this of relevance to me?”
The navigation itself provides visitors with shortcuts to parts of the site that matter most to them, simplifying their pathway to conversion.
When reviewing your navigation in the context of holiday traffic, you must ensure that it fulfills both of these roles.
Let’s look at two websites that provide relevant links during the holidays while also streamlining the visitors’ journey from entry to holiday-related pages.
Food52 is an online hub for people who enjoy cooking. You can buy kitchen gadgets from the site and peruse a whole bunch of content related to food and cooking.
I want to call out a number of things Food52 does especially well in terms of navigation:
The Food52 home page includes Thanksgiving-related categories (Source: Food52) (Large preview)
The hamburger menu is prominently displayed in the top-left, which is exactly where visitors’ eyes will go as they follow the Z-shaped pattern for reading.
The shopping cart, search bar shortcut and profile link are also displayed in the top header, making it easy to navigate to elements that support the shopping experience.
If you scroll down on the home page (as I’ve done in the screenshot above), Food52 includes a good mix of Thanksgiving-related content along with its standard fare. In addition, it includes categories that help users filter through content that’s most relevant to them.
One other thing I’d like to point out is the navigation itself:
Simplified and customized navigation from Food52 for Thanksgiving (Source: Food52) (Large preview)
There are a number of things you’ll notice:
The mobile navigation is quite simplified. Despite how many categories and types of pages the site has, the navigation keeps this from being an overwhelming choice.
There are special tabs for Thanksgiving and Holiday. This will get users directly to content related to the holiday they’re cooking for.
The Hotline — which is its customer service forum — is also featured in the mobile navigation. This element is especially important around the holidays when visitors have questions they need answered quickly.
L.L.Bean is another website that handles mobile navigation well.
As you can see, there are four buttons located within the mobile header:
Hamburger navigation icon: bolded and well-placed;
L.L.Bean logo for easy backtracking to the home page;
A shopping cart icon which will keep stored items top-of-mind with mobile users;
An ever-present search bar to speed up navigation even further.
Once a mobile user expands the hamburger navigation, they encounter this:
L.L.Bean prioritizes customer service and gifts around the holidays (Source: L.L.Bean) (Large preview)
As you can see, “Call Us” is the first option available within the mobile navigation. Again, with people in a rush and trying to get purchases done right over the holidays, having a direct line of communication to the company is important. The account link and “Ship To” personalization are also nice touches as these icons keep conversion top-of-mind.
Now, looking down the navigation, you’ll see this is a pretty standard mega menu. However, take note that at the very top of this category (as is the case for all others) appears a page for “Gifts”. This is not something you see the rest of the year, so that’s another holiday-related touch meant to streamline searches and sales.
3. Use Add-ons At Checkout
Here is everything you need to know to optimize conversions at mobile checkout. If I can add an additional two cents to this matter, though, I’d like to briefly talk about add-ons at checkout… but only around the holidays.
Typically, I believe that a fully streamlined checkout process is essential to capturing as many conversions as possible on mobile devices. It’s hard enough typing out all that information (if it doesn’t auto-populate) and trusting that devices and websites will keep payment information secure.
However…
When it comes to designing the checkout for holiday shoppers, I think it’s at least worth experimenting with add-ons. For example:
Promo codes
Free delivery options
Shorter, but more premium delivery or pick up in store options
Gift wrapping.
Nordstrom doesn’t even wait for visitors to get to the checkout to promote this.
Nordstrom promotes free shipping and returns right away (Source: Nordstrom) (Large preview)
The very top of the site has a sticky bar promoting the free shipping and returns offer. This way, visitors are already in the mindset that they can get their Black Friday purchases or holiday gifts for even cheaper than planned.
The top-half of the Fitbit homepage gets visitors into the mindset that there are cost savings galore here. Not only are items on sale, but certain orders come with free and expedited shipping. And the site clearly states when the sale ends, which will keep customers from getting upset if gifts don’t arrive on time. (It will also probably motivate them to get their shopping done sooner if they want to cash in on the sale.)
So all appropriate expectations regarding pricing and shipping are set right from the very get-go, making checkout go more smoothly.
I know that some may argue these will be bad for UX (and normally I’d join them), but I don’t see them as distractions during the holidays. This is an expensive and busy time of year.
Anything you can add to checkout that says, “Hey, we’re thinking about you and want to make this holiday season go just a little more smoothly” would go over well with your users.
4. Give Images A Seasonal Touch
Images are a tricky thing this time of year. You want to use them to appeal to holiday-minded visitors, but you don’t want to overdo it because images add a lot of pressure to your server. You need your site running fast, so be smart about what you do with them.
Resize them before you ever add them to your site. There’s no need to use oversized images if they’re going to appear smaller online.
Optimize your images with compression tools before and after they’re added to the design. This will free up some space they would otherwise take.
If your users’ journey starts above-the-fold, you might want to consider lazy-loading images.
That said, images can go a long way in communicating to visitors that your site and business are ready to spread some holiday cheer without having to ever explicitly say it. This might be the ideal choice for those of you who design websites for global audiences. Perhaps you’d rather use an image that evokes a festive feeling because you don’t want to unintentionally offend anyone who doesn’t celebrate the holiday your copy calls express attention to.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the images used here are festive, but there are unique elements that evoke a certain association with the holidays. Like the color green used within the photos. Or the partial glances of what appear to be snow globes. They’re seasonal elements, but not necessarily relegated to Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa.
Then, there’s the United States Postal Service (USPS) website. Granted, this website targets visitors within the United States, but it remains mindful of the differences in religions practiced and holidays celebrated.
USPS uses a non-denominational image to promote the holidays (Source: USPS) (Large preview)
The message remains neutral as does the image itself. The USPS is simply trying to help people quickly and festively send holiday cards, gifts and other items to distant relatives and friends.
5. Review The Customer Journey
The factor of speed is a big one when it comes to designing the customer journey. While the navigation cuts down on any unnecessary steps that might be taken when visitors can afford a more leisurely pace, your design should expedite the rest.
In other words:
Start talking about holiday-related content, products, pages and links right on the home page.
Make sure you have at least one mention above-the-fold, whether it’s in the navigation, in a blog link or in a seasonal promo.
Use the data from last year to streamline the ideal pathway from the home page to conversion.
Walk through that pathway as a visitor on both desktop and mobile. Is it as clear, concise and direct as possible?
Check the responsiveness of the pathway. Your site, in general, needs to be responsive, but if you’re optimizing a certain journey for visitors and you want them to convert on mobile, then extra care needs to be taken.
Below is another example from the Food52 website from the holidays. As you can see in this snippet, two kinds of holiday-related content are promoted. What’s cool about them, though, is that it’s not necessarily in-your-face.
Food52 adds a holiday touch to its home page design and copy (Source: Food52) (Large preview)
The relish recipe could easily be used any time of the year. However, because pomegranates are often considered a winter food, this falls into the category of holiday-related content. The second post is more blatant about attracting holiday readers.
The final element in this screenshot is also worth taking note of. To start, it appears they’ve customized the copy specifically for this time of year. All it takes is one addition of the word “joyfully” to let visitors know that Food52 took time to make its site just a little more festive.
I also want to give them kudos for including a newsletter subscription box here and in other key areas of the site.
If the research from Adobe is right and only about half of mobile visitors convert, then this is a smart design choice. This way, Food52 can collect visitor information on mobile and contact them later. When interested visitors receive the reminder at a more convenient time and place, they can hop onto their desktop or other preferred device and finish the conversion process.
Another site which I think handles the customer journey optimization well is Cracker Barrel.
Cracker Barrel doesn’t overdo it when it comes to designing for the holidays. Instead, it’s developed a series of calls-to-action that set certain types of visitors on the right path.
The first one features an image of what looks like a holiday feast with the CTA “Order Heat N’ Serve”. That’s brilliant. If people are taking the time to visit this site right before Thanksgiving, it’s probably to see if they can get help preparing their major feast… which it appears they can.
The second section sort of looks festive, though I’d still say they play it safe with choice of color, texture and gift card image. With a CTA of “Buy Gift Cards”, they’re now appealing to holiday shoppers. Not only can you get a whole feast conveniently prepared by Cracker Barrel, but you can buy gifts here, too.
Sometimes designing for the holidays isn’t about the blatant use of snowflake imagery or promoting recipes for cooking a turkey. Sometimes it’s about understanding what your users’ particular needs are at that time and helping setting them on that exact journey right away.
Wrap-Up
I understand that there are ways to add a dancing Santa to a site or to spruce up pop-ups with animated text and images, but I think subtler is better.
It’s kind of like the whole holiday music and decorations thing. How many times have you gone to your local drug store at the end of October for the purposes of getting Halloween candy, only to be met by an entire aisle full of holiday decorations? Or maybe you entered a department store like Macy’s in November, thinking you’ll beat the crazy holiday crowds. And, yet, holiday music is already playing. It’s overkill.
If you want to impress mobile visitors with your website around the holidays, focus on making this a worthwhile experience. Optimize your server for high volumes of traffic, put extra security in place, reorganize the navigation and add some small festive touches to your design that call attention to the most relevant parts of your site at this time of year.
Hello Readers. It’s September, so as soon as your kids are off to school, maybe you can finally have a five-minute power nap. Take that power nap with equal parts gusto and relief, dear Reader. You’ve earned it.
Last month, one of you asked for less “ultra-modern” designs, and the design gods have seen fit to provide. We still have some of that ultra-modern goodness — because apparently now that it’s been started, we can’t make it stop — but I managed to find and sprinkle in a few more classic-feeling designs. Enjoy.
Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.
45royale
45royale is one of those sites that combines minimalism with a healthy love of gradients.The layouts are simple, and the type is good, but it’s the use of color that truly makes this site stand out.
Platform: WordPress
RedElegant
RedElegant embraces a classic and more corporate-client-friendly aesthetic with just a touch of that material design feel. It’s the sort of design you’d expect to see at a bank.
Interesting side note, the WordPress theme used seems to be a heavily customized version of the Twenty Seventeen default WordPress theme. The extent of the customization makes this site impressive, as I would never have guessed this if I hadn’t looked at the source.
Platform: WordPress
5e Rue
5e Rue combines a fairly minimalist and classical feel with light hints of more modern artistic flourish, and a bold use of blue. The serif heading type overlaps with illustration-style bits in a way that creates a beautiful yet staid experience. It puts me in mind of a classic Parisian café, and not just because the studio itself is in Paris, okay?
Platform: Static Site
Co-Partnership
Co-Partnership has gone for the solid background with the big sans-serif text, and just a little bit of asymmetry. Well, there’s nothing at all wrong with using a tried and true formula.
I particularly like what they do with their logotype. The ever-shifting branding is a nice touch of art direction on an otherwise very simple site.
Platform: WordPress
Object
Object goes hard on the use of color as art direction. Just about every page has a different palette, and the overall effect is quite pleasing. While I’ll admit that the “hero” section on their home page is a bit of an eye-gouger, the overall effect is a pleasant one.
Platform: WordPress
60fps
60fps specializes in motion design, so it’s to be expected that their site will be a bit JavaScript-heavy. Even so, the animation used feels understated, even while making its presence known so clearly. With unique-feeling layouts and good typography, the whole experience is one of the better ones I’ve seen in the “presentation site” category.
I just wish they would stop with the scroll-jacking. I’m not a fan.
Platform: Static Site
Hochburg
Hochburg uses a very light touch with animation and a very simple, minimalist, and grid-based look. One thing I do rather like about the home page is this very light animated static effect to highlight portfolio pieces when you hover on them. It’s just a good-looking plain old dark layout, and I love it.
Platform: Contao CMS
Rimini Berlin
Rimini Berlin is interesting for in that the entire site is an accordion element. Sure, the implementation is a bit too JS-dependent for my taste, but it does preserve navigational context on this one-page site in a fairly clever way. Give me a pure CSS implementation, or at least some simple fallbacks, and I’d have nothing to complain about.
Platform: WordPress
ED.
ED. goes for full minimalism, and a classic three-ish-column approach. In fact, I’m kind of a fan of the way the columns shift around a bit when you click on a project, even if I’m unsure about this trend of letting your branding clip onto the content of your site. It’s a simple effect, but it works, and allows for a certain flexibility in this simple layout.
Platform: WordPress
Intervaro
Intervaro goes for full minimalism with a touch of material design, by which I guess I mean drop shadows and a fixed navigation bar. That’s Material Design, right? And Material Design is the new corporate aesthetic?
Whatever, it’s a simple and good-looking portfolio site. Bonus points: they implemented a rather fantastic-looking dark mode for users who find that easier on their eyes.
Platform: WordPress
Modest Department
I find myself fascinated by the choices made on Modest Department’s portfolio site because they went with very intentionally small thumbnails for everything. Is it to fit with the name? Is it to save people’s bandwidth? Either way, it does both.
The small thumbnails and wide spacing naturally draw the eye in and make you really look at what they’re showing you. It would be inadvisable for an extended browsing experience, but it’s great for a quick portfolio. It’s not great for those with visual impairments, but they could zoom in, and clicking on a thumbnail gets you a full-sized video in any case.
Platform: WordPress
Koto
Koto’s studio portfolio has gone with a one-column portfolio site, relying on their use of color and branding to help them stand out. And it works. Every element feels very intentionally placed despite the almost extreme simplicity. And I can’t fault the way they use illustration-style elements.
Platform: WordPress
Jane Studios
With all of the comparably simple sites on this list so far, we were due for another artsy one. Enter Jane Studios, a site so minimalist, artsy, and generally PowerPoint-like, we might have reached peak modern design. I’ll never be a fan of that in-all-the-corners navigation, but the rest of the site is an excellent example of its kind,
Platform: WordPress
Raxo
Raxo gets a spot on this list only partly because I’m a sucker for horizontal layouts like the one they have on their home/landing page. The rest of the site is a fairly simple and business-like affair with a strong but not overwhelming use of solid red.
Once again, I’m going to complain a bit about the navigation, though. Hamburger icons are bad enough on a desktop site, but it’s not even a hamburger icon anymore. It’s a circle. Come on. The rest is pretty good, though.
Platform: Static Site
RubyAnne Designs
RubyAnne Designs, which is abbreviated very awesomely as “RAD”, is an architecture firm. Unlike many architecture sites, this one skips a lot of the fluff and just shows you the houses already. The aesthetic is nearly brutalist, but don’t let that stop you from checking it out. It’s a fantastic example of a simple, clean, and not at all overdone architecture portfolio.
Platform: SquareSpace
Robin Mastromarino
Robin Mastromarino is an interaction designer, which means you should expect lots of animation. The animation is fairly low-key, though, and doesn’t detract from this delightfully clean and well-structured site.
The click-and-drag slideshow probably works better on mobile than it does on the desktop. Well, mobile is a huge market, so that works.
Platform: Static Site
Célia Lopez
Célia Lopez’ portfolio lands squarely in artsy territory with lots of 3D-ish graphics and that aesthetic form that’s just so “modern” that I feel like inventing a new word for it. Supermodern? Anyway, as presentation sites go, this one looks absolutely lovely. I love the heading type, especially.
Platform: JS App(?)
Hamish Stephenson
Hamish Stephenson’s flim and photography portfolio is dark, simple, and… smooth? Look, it feels smooth. Maybe that’s just because Samuel L. Jackson stares out at you from the portrait section of the site, but it just looks “cool”, in that dark and honey-voiced narrator sense of the word. Like old jazz.
Man, blurry background elements have never gotten so much praise, but here we are.
Platform: WordPress
Sebastian Chen Speier
Sebastian Chen Speier’s one-page portfolio is fairly post-modern, minimalist, and basically defines the phrase “dead simple”. It does that whole hover-over-text-to-see-a-preview thing, but with a twist: click, and you’ll get different preview images. It’s not the most intuitive setup, but it’s worth checking out for the novelty alone.
Platform: Static Site
Helder
The Helder agency site is of that school of thought that holds bold text in high regard. It’s all bold. All of it. Then there’s the strong color changes (that still somehow work), the stark imagery… it’s just a design that doesn’t hold back. And yet, it still looks kind of reserved for all that.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
21 CSS Animation Examples
Google is Rolling Out a New Chrome Design Across all OSs Next Month
7 CSS Dividers
Why your Static Website Needs HTTPS
Create your Design System
Slicki – The Wiki for Slack. Build Documentation from Slack
A Better Way to Create Typography Design Systems
The iPhone’s Original UI Designer on Apple’s Greatest Flaws
Real Work Vs. Imaginary Work
Let’s Be Transparent
New Website Design for Buffer
7 Tips for Young Designers
How Logitech Designed an Ergonomic Mouse that’s not Weird
Designing an App to Keep Students Safe During an Active Shooter
Web Copy Techniques that Alienate Users, and Why not to Use Them
This Site Generates the LinkedIn InMail of your Nightmares
Redesigning a Product Card for Improved Conversion – A UX Design Challenge
The Disconnect
How Hardware and Design Collaborate
The Ultimate Checklist to Go Through Before Sending your UX Portfolio
The Future of Design Systems
What is a Design Library?
The Underappreciated Genius of Retro Video Game Fonts
The Web I Want
Affinity Publisher Beta Download
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.
