As a business, your website should be informative, and the key to a seamless user experience lies in the navigation. Any time a user visits a website, they want and expect all content to be clear and concise. Your navigation is the map—and therefore digital portal—between the visitor and what you have to offer.
According to Silverback Strategies, a DC web design agency, “A key step to staying ahead of competitors is ensuring that your company makes a great first impression, and your website is often the first encounter consumers have with your brand.” Unfortunately, not everyone puts the right amount of time and effort into crafting a navigation that works. With that in mind, these seven tips will help you create a better website navigation that users will appreciate and understand.
1) Plan Your Navigation Early
It’s not uncommon to be eager when creating a website and to simply start adding pages in your website host dashboard. However, this can easily lead to an ill-planned navigation menu, and you can do much better by prepping your pages ahead of time. When you prepare your
navigation menu ahead of time, this is called a “sitemap”—and just as it sounds, it’s a map of your website. There are several ways you can do this. Start off by drafting a map via pen and paper to help get your ideas out. Then, begin creating it in something as simple as a Google
Doc. Use an outline format to create your page setup. For example:
1. About
a. Our Team
b. Company Mission
c. Brand History
There are also dozens of sitemap creation tools to streamline the process for you. Keep in mind that early on, you want to focus on creating visual sitemaps, purely for planning purposes. Take a look at some visual sitemap creator tools here. And for some inspiration, check out these websites with great navigation.
2) Use Language People Can Understand
Your navigation uses language to communicate with visitors, and the language you use should be user-friendly. In fact, you might even consider getting creative with your copy, depending on your brand and the industry you’re in. Additionally, certain terms are more applicable across different industries than others.
For instance, if you were a professional scientific publication, it would be acceptable to use the word “Articles” to refer to your content, but if you were an e-commerce company, “Blog” would be the appropriate language to use. Similarly, as an e-commerce shop, you wouldn’t want to call your store “Marketplace” but would choose “Shop” instead.
3) Link Your Logo
Today, the majority of people expect certain experiences out of their website visits. And one of their expectations is that the logo always links back to the homepage. Typically, you will find the logo at the top left corner of the website. It’s not always bad to reinvent the wheel, but it’s important to understand that doing so can result in some confusion, and confusion can lose potential conversions. To ensure you’re creating the best experience for your users, you should A/B test your website to see which efforts are faring best with those visitors.
4) Implement a Responsive Navigation
Without a doubt, you need a responsive navigation. A responsive navigation allows any user to seamlessly view your content and design from any device, whether it’s desktop, phone, or tablet. Today, this is extremely important. There are many reasons for this. First and foremost, in 2015, Google announced that, for the first time, searches across mobile devices surpassed searches on desktop devices in at least 10 countries, including the United States. Another study revealed that between December 2013 and December 2015, tablet Internet consumption grew by 30%, while mobile smartphone consumption increased to 78%. If a user visits your website through their mobile device and has difficulty with your menu, they’ll simply move on to the next best thing.
5) Pay Attention to Your Footers
Your footer is the area where you put some of the items that are not so much fun—this includes your privacy policy and other legal terms. However, it’s an important area to pay attention to, as many people scroll directly to the footer to locate important information (or information they can’t find in the header navigation), such as where a business is located, how to find job opportunities, and where to get press and media information.
Many businesses, especially storefront companies, even put a visual map here to show visitors exactly where the business is located. And lastly, many businesses also include social media icons in the footer.
We don’t generally think of CSS animations or transitions inside of email, or really any movement at all outside of an awkward occasional GIF. But there is really no reason you can’t use them inside HTML emails, particularly if you do it in a progressive enhancement-friendly way. Like, you could style a link with a hover state and a shaking animation, but if the animation (or even the hover) doesn’t work, it’s still a functional link. Heck, you can use CSS grid in email, believe it or not.
Jason Rodriguez just wrote Understanding CSS Animations in Email: Transitions and Keyframe Animations that covers some of the possibilities. On the supported list of email clients that support CSS transitions and keyframe animations is Apple Mail, Outlook, and AOL mail, among others.
The subject of scaling CSS came up a lot in a recent ShopTalk Show with Ben Frain. Ben has put a lot of thought into the subject, even writing a complete book on it, Enduring CSS, which is centered around a whole ECSS methodology.
He talked about how there are essentially two solutions for styling at scale:
Total isolation
Total abstraction
Total isolation is some version of writing styles scoped to some boundary that you’ve set up (like a component) in which those styles don’t leak in or out.
Total abstraction is some version of writing styles that are global, yet so generic and re-usable, that they have no unintended side effects.
Total isolation might come from in a .vue file, CSS modules in which CSS class selectors and HTML class attributes are dynamically generated gibberish, or a CSS-in-JS project, like glamerous. Even strictly-followed naming conventions like BEM can be a form of total isolation.
Total abstraction might come from a project, like Tachyons, that gives you a fixed set of class names to use for styling (Tailwind is like a configurable version of that), or a programmatic tool (like Atomizer) that turns specially named HTML class attributes into a stylesheet with exactly what it needs.
It’s the middle ground that has problems. It’s using a naming methodology, but not holding strictly to it. It’s using some styles in components, but also having a global stylesheet that does random other things. Or, it’s having lots of developers contributing to a styling system that has no strict rules and mixes global and scoped styles. Any stylesheet that grows and grows and grows. Fighting it by removing some unused styles isn’t a real solution (and here’s why).
Note that the web is a big place and not all projects need a scaling solution. A huge codebase with hundreds of developers that needs to be maintained for decades absolutely does. My personal site does not. I’ve had my fair share of styling problems, but I’ve never been so crippled by them that I’ve needed to implement something as strict as Atomic CSS (et al.) to get work done. Nor at at any job I’ve had so far. I see the benefits though.
Imagine the scale of Twitter.com over a decade! Nicolas has a great thread where he compares Twitter’s PWA against Twitter’s legacy desktop website.
The legacy site’s CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can’t be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers alike.
This platform is perfect for teams sized at 2-to-200 — and gives every employee the same level of transparency.
Every project management tool seeks to do the same instrumental thing: keep teams connected, on task and on deadline to get major initiatives done. But the market is getting pretty crowded, and for good reason — no platform seems to have gotten the right feel for what people need to see, and how that information should be displayed so that it’s both actionable/relevant and contextualized.
That’s why monday.com is worth a shot. The platform is based off a simple, but powerful idea: that as humans, we like to feel like we’re contributing to part of a greater/effort good — an idea that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as we focus on the details of getting stuff done. So projects are put onto a task board (think of it like a digital whiteboard), where everyone can have the same level of visibility into anyone else who’s contributing a set of tasks. That transparency breaks down the silos between teams that cause communication errors and costly project mistakes — and it’s a beautiful, simple way to connect people to the processes that drive forward big business initiatives.
Whether you’re part of a tech-forward team or not, monday.com is a welcome relief to cumbersome Excel files, messy (physical) whiteboards, or meetings that waste time when actual work could be completed. The scalable, intuitive structure can effectively work for a team of two, or an international team of 2,000+ — and a beautiful, color-coded board lays out tasks you can cleanly see and tag for various stages of completion. That way, employees can see exactly what needs to be done (and who needs to do it), while managers can optimize their time re-allocating resources as necessary to optimize processes. It’s a win-win.
monday.com also allows teams to communicate within the platform, cutting down on the amount of laborious sifting through various email threads to figure out a workflow. Messages can be sent inside of tasks — so all the communication is contextualized before meeting resolution or seeking it. The platform also supports uploads, so documents and videos can be added to facilitate more collaboration, and integration with other productivity apps. So if your team is already using tools like Slack, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Microsoft Excel, Trello, and Jira, there’s specific, clean shortcuts to integrate the information from those platforms into monday.com. And even beyond team communication and management, you can use monday.com for client-facing exchanges, so all your messages are consolidated into a single place.
The platform recently raised $50M in funding, and received nods from the likes of Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and more for its ability to empower international teams to do better work together. Best of all, unlike other team management software, which can be pricey and time-intensive to scope, test and run, you can try monday.com today — for free.
What can this app do?
Creating and managing a project’s milestones
Creating and assigning tasks
Attaching files to any project’s table projects on the go.
Using mobile applications to manage projects
Communicating with your team members
Updating team using the news feed
Keeping clients in the loop
Organizing the organization into teams
Creating detailed project charts and reports
Tracking the time your team members spend on tasks
Managing a project’s financials
Website as well as a desktop app for Mac and Windows
monday.com to make every user feel empowered and part of something bigger than their own individual tasks, and as a result, to boost collective productivity and transparency.
To all the presenters of conferences, workshops, and meetups: I truly enjoy hearing your anecdotes and learning things from you. I like laughing at your jokes, especially the puns. Unfortunately, some people in your audience aren’t getting as much out of your session as me. They may not be able to see your slides, or hear you speak, or make out the details on the screen.
A few tweaks will make your presentation more inclusive. Here are some tips so next time you’re on stage, everyone in the crowd can laugh at your bad jokes.
1. Create Accessible Slides
Make Your Text Big. No, Bigger.
The back row of your presentation room is a long way from the projector screen. It’s much further than the distance between you and your laptop screen as you create your slides.
Small text in the middle of a large slide. (Large preview)
People up the back will appreciate every extra pixel you add to your font size. People with vision impairments will appreciate the larger text too — they’ve got a better chance of being able to read it.
Go big or go home. This goes for all text, even “less important” stuff like data labels, graph axes and legends, image captions, footnotes, URLs, and references.
Is Your Slide Font Readable?
I love fonts; they can really set the tone of a talk. However, before you jump into the craziest corners of Google Fonts, think of your audience members with reading difficulties. Using handwriting or script fonts, particularly ones whose letters link together, makes text much harder to read. Using uppercase reduces scannability by removing ascenders and descenders, as well as being shouty.
There’s more scope to experiment with fonts on slides than web pages due to the larger text size, but here are some best practices:
Sans serif is typically the most readable.
Be generous with spacing (between letters, words, and lines).
Use bold for emphasis — underline and italic change the letter shapes, making them less identifiable.
Do a print preview of your slides in black and white. Does it all still make sense without the color? If you send out your slides post-talk, some people may not have access to a color printer.
There’s also a good chance that someone at your talk is color-blind. If you’ve used red text for negative items and green text for positive items mixed together in a single list, they may not be able to tell them apart. If the datasets in your graphs only use color to differentiate, think about using patterns or labels to tell each bar, line or pie segment apart.
Don’t rely on color only to tell your story — enhance color with labels, icons, or other visual markers.
Every time a new slide goes up, you lose the crowd while they scan the new content. If the slide is full of text, it’s going to take a long time for their attention to come back to what you’re saying.
People with attention deficiencies will struggle to read your slides and listen to what you’re saying at the same time. Audience members with reading difficulties may not finish reading text-heavy slides before you move on, and never mind what you said while they were concentrating on the screen.
Slides aren’t speaker notes. If you need prompts, write up some cards or use your slide program’s notes function. Use keywords and short phrases in your slides, not whole sentences or paragraphs, to share the essential ideas of your talk. Write and refer to a long-form companion piece if you want to share loads of detail that doesn’t translate well to slides.
Animated Slide Transitions? Really?
My high-school self-loved slide transitions — the zanier, the better. Look, my slide is swirling down a plughole! It’s swinging back and forth like a leaf on the breeze! Fades, swipes, shutters, I was all for it.
Make your audience groan with your punny jokes, not because they feel ill.
Readability Applies To Slide Text, Too
If you’re presenting, you probably know a decent amount about your topic. You likely use specialist words and phrases and assume a minimum level of audience knowledge.
Be mindful of using jargon and acronyms, even if you think they’re well-known. Explain them, don’t assume everyone knows them. Better still, use plain language for everything.
Don’t mistake using simpler words and shorter phrases for “dumbing it down”. Slides are for clear and concise ideas, not showing off your vocabulary. Save your fancy words for your next crossword puzzle.
GIFs Aren’t Always Funny
Animated GIFs are used in lots of presentations — usually as a killer quip or a laugh out loud punchline. They’re an easy way to add fun to dry tech talks but use with care — and I’m not talking about your bad sense of humor.
While a GIF is looping on the screen, I’m half-listening to the presenter at best. It’s so distracting. If there’s an animation on screen while you relate an anecdote, I’m going to miss the story.
When you create an animated GIF, you can configure the number of times it loops. This is a good compromise — have some fun with your audience, then they can focus on what you’re saying without distraction.
How Good Is Your Color Contrast?
The word ‘Binary’ on the bottom-left of this slide is presented in a large, readable font, but the color contrast is very poor. (Large preview)
Color contrast is important for slide content too. You probably won’t have much control over the environment, so it’s a good idea to use color combinations that go beyond recommended contrast ratios. I guarantee it won’t look as clear on the projector as it does on your computer.
Don’t be subtle with your color palette. Use bold colors that make your text stand out clearly from the background. Be careful about laying text over images — do it, just make sure the contrast is good. Use a color contrast checker and aim for a ratio of at least 4.5 : 1.
(Before you flame me about the big text minimum ratio being 3 : 1 for WCAG 2.0 AA, I figure it’s big up close, but it’s smaller from the audience’s perspective. They’re not likely to complain that it’s too high contrast, are they?)
If you know the setup in advance, light-colored text on a dark background is more audience-friendly in a darkened room; a white background can be dazzling. Some people have even resorted to wearing sunglasses when they were blinded by too much glare!
Enable Your Audience To Follow Along
If you plan to share your slides or you have complementary materials, include links to these on your first slide, and mention it in your intro. This enables your audience to follow along or adapt the presentation on their own devices. People with low vision can zoom in on visual content, and blind audience members can follow along on Braille displays or with a screen reader and earbuds.
Keep Your Links Short
If there’s a web link in your slide, there are two reasons to keep it as short as possible:
Readability: Long URLs will wrap onto multiple lines, which is hard to read.
Say-ability: You should say your URL out loud for people who can’t see the screen. A long URL is very hard to say correctly, particularly if it contains strings of random characters. It’s also very hard for listeners to understand and record in real time.
Use a URL shortener to create short links that point to the destination. If you can, maximize readability by customizing the short link to contain related word or two rather than a random string.
Does Your Presentation Contain Multimedia?
Video and audio clips are a great way of presenting events, interviews, and edited content that doesn’t work in real time.
If you’re playing video, think about audience members who can’t see the screen — is the audio descriptive enough by itself? Can a blind or low-vision person get a sense of what’s going on, or who’s speaking, purely from the soundtrack? You may need to introduce or summarise the vision yourself to add context.
If your video has an audio track or you’re playing a separate sound clip, are the visuals enough for someone who is deaf or hard of hearing? You should provide captions of decent size and contrast. Given an audio clip doesn’t have a visual component, you could display equivalent text or graphics while the audio is playing.
Don’t Put The Punchline At The Bottom Of Your Slide
This is more of a general usability tip. Don’t bottom-align slide text unless you know that the bottom of the screen is located well above the audience, or the audience seating is tiered. If the bottom of the projector screen is at or below the audiences’ head-height, and the floor is flat, people seated beyond the first few rows will likely not see what you wrote at the bottom of the slide.
It can be tempting to structure your talk towards a big reveal. This is a great device for building interest, but you run the risk of losing people with attention deficit disorders. More generally, if you find yourself running out of time, you may have to rush or cut short your final grand flourish!
Set expectations upfront. Start with a quick “Today I’ll be covering…” statement. You don’t have to give the whole game away, just tantalize the crowd with an outline. They can then decide if they want to commit their brain power to focus on your talk. Let the audience know that it’s OK for them to go if they wish.
Don’t be offended if someone chooses not to stay. They may have a limited capacity for focused thought each day, so a conference of back-to-back presentations and loud breakout spaces is challenging. They must pick and choose what is most useful to them. Hopefully, they’ll come back to your talk if it’s shared later.
Give The Audience Time To Read Your Slides
Complex content like graphs with multiple datasets take time to read and understand. If your slide is a slab of text, your audience will get annoyed if you summarise it and skip onto the next topic before they’ve finished reading.
Consider how much time your audience needs to read and understand each slide, based on the amount and complexity of the content. Remember, they’re seeing it for the first time, and they don’t know as much about the topic as you. Structure your talk so complex slides stay up on the screen long enough to be read completely.
You worked hard on those slides, it’d be a shame if they weren’t appreciated!
Provide Captions And Foreign Language Translation
I’ve attended events that have provided sign language interpreters or live captions to translate or transcribe what the speakers say in real time. They’re invaluable for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. International events may also provide foreign-language translation.
If you present at an event that provides these services, send your slides or speaker notes to the interpreters and captioners in advance. They can then research and practice unfamiliar terms before the day.
Many events don’t provide captioning or translation. They’re beyond the budget of most conferences, being both specialized and labor-intensive. In this case, you can potentially provide your own captions.
MS PowerPoint has a free Presentation Translator plug-in to add real-time captions and foreign language translation. I saw a demo at A11y Camp Sydney last year:
Your choice of words may be offending or excluding some of your audience, and you may not even know you’re doing it.
Not all people that work in technology are “guys.” When a speaker says “I talked to the guys about it,” I imagine a group of men. If they’d said “I talked to the developers about it,” then my imaginary group also contains women.
There’s also ableist language. Using words like retarded, insane, lame, and crazy incorrectly is degrading to those with mental and physical disorders. What’s a normal user? Are you making assumptions about gender, sexual orientation, race, family unit, technical knowledge, physical or mental abilities, or level of education?
Then there’s swearing, commonly used to get attention or add some spice. Be careful about deploying this weapon. If you’ve misjudged the room, you could put people offside. If you’re traveling, that fairly tame curse word you use at home could be deeply offensive elsewhere.
Stories Aren’t Universal
When I discussed color contrast at A11y Bytes 2017, I moaned about not being able to see my phone screen in bright sunlight. Attempting to relate, I asked “we’ve all been there, right?”, expecting a few nods and smiles.
The retort was lightning-fast: “Can’t say I’ve found it a problem!” Laughter rippled through the crowd as I realized I’d just been heckled by a blind woman. She graciously laughed off my hasty apology.
I still tell my sunlight story, but now I’m mindful that not everyone can relate to it directly. Learn from my mistake, don’t assume your audience has the same abilities and experiences as you.
Interests And Pop Culture References Aren’t Universal Either
I don’t assume that the audience has used a Switch. I briefly explain the premise of each game and the motion input it uses before I move on to how it relates to the new success criteria. It’s a courtesy to those people who don’t share my interest in the Switch.
Similarly, much as I’d love to do a Star Wars-themed accessibility talk, I won’t because I’d be putting my own amusement ahead of informing my audience. Some people aren’t into Star Wars, just as I’m not a Trekkie or a Whovian. It’d be a shame for them to misunderstand me because they can’t translate my tenuous Star Wars associations — or worse — if they saw the themed talk title and skipped my session altogether.
Have some fun, by all means, include a pop culture reference or two, but don’t structure your entire talk around it. Make it work for someone who hasn’t watched that movie, or heard that band, or read that book, or seen that meme.
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand (Spoken) Words
Photos, graphics and drawings all add interest to your slides. You may have screenshots of a website you’ve built, or photos of people or places you’re talking about.
When your slide imagery is part of the story, remember to describe the pictures for those in the audience that can’t see it. Try not to say “As you can see here…” because someone may not be able to see there.
If you think it’s awkward to quickly rehash a sight gag, think how awkward you’d feel if you were in a room full of people that suddenly all laughed and you didn’t know why.
Slow Down, Breathe.
You’re nervous. You’ve never presented before. You’ve got a time limit and lots to share. You haven’t practiced. Your parents, friends, children, workmates, industry idols, and managers are all in the room.
Whatever the reason, you probably talk faster than usual when you present. This puts pressure on interpreters and captioners, particularly if your talk contains tech-speak. Your audience may struggle to keep up too. Note-takers mash their laptops in vain, live-tweeters’ thumbs cramp up, and sketchnoters leave a trail of half-drawn doodles in their wake. International visitors may get lost figuring out your accent. Cognitively, everyone is thinking furiously to keep up, and it’s hard work!
Practice. Slow down. No one knows your stuff as well as you; give everyone else time to take it in.
Respect The Code Of Conduct And Your Audience
Codes of conduct are found at most public speaking events, such as this one by UX Gatherings. They set the minimum behavior standard for speakers and attendees.
Read the code of conduct for every event you attend — they can differ broadly. Know the no-go zones and don’t go there.
If you are talking about sensitive topics that may upset some of your audience, give them plenty of notice so they can prepare or remove themselves from the discussion. A note in the event program, if possible. A mention on your lead slide, and during your opening remarks. Include contact details of support services if appropriate.
Make Your Code Demonstrations Accessible, Too
Well done if you have mastered the art of the live code demonstration. Few presenters can show off something meaningful that also works while providing a clear commentary.
You know what would take your code demo to the next level? Jacking up the font size. Your usual code editor font size is perfect when you’re sitting at your desk, but it’s not big enough for those sitting in the back row of your presentation.
Check your editor’s color settings too. A pure white background might be startlingly bright in a darkened room. Make sure your editor text colors have good contrast as well.
Don’t Drop The Mic
If there’s a microphone on offer, use it, even if it’s a small space.
Many public conference spaces have an audio induction (hearing) loop connected to their AV systems. The loop transmits the AV output directly to hearing aids and cochlear implants. People who are hard of hearing receive the target audio without background noise.
Congratulations! You’ve done your talk. There are just a couple more things that’ll round this thing out nicely.
Distribute Accessible Slides
Lots of presenters publish their slides after the talk is done. If this is you, make them accessible! Correct semantics, meaningful read order, ALT text on images, enough color contrast, video captions, limited animation looping, reasonable slide transitions, all the good stuff.
Fill The Gaps With Notes, A Transcript Or An Article
Help people that need more time to take in your talk and need more detail than what’s on your slides. Publish your speaker notes or a companion piece that covers your topic(s). If the event is recorded, ask the organizers to include captions or a transcript (but perhaps don’t rely on YouTube’s auto-captioning).
Conclusion
Applying these tips will make a big difference to your whole audience. Your slide content, design, and how you present can all affect how well the crowd gets your message, if at all. This is particularly true for those with physical and cognitive conditions.
Making subtle changes to what you show and your script will help all attendees, not just those with disabilities, to get the most out of your hard work.
Halting climate change; distributing wealth around the globe; achieving social, racial, sexual, and gender equality; ending violence; there are so many challenges in today’s world. The web can be an incredible vehicle for change, and Adobe are lending a helping hand with an incredible, free UI kit for Adobe XD.
The UI kit has been created by Brooklyn-based designer, Meagan Fisher. Her goal was to help non-profits publish better websites; which in turn helps the non-profits to advocate for their cause more effectively, increasing user engagement and driving donations; which in turn helps the non-profits to help more people.
I’m so excited to share that I’ve created another free UI kit for @AdobeXD; this one is for a responsive website for non-profits. My hope is that people will use it to give charities better websites, and to help them help more people! https://t.co/pHpIUcPYFm#AdobePartnerpic.twitter.com/XATDrx08yc
Although the UI Kit uses the example of a charity addressing the food-shortage implications of climate change, the kit would actually work for any fact-based campaign, whether it be gun control, voter empowerment, deforestation, or a youth drop-in centre; no matter what kind of non-profit you’re designing for, this a great starting point.
Because the non-profit sector is so broad, the UI Kit has been designed to be highly versatile. It is a fully prototyped, responsive website design, that employs known best-practices.
Included in the UI Kit are key pages like home, about us, resources, stories, news, events, get involved, and even a carefully crafted donation flow. You’ll find everything you need for a non-profit website, and if there’s anything missing, Adobe XD’s assets panel makes it simple to generate new pages using the existing customizable elements.
The most visually striking thing about the UI Kit is its original color palette. Bucking the trend for hot colors, the UI Kit uses a cool palette of deep, desaturated blue (#354463), and bright, mint green (#C1F7D5). You can change this easily in Adobe XD, but the sophisticated look is both modern, and serious—absolutely appropriate for the task at hand.
The UI kit uses three fonts to convey its message: Flood is a brush script that humanises the text, bringing it back to real people with real problems; Poynter is used for headlines, it’s a media-savvy typeface that works great for newspapers because it has a sense of no-nonsense certainty; Komet is used for the main text, it’s a highly-readable sans-serif with humanist touches.
Even if you’re not currently working for a non-profit, this is a great way to jump into Adobe’s flagship UX project and see what all the fuss is about Adobe XD. If you haven’t tried XD yet, you’re in for a treat. You can download it for free, for Windows, or for Mac. The latest version, released to coincide with October’s MAX conference includes design for voice, and automated artboard transitions.
Who doesn’t love a button? In this case, we are not talking about the buttons of a suit, nor the ones that hold your pants together. Today, we are going to be talking about the buttons that have been a staple in interactive UI design for years. You might be thinking that a button is just a button, but it can be made into so much more. Button design gets a little bit more complex than you might think. Today, we are going to be discussing what makes a good button.
A Button should look like a button
Online, buttons act as visual cues to help enhance the user experience. In order for the user to get the full experience, they should not have to guess where the button is located. If you really want your visitors to click that button, it should look like a button that can be pressed. This is how you do it:
Give it a shape
You want your button to stand out. For this to happen, you have to give your button a recognizable shape. It should stand out from everything else on the page and instantly be recognized as something the users can interact with. Believe it or not, the most common button shape online is not a circle, like you’ve all probably imagined. Your safest bet is to use a rectangle. Not a normal rectangle, though, but one with rounded edges. These typically work the best because they stand out enough to be recognized, but not enough to disrupt the flow of your website’s design.
If you feel creative, you can just as well use something less traditional, such as a rhombus, a triangle, or even a custom shape. The key to making these easy to recognize is to be consistent throughout your website. They will give it a personal touch, which always makes the users more interested.
Use Shadows and Highlights
Shadows have a valuable role in design, as they make things look like they pop out. Every good UI design requires elements that stand out against the background, suggesting that they are tappable or clickable. Just like in real life where the keyboards of a laptop, for example, has raised buttons that can be presses down. More than the shape of your button, the shadows and highlights play a very important role in identifying an interactive button.
Label your buttons according to their purpose
We evolved quite a bit from the times when the only buttons we’d use were the play, rewind, forward and stop. They used to be represented by symbols that everybody was familiar with. Today, it would be almost impossible to put a symbol on every button and expect people to memorize them. There are so many! The good news is that we don’t need to do that, as we have the option to simply write on that button what it is meant for.
It may happen that the message is not clear enough. In this case, it is not wrong to have conformation label as a follow up, that explains the action of a certain button. These need to give the user the option to decline or accept the action of the button.
Place the Button Where It Can Be Found
The user should never hunt for the button. Place them in such a way that everybody can find them. The easiest way to do that is by placing them where people expect them to be. Also, there’s nothing wrong with testing their placement before you determine where to put them. A good example for this is when you log in to any given website. You always put your name and password in, and the log in button is right below that. Nobody would expect the login button to be anywhere else.
Make Interaction with the Button Easy
Consider the size of the button relative to everything else on the page. Make sure that the button is large enough to interact with, but not so large that it takes from the beauty of the page. Studies have shown that the optimum size is 10mmX10mm. Another aspect to keep in mind is the distance between two clickable buttons. Give the buttons some room to breathe. You don’t want anyone accidentally clicking on the wrong button.
Allow Users to Visually Interact with the Button
The button can look good, but if it doesn’t act like a button, the whole project is pointless. When the users click, make the button give visual feedback. This helps in two ways. The first way is that well, it feels more like a button, and that makes everyone happy. The second way is that it gives the user quick confirmation that they actually clicked the button.
Highlight the Important Buttons
Buttons have different roles, from minimal to major. The more important buttons should be easily distinguished between the any other button that’s not as important. The solution could be using different colors, outlining, or making the more important button bigger.
The summary
In order to improve your button design, you need to understand that:
A button should look like a button;
Buttons should be placed where they can be found
The interaction with the button needs to be easy
Interaction with a button should give visual feedback
Important buttons should be highlighted
For such a simple concept there sure is a lot to know about buttons. Although the details are small, there’s nothing more satisfying than pressing a good button. We hope that these tips will help you design buttons that will offer your users a good experience. Share this blog post with other people you think would benefit from it and make sure you stay updated with out latest snippets of knowledge and inspiration by vising us daily.
How often have you put out work only to wish you could have gone through at least one more iteration? It happens that you want to make what you now see as needed improvements.
Don’t feel guilty. We’ve all gone through that.
You know you’re capable of doing better and you always strive to do so, a factor which is definitely in your favor. To help speed up your goal of continual improvement we’ve put together a checklist for you.
It describes 5 ways to improve your designs using pre-built websites. It is complete with examples.
Be Theme and Its Exceptional Library of Pre-built Websites
Sure, you take pride in doing your own designs. But by ignoring any assistance you’re placing limitations on what you can accomplish. Your ability to improve as much and as quickly as you’d like to is also lowered.
They’re professionally designed and crafted. Yet, pre-built websites are not a “lazy man’s approach to web design”. What they provide are structure and inspiration. At the same time, they are leaving plenty of room for you to apply your creative skills.
Be Theme has a library of 390+ of them at a one-time cost to you of only $59. And, more pre-built websites are constantly being added at no additional cost.
They are organized by industry and website type, so it’s easy to find what you need.
These pre-built websites reflect the latest design trends. Each is tailored to their chosen industry or niche.
Our Checklist of 5 Ways Pre-Built websites can Improve Your Design Efforts
Am I aligned with the trends in this specific industry?
Take the fashion industry for example. Your work features a luxurious design, rich textures and colors, and plenty of bold images. Then, it’s in line with user expectations – right? Actually, your design will be out of sync with changing times and trends.
This year, fashion sites are taking on a minimalist approach. Simple black and white sketches and an abundance of white space are currently in vogue. So are minimalistic menus.
Be Theme has taken this new trend into account by launching a new series of fashion templates.
Do 2. I know for sure what NEEDS to be on the Homepage?
There are a lot of the difficulties associated with a homepage design. One of them is that what is WANTED all too often gets in the way of what is NEEDED.
Another problem is that a typical homepage design should have the right mix of art and science. Your typical web designer tends to struggle to find the right mix. Some aren’t aware of it at all (WANTS supersedes NEEDS).
A good solution is to use a pre-built website as the basis for your home page. It will have been designed by professionals and have a tried and tested user journey.
Which, as these examples illustrate, is what you need – and “want”.
You could place web designers (and much of the rest of the population) in two general categories. The followers who like to play it safe, and those who delight in taking one leap of creative faith after another.
We constantly hear whispers in our ear that tell us to “go for it.” This is not particularly good advice when you’re dealing with “stiff” clients. These are professionals who would rather not be taken down unfamiliar paths.
Pre-built websites give you the solidly-structured templates you need. You can still customize them with a creative touch your client would appreciate.
Which of these 5 great ideas I have will go best with this project?
When you’re involved with design, too many ideas, even great ones, tend to run into one another. The too many idea (TMI) syndrome is not at all uncommon and it’s not a nice problem to have. None of us like to discard what we believe to be a great idea. If you have 5 of them, you might be tempted to incorporate all of them into your idea.
The odds of all 5 meshing nicely together is about the same as the odds of winning the lottery.
A far better approach is to –
Browse Be Theme’s large collection of pre-built websites.
Search through them by type of content, industry, or niche.
Pick one that closely matches your design ideas or needs.
Customize it.
The result? You’ll be able to implement your creative vision on a tried and tested structure and platform.
Is the client right or should I stick to my ideas?
Taking the approach that the client is always right is usually the best way to go. But there will be times (many of them perhaps) when you’ll really want to change a client’s thinking. It might be simply not the way to go to establish a solid online presence.
You’ll help your client (and yourself) by using a pre-built website. It’s simply a matter of convincing the client that a website structured to his or her industry is the best way to go. Pre-built websites allow you to deliver high-quality work. They will conform to industry standards and feature good structure and content focus. And that’s usually enough to seal the deal.
Pre-built websites have many things going for them. Two of them are that they are a proven way to improve your designs, and they are fast and easy to work with.
They also allow you to produce designs that are in tune with the latest trends. At the same time, they ensure one of the characteristics of the products you deliver will be a tried and tested UX.
Pre-built websites will help you zero in on the best idea for a new design. They will also give you plenty of room to exercise your creative talents.
Like Eric Bailey says, if it’s interactive, it needs a focus style. Perhaps your best bet? Don’t remove the dang outlines that focusable elements have by default. If you’re going to rock a button { outline: 0; }, for example, then you’d better do a button:focus { /* something else very obvious visually */ }. I handled a ticket just today where a missing focus style was harming a user who relies on visual focus styles to navigate the web.
But those focus styles are most useful when tabbing or otherwise navigating with a keyboard, and less so when they are triggered by a mouse click. Now we’ve got :focus-visible! Nelo writes:
TLDR; :focus-visible is the keyboard-only version of :focus.
Also, the W3C proposal mentions that :focus-visible should be preferred over :focus except on elements that expect a keyboard input (e.g. text field, contenteditable).
(Also see his article for a good demo on why mouse clicking and focus styles can be at odds, beyond a general dislike of fuzzy blue outlines.)
Browser support for :focus-visible is pretty rough:
This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.
Desktop
Chrome
Opera
Firefox
IE
Edge
Safari
No
No
4*
No
No
No
Mobile / Tablet
iOS Safari
Opera Mobile
Opera Mini
Android
Android Chrome
Android Firefox
No
No
No
No
No
62*
But it does have Firefox support, and as Lea Verou says:
… once Chrome ships its implementation it will explode in a matter of 1-2 months.
That’s generally how things go these days. Once two major browsers have support — and one of them is Chrome — that’s a huge enough slice of the web that can start using it. Especially when it can be done as safely as this property.
Safely, as in, there is an official polyfill, meaning you can nuke default focus styles and just use :focus-visible styles:
But, as Patrick H. Lauke documented, you can do it even without the polyfill, using careful selector usage and un-doing styles as needed:
button:focus { /* Some exciting button focus styles */ }
button:focus:not(:focus-visible) {
/* Undo all the above focused button styles
if the button has focus but the browser wouldn't normally
show default focus styles */
}
button:focus-visible { /* Some even *more* exciting button focus styles */ }
With the introduction of dark mode in macOS, Safari Technology Preview 68 has released a new feature called prefers-color-scheme which lets us detect whether the user has dark mode enabled with a media query.
That’s right. If this becomes a little bit more supported in other browsers, then we might potentially soon have a way to toggle on night modes with a few lines of CSS!
Recently Mark Otto described how we can start using prefers-color-scheme today in order to create themes that dynamically adjust to the new user setting. And the neat thing about this post is that Mark sort of frames it as an accessibility issue and shows how he uses it on his own website to adjust images so that they’re not too bright for the user:
In the code above, Mark detects whether the user has dark mode enabled with the media query and then makes the images darker so that they match a dark background. This reminds me of an excellent post by Marcin Wichary where he explores a similar technique and goes one step further by adding all sorts of filters to make sure they have a much higher contrast.
Andy Clarke also wrote up some thoughts about how to take this fancy new CSS feature and how we might apply a dark theme across our website. He describes how to pick colors so our light/dark themes are consistent in terms of branding and how we might want to use a lighter font-weight for darker backgrounds. He writes:
Designing for dark mode shouldn’t stop with choosing darker colours. You should also consider altering typography styles to maintain readability for people who use dark mode. Light text against dark backgrounds appears higher in contrast than when the same colours are used in reverse, so to make your dark mode designs easier to read you’ll need to add more white/dark space to your text.
If your fonts offer a lighter weight, using that for your dark mode design will open up the letterforms and make them appear further apart…
What was that? It sure sounded like the joyous applause of typography nerds and designers everywhere!
