Instagram has become a hotbed for brand marketing, and it’s easy to see why. It boasts of massive engagement rates compared to its competitors Facebook and Twitter. While those may have 0.5 to 1% engagement, Instagram’s is 4.21%—no other social media platform currently comes close. With 500 million users on the platform daily, this can translate to millions of people seeing your content and interacting with it.

However, with Instagram’s updated algorithm focusing on user activity first and foremost, organic reach among brands took a nosedive. As it stands today, an audience that doesn’t interact and doesn’t engage with your brand is a marketing no-go. You’ll be relegated to the bottom of their feeds if you can’t get people to participate. Likes, comments, views, and clicks—these are the metrics you want to increase.

This is actually something of a blessing in disguise. You might have a smaller audience than the big brands, but a committed userbase that actively wants to connect with you on a regular basis is much better than a large, passive audience.

When you have people actually coming to you and becoming involved with your content, you’ve got something most companies can only dream of: brand loyalty.

Motivating people to become loyal to your brand doesn’t come easy, but it also doesn’t need to be expensive. Before you take out your checkbook and spend capital on a big marketing push, there are a ton of ways you can increase your Instagram engagement right now—you just have to work at it. Today we’re going to show you just how to come up with content that plays to the algorithm’s strengths and grows your Instagram followers.

Optimal Hashtags will give you optimal results

We’ve all seen them—posts where the caption is filled to the brim with hashtags. Sure, some accounts will try to hide the captions with a ton of spacing, but users have become savvy to these kinds of tricks.

Yes, it’s true that posts with hashtags receive greater engagement. When you decide what to include, you’ll want to be broad enough that you reach a decently sized audience. But there are caveats to this. A shotgun method to get your content on to as many pages as possible simply doesn’t work in our experience. Instagram engagement doesn’t grow by random chance.

On the other hand, if you create an entirely new hashtag that nobody even follows and hope that people pick up on it, the likelihood of your audience increasing basically drops to nil.

Striking a good balance between wide reach and relevance is a tricky job, but it’s definitely doable. The most successful brands on Instagram are able to do it on a regular basis.

The key? Don’t go overboard with the hashtags. Engagement is at its highest when brands add nine hashtags to their posts, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Making sure that each hashtag is relevant and targeted is the other.

There are tons of lists of the “top” hashtags to use, but do you really need to add #love or #coffee to every post? Unless you’re actually in the coffee business, you probably don’t. It’s fine to have a niche and to use that limited audience to the best of your ability.

Instagram already makes it easy to find out the reach of any hashtag through the search function, as well as any related hashtags. Use this feature wisely and you’ll not only have a better chance of actual activity from these feeds, your post will appear much more professional.

Users are incredibly sensitive to brands that try too hard, so the less spammy your posts feel, the better. Give them content that’s actually relevant to the hashtags they follow, and they’ll easily reward you with likes and comments.

Your need to step up your Instagram story game

We all know just how big of a hit Instagram stories are. According to Instagram, stories aren’t affected by their algorithm, so posting more will get your content seen by the most people.

But there are some drawbacks to this approach. We’ve seen brands almost completely forego posting to their normal Instagram feed, which in itself is a losing game. Ephemeral content is great, but it’s just that—ephemeral.

There needs to be content that a user can peruse at their own leisure. So, the question is, what do you post more of? Stories or traditional posts?

We think there’s no reason to choose between the two. In fact, you can use your stories to boost Instagram engagement on your normal posts. Share a story when you’ve put up a new post, and try to get some of that audience on to your traditional feed.

One other thing you need to do is to start using Instagram stories stickers.

With a minimal amount of effort, you can get people participating in your feed. Our favorite is the quiz sticker for increasing Instagram engagement. But the hashtag stickers (just make them relevant, as we said before), location stickers, mention stickers, question stickers, etc. are all great as well. Just don’t go overboard and try to keep a visual aesthetic that’s consistent with your branding.

The best part is that by asking for users to actively engage with you instead of just presenting content, you open the possibility for future engagement. Someone browsing your stories and answering questions is much more likely to like and comment on your traditional posts.

Captions can be the beginning of a real conversation with your audience

While it’s true that Instagram is primarily a visual platform, that doesn’t mean you can completely forego meaningful captions or quotes with each post. All too often you’ll see text that’s either simply a description of what’s in the image, or no caption at all.

Why is this such a big deal? Because one of the key factors that Instagram’s algorithm takes into account is how long people spend looking at each post. That’s not to say you need to take up the whole 2,200 character limit for captions, nor should you waste people’s time in an effort to bump up your numbers.

What it means is that opening a conversation in your comments section is one of the best ways to get Instagram users to stick around, and gives Instagram a reason to put you at the top of user feeds.

Doing that with a meaningful caption and a message that users will feel compelled to think about is one of the best ways to do that.

However, there are some things to remember before you produce your copy. The caption can’t be too long, as Instagram isn’t made for long-form content. It also can’t be just an endless sales pitch, because your audience is sensitive to that. It needs to be relevant to both the image in the post, and to your overall Instagram marketing strategy. Lastly, it has to give your followers a chance to respond with their own opinions and ideas.

Ask yourself: what are we trying to say with this post, and what kind of story are we trying to tell?

It seems like a tough job to keep all that in mind when writing each post, and it is. One way to simplify it is with a call to action. A good call to action will give your audience a reason to interact with you and with the community you’re trying to foster.

A call to action doesn’t have to be complicated. Asking users to tag others who might be interested in your posts, or even just asking them their opinion should be enough.

One last thing—reply to as many of the comments as you can. This is the nuts and bolts of engagement! Each reply will make users feel like you’re really listening to them and really care about what they have to say. Don’t pass up that opportunity to make an impact and build brand loyalty.

Be consistent with your visual aesthetic

Instagram is, first and foremost, a visual platform. Studies have shown that the best-performing brands on Instagram use consistent filters for their posts. That makes sense, as it’s the brands with the strongest visual aesthetic and the best sense of what they’re trying to achieve that meet success.

So, can you just choose a random filter from Instagram’s offerings, slap it on every post, and call it a day? Of course not. We’ll have to be a bit more judicious than that.

The first step is identifying your brand’s message and figuring out what visual style will go best with it. Once you know that (it’s really the hardest part of all this), you can choose a set of three to four filters that fit each mood you’re trying to create in your posts.

If the premade filters available on Instagram don’t work for you, then you can easily choose powerful third-party photo and video editing apps such as Instasize, which allow you much more control.

The key takeaway here is that consistency—from brand message to Instagram filter—will reward you with increased engagement. People will like sticking around on your profile if your feed looks good!

Let your audience see the human side of your brand

When was the last time you followed a brand that was nothing but product shots? Maybe in the infancy of Instagram that would’ve worked for brands, but nowadays users are expecting much more in terms of the content that you produce. Your account won’t grow Instagram followers if all you are is a glorified shop page.

Letting your audience peek behind the curtain, so to speak, is a great way of humanizing your brand and getting people to relate to you.

Behind the scenes videos, employee features, and even Q&A sessions are all easily doable through either posts or Instagram stories.

The question sticker on Instagram stories is one of the best ways to do this, as it allows you to not only answer questions from your followers, it also allows you to share their answers. This is great for building a community, as your followers can see that there are other people like them who are interested in your brand.

The only caveat here is that you need a social media team that is good at running these events and can really connect with your audience. They also need to be able to thread the line between professional and personal—as too formal a voice when conversing in the comment section can seem aloof and can turn off people from commenting. But if you can form and manage a team that can do that, It’s a small price to pay for real engagement.

Instagram engagement isn’t something that happens by chance—it takes hard work, consistency, and a willingness to communicate with your audience. People aren’t satisfied being passive consumers of content anymore, but you still have to give them a reason to reach out. Implement our tips today and we believe you’ll reap the rewards almost immediately.

VuePress: Documentation Made Easy

Ben Hong

2019-08-30T13:00:59+02:002019-09-01T08:06:32+00:00

When it comes to any project that requires any user interaction (e.g., end users, maintainers, etc.), there is one critical factor that makes the difference between success and failure: good documentation. This holds true regardless of how small or large your project is. After all, short of providing one-on-one support for your project, documentation is the first line of defense for users who are trying to solve a problem. And whether you like it or not, you will never hear from users who give up after being unable to solve their problem due to inadequate documentation.

The Challenges Of Creating Good Documentation

When it comes to writing good documentation, there are four recurring issues that teams often encounter:

1. Documentation is often out of date.
   While no documentation for a project can be a frustrating experience, it is arguably worse to have outdated documentation. After all, the purpose of having documentation is to provide users with an official body of knowledge that they can rely on. When it is out of date, users are wasting their time and ultimately losing trust in your product.

   The primary reason that documentation becomes outdated is that documentation maintenance is separate from code changes. Without investing significant time and energy, this can be difficult to solve because:

   1. Documentation usually lives in a third-party service like Confluence or a Wiki,
   2. Developers are typically more interested in writing code than documentation.
2. Users are unable to easily provide feedback.
   No matter how good you think your documentation is, it is ultimately meaningless without testing it with real users who can provide feedback. As mentioned earlier, a common bias when evaluating the effectiveness of things like documentation is failing to account for users who were unable to solve their problems and gave up. Since no team would ever be able to account for every scenario of how users might use your product, users must have an easy and reliable way to give feedback.
3. Documentation is often written for by power users for power users.
   The flaw with using standard tools like wikis or README files is that they often only cater to a specific set of users who often have a pre-existing knowledge of the library and/or technology stack. As a result, it is fairly simple for them to navigate the space and find what they need. However, new users lack this prior knowledge and thus often require a much more immersive experience to engage them.

   Examples of this include:

   • A well-designed website,
   • Search capability,
   • Guided side navigation,
   • Easily identifiable meta information (i.e., last updated date),
   • Immersive content that extends beyond a wall of text that is difficult to easily comprehend.
4. Poor infrastructure that makes documentation difficult to maintain.
   As if writing good documentation that users can understand is not difficult enough, the ease in which a developer can write and/or maintain documentation is critical to its long term viability. So, for every additional barrier that developers must deal with to write and/or maintain documentation, the more likely it is that it will ultimately fail. As a result, it is critical that the authoring experience and maintenance of any documentation be as seamless and engaging as possible.

If only there was a tool that could do all of these things for us…

Enter VuePress

When first hearing of VuePress, one might be tempted to guess that it is an amalgamation of Vue.js and WordPress. Instead, you should think of VuePress as:

Vue.js + Printing Press

Because when all is said and done, VuePress is a static site generator!

Some of you might be thinking, “Wait. Another static site generator? What’s the big deal?”

While there are a number of tools that are static site generators, VuePress stands out from amongst the pack for a single reason: its primary directive is to make it easier for developers to create and maintain great documentation for their projects.

Why Is VuePress So Powerful For Creating Documentation?

The answer is simple. It was designed with one goal in mind: to help developers create great documentation sites while maintaining a fun authoring experience. This means that it provides a framework for developers to:

• Create beautiful documentation sites,
• Come with pre-built features essential to all documentation sites,
• Optimize the authoring experience to make it as simple as updating a Markdown file.

VuePress Can Co-Exist With Your Existing Codebase

This is one of the main reasons why I strongly recommend it. When it comes to maintaining documentation, one way to guarantee it will go out of date is to make it difficult for developers to update docs when writing code. If you make the authoring experience difficult by forcing developers to update things in two different places, this will cause a lot of friction and often results in documentation getting left to the wayside. This is commonly seen when developers have to maintain a third party tool like a wiki, in addition to the codebase itself.

Because it is a static site generator, this means that it can live in the same exact repo as your code.

As you can see in this sample web app structure, your code would live in the src directory as normal, but you would simply have a docs directory to contain all of your documentation. This means you get the benefits of:

• All documentation is now version controlled;
• Pull requests can now contain both documentation and code changes;
• Creating separate scripts for running local instances of your code and docs at the same time;
• Utilize build pipelines to determine whether new documentation site deployments go in sync with code deployments or not.

The Default Theme Comes With Standard Configuration

Writing documentation is hard enough as it is, so VuePress offloads a lot of the decisions that one normally has to make and has a bunch of built-in defaults to make your authoring experience easy:

• Writing content is done primarily with Markdown.
  This means that you can leverage your existing knowledge of Markdown syntax to style and format your text.

• Code syntax highlighting.
  If you were building a site all on your own, you would need to wrestle with color syntax highlighting libraries. But you’re in luck because you can add code blocks in VuePress is so easy since everything is ready to go with zero configuration.

• Front matter for defining page-level meta data.
  Even though you’re authoring in a Markdown file, you can use front matter (like YAML, JSON, or TOML) to define metadata for your page to make it even easier to manage your content!

---
title: Document Like a Pro
lang: en-US
description: Advice for best practices
tags:
  - documentation
  - best practices
---

• Custom Markdown containers.
  In case you didn’t know, Markdown has extensions to add even more useful shortcuts to create beautiful UI components like custom containers. And since they are so useful in documentation, VuePress has already configured it so you can use it right out of the box:

Built-In Search Functionality

Let’s face it. No matter how much time we spend writing great documentation, it will ultimately amount to being useless if the users can’t find it. There are generally two approaches to this:

1. Wait for search engine robots to slowly crawl your site in hopes that one day your users will be able to find the right page on your site. Not a great solution.
2. Build your own search functionality, but this can be difficult to implement for static sites as there’s no server-side code running to create search indexes and perform the lookups. Not to mention this is taking development time away from the product itself. So this isn’t great either.

Luckily for us, VuePress is here to save the day once again!

VuePress comes with a built-in search functionality that generates its own “search engine” — you read that right. Without any additional database setup or configuration, VuePress is setup to scrape your entire docs to generate a simple search engine that will surface all of your h1s and h2s to your user.

Now, some of you may be thinking,

“What if I want something that will provide lower-level indexing for searching?”

Well, VuePress has got you covered there too because it is designed to easily integrate with Algolia DocSearch which can provide that functionality to you for free if you meet their requirements:

Sidebar Navigation Is As Simple As Toggling The Feature On Or Off

For anyone who has ever been responsible for managing content, you know how complicated it can be to built a sidebar that has nested items and then track what position the reader is on while scrolling down. So, why spend the time on that when you could be writing better docs? With VuePress, the sidebar is as simple as toggling on the front matter for a page:

Automatic Generation Of Important Meta-Data That’s Commonly Overlooked

One of the most frustrating things that a user can encounter is out-of-date documentation. When a user follows the steps and has trouble understanding why something doesn’t work, being able to easily find out the last updated date can be incredibly useful to both the user and maintainers of the project.

With a simple configuration, VuePress can ensure automatically output the last updated date on the page so your users always know the last time it was updated.

On top of that, with a little bit of configuration, VuePress also makes it incredibly easy for users to contribute to your docs by automatically generating a link at the bottom of every single page that allows users to easily create a pull request to your docs.

It doesn’t get much easier than that for your users.

Deployment On Any Static Hosting Site

Since VuePress is a static site generator at its core, this means that you can deploy it on any popular hosting platform such as:

• Netlify
• GitHub Pages
• GitLab Pages
• Heroku
• Now

All you need to do to build the site is run vuepress build {{ docsDir }} with where your directory lives and you’ll have everything you need to deploy it live on the web!

Note: For more in-depth guides on how to do this, check out the official deployment guides for VuePress.

Leveraging Vue Inside Your Markdown File

I know, I know. We can use Vue.js in our Markdown?! Yes, you read that right! While technically optional, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of VuePress because it allows you to enhance your Markdown content like you’ve never been able to do before.

Define Repetitive Data In One Place And Have It Update Everywhere With Interpolation

In the example below, you’ll see a brief example of how you can leverage local variables (like the ones define in the frontmatter) as well as globally defined ones (like the site title):

---
title: My Page Title
author: Ben Hong
---

# {{ $page.title }}

Welcome to {{ $site.title }}! My name is {{ $page.author }} and I'll be your guide for today!

Use Vue Components Within Markdown

I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself after reading this, but yes, live Vue components with a full Vue instance can be yours for the taking if you want! It will take a little bit more work to configure, but this is to be expected since you are creating custom content that will be running in your documentation.

Here is a quick example of what a Counter component would look like in a Markdown file:

This is perhaps the most powerful part of customization available to documentation since it means you now have the freedom to create custom content extends far beyond the abilities of standard Markdown. So whether it’s providing a demo, or some interactive code, the ideas are endless!

Next Steps

If you want to set up a beautiful documentation site for your users to learn how to use your product, it doesn’t get much easier than VuePress. And even though it might be easy to assume that VuePress should only be used by projects that use Vue.js, this could not be further from the truth. Here are just some examples of the different types of projects leveraging VuePress for their documentation sites:

• Craft CMS
• UmiJS (which is built for React)
• openHAB
• Peacock

At the end of the day, regardless of whether you use VuePress or not, I hope this has helped to inspire you to create better documentation for your users.

Further Resources

There are many cool things that I did not cover here in this article (e.g. theming, blogging, and so on), but if you would like to learn more, check out these resources:

• Official VuePress Docs
• A Curated List of VuePress Related Resources
• VuePress Gallery
• VuePress Blog Boilerplate

(dm, yk, il)

Designing mid-level feature pages is one of the hardest parts of building or revamping your website. How do you divide your business into neat, tidy sections? How many categories should you use? Does it make sense to combine this feature with that one? How do you find the optimal balance of text, images and graphics? What keywords should you target? Are you building these pages for humans to buy your products or search engine crawlers to rank you higher?

I could go on, but it’s a safe bet that your head is already spinning. Developing the optimal information architecture design for your business can be a major struggle — but it’s definitely one worth putting the time, energy and resources into getting right.

Here are six tips to design better mid-level feature pages:

1. Organise Your Information Architecture into the Right Categories

Instead of rushing to get a new website up as fast as you can, spend some time thinking deeply about natural categories that align with your products, services, and core values. An hour’s brainstorm and quick sketch will probably not suffice here.

Discuss with your team. Look at your competitors’ sites. Consult an SEO consulting service. Think about providing your customer with the best possible browsing experience. Consider the most important keywords that you want to rank for. Doing proper due-diligence before building out mid-level pages will save you countless headaches down the road.

When we started building mid-level feature pages for our PDF SaaS app, we thought long and hard about how to organise mid-level feature pages so users could access the information that they were seeking quickly and intuitively. After a ton of research and countless conversations with people who brought different vantage points, we decided on three overarching feature page categories: “Create PDF,” “Edit PDF,” and “Convert PDF.” These broad categories covered the three main services that we provide and allowed the flexibility for us to build out 22 more specialised mid-level pages for specific features like compression, and format conversion.

2. Keep it Simple

You are passionate about your business and want to share your whole story with prospective clients. It’s natural to try to include everything on your mid-level feature pages, but that is a recipe for clutter and confusion. Design a clean, consistent markup that includes a healthy balance of text, images and infographics. Readers tend to skim (or completely skip) text-heavy sections. Try to use bullets, integrate graphics and err on the side of brevity whenever possible.

Make sure that your layouts are consistent across all mid-level pages. People usually notice different layouts on similar level pages. Whether they note the differences consciously or not, the inconsistencies give off an unprofessional vibe and should be smoothed out before going live. We developed a template that was easy to replicate for each additional mid-level page. Each mid-level page follows the same blueprint which simplifies navigation:

• a header
• a drag-and-drop upload button
• three steps of directions
• two or three images
• a brief explanation of the specific feature
• options to explore other features near the bottom of the page

3. Match Each Mid-Level Page With a Primary Keyword That You’re Targeting

Keyword research is an essential step in constructing effective information architecture. Knowing the most important search terms that you want to rank for will help you develop site structure and content that drives the right traffic to your site and keeps it there. There are lots of good tools out there to research search volume and identify related keywords. We used Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, CanIRank and a few other keyword research tools to figure out the most valuable keywords we should go after. One of the nice things about these three tools is that they give you search volume reports on related keywords as well. Oftentimes, the keyword you expected to be best actually isn’t, and a similar iteration turns out to be a better fit.

Most of us seasoned website architects aim to match each mid-level feature page with a high-volume keyword that is valuable to our business. By targeting specific related keywords, you are signalling to Google and other search engines what your website is about, and building topical relevance for your site. As you build out multiple mid-level pages targeting specific keywords related to your business, you will boost both your page relevancy (for each individual page) and overall website relevancy. This will help you improve your SERP rankings for the keywords that matter most to your business and drive traffic into your conversion funnel.

Remember to have only one primary keyword per page. The primary keyword should be featured prominently in your H1 header and also used consistently throughout the page. In addition, you should include several “secondary” keywords that are related to the primary keywords. Using your favorite keyword research tool, identify a primary keyword, several secondary keywords, and other related keywords to build your page around. Be cognizant not to have separate mid-level pages targeting similar keywords. It’s easy to have two pages “cannibalisze” each other — which will drive both pages’ rankings down.

4. Include a Clear, Catchy, Concise Call-to-Action

You’ve designed the perfect information architecture, done your keyword research, matched each page to a high-volume keyword, and written stellar content that includes the right balance of keywords. Finally, it’s time to let out a big sigh of relief, right? Well, not exactly. After doing all this work, it would be a shame not to nail your call-to-action.

After all, your goal is not merely to get traffic to visit and stay on your mid-level page; it’s to move them further down the conversion funnel and actually buy your product or service! Be strategic with your language and graphics to encourage users to try out your service, sign-up for your newsletter, enter a contest, share on social media or take whatever action you want them to take. We have a big “Click to upload” button at the top of the page for users who just want to take action quickly without reading in more detail about the feature. For more investigative readers, we have other “Upload your file” buttons conveniently positioned in the middle of the page content. Our goal is to make using our software so simple and intuitive that users always can easily navigate their way further down the conversion funnel.

5. Design For Your Audience(s)

So in this long haul of building mid-level pages, are search engines or humans our primary audience? Reasonable minds disagree on this one, but for our purposes today, I recommend targeting both — because you will not be successful targeting one but not the other.

Think about the key steps in your customer’s journey. She hears about a cool new product that you sell and decides to check it out. She searches for it on Google. If your page isn’t optimized properly to rank highly and catch her eye, it really doesn’t matter how amazing or persuasive your content is. Conversely, if your page is optimized to rank atop page 1 but includes a lacklustre call-to-action, you will have a high bounce rate and fail to convert in ways that bring your business tangible value.

Always keep the big picture in mind and design your mid-level feature pages to meet the needs of search engines and humans.

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

Source

Listen, I am no GraphQL expert but I do enjoy working with it. The way it exposes data to me as a front-end developer is pretty cool. It’s like a menu of available data and I can ask for whatever I want. That’s a massive improvement over REST and highly empowering for me as a front-end developer who desires to craft components with whatever data I think is best for a UI without having to make slew of calls for data or ask a back-end developer to help make me a new bespoke API for my new needs.

But… who builds that menu of data? Somebody does.

If that somebody is a person or team at your own company because you’ve built out your own GraphQL API for your own needs, that’s great. Now you’ve got control over what goes in there (and when and how).

But sometimes GraphQL APIs are just handed to you. Perhaps that is how your CMS delivers its data. Still cool and useful, but that control is at the mercy of the CMS. You still have a menu of options, but the menu just is what it is. No substitutes, to continue the metaphor. If the menu doesn’t have what you need, you can’t go back into the kitchen and add extra sauerkraut to that reuben or have the steak fries come with fried mushrooms.

This came up in a discussion with Simen Skogsrud and Knut Melvær on an episode of ShopTalk. Their product, Sanity, is like cloud storage for JSON data, and a CMS if you need it. A modern product like this, you’d think a GraphQL API would be a no-brainer, and indeed, they have a beta for it.

But instead of GraphQL being the main first-class citizen way of querying for and mutating data, they have their own special language: GROQ. At first glance, I’m like: eeeeeesh, there’s a way to shoot yourself in the foot. Invent some special language that people have to learn that’s unique to your product instead of the emerging industry standard.

But Simen and Knut made a good point about some of the limitations of GraphQL in the context of a third-party handing you an API: you get what you get. Say a GraphQL API offers a way to retrieve authors. A generic API for that is probably designed something like this:

{
  allAuthors {
    author {
      name
      username
      avatar
    }
  }
}

But what I actually want is just how many authors we have on the site. Perhaps I wish I could do this:

{
  allAuthors {
    count
  }
}

But that’s not in the API I was given. Well, too bad. I guess I’ll have to request all the authors and count them myself. I might not control the API.

This means that something like a CMS that offers a GraphQL endpoint needs to make a choice. They are either very strict and you just get-what-you-get. Or, they offer not only a GraphQL API but a way to control and augment what goes into that API.

In Santiy’s case, rather than offer the later, they offer GROQ, which is a query language that is powerful enough you can get whatever you want out of the (JSON) data. And rather than making it this proprietary Sanity-only thing, they’ve open sourced it.

With GROQ, I don’t need any permission or alterations to the API to ask how many authors there are. I’d do something like…

{ "totalAuthors": count(*[* in authors]) }

(I actually have no idea if the above code is accurate, and of course, it depends on the JSON it is querying, but it’s just conceptual anyway.)

By giving someone a query language that is capable of selecting any possible data in the data store, it has a big benefit:

• You can query for literally anything
• You don’t need a middle layer of configuration

But it comes at a cost:

• Complexity of syntax
• No middle layer means less opportunity for connecting multiple APIs, exposing only certain data based on permissions, etc.

The post The Best (GraphQL) API is One You Write appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You’ve created a Progressive Web App (PWA), designed an icon to represent it, and now you’re installing it to your Android home screen.

But, if you have a recent Android phone, your icons will show up like this:

What happened? Well, Android Oreo introduced adaptive icons, a new icon format that enforces the same shape for all icons on the home screen. Icons that don’t follow the new format are given a white background.

However, there is a new web feature called maskable icons that is coming soon to Firefox Preview and other web browsers. This new icon format will let your PWAs have their own adaptive icons on Android.

I work at Mozilla and have implemented support for maskable icons in Firefox Preview. I’ll show you how to add them to your own PWAs for Android.

What are maskable and adaptive icons?

Until a few years ago, Android app icons were freeform and could be any shape. This meant that web apps could also reuse the same transparent icon when pinned to the home screen.

However, manufacturers, like Samsung, wanted to make all icons on a device the same shape to keep things consistent. Some manufacturers even wanted different shapes. To deal with the variety of requirements from manufacturers and devices, Android introduced “adaptive icons.” You supply an image with extra space around the edges, and Android will crop it to the correct shape.

But web apps are designed to work on any platform, so they don’t have APIs to create these special Android icons. Instead, icons would get squished into white boxes like this:

Lo and behold, last September a brand new API descended upon us and was added to the W3C spec. Maskable icons allow web developers to specify a full-bleed icon that will be cropped. It’s platform agnostic, so Windows could use them for tiles or iOS could use them for icons.

How to create maskable icons

Since the maskable icon format is designed work with any platform, the size and ratios are different from the size and ratios of Android’s adaptive icons. This means you can’t reuse the same asset.

Maskable icons can be any size, and you can continue to use the same sizes that you’d use for normal transparent icons. But when designing the icon, ensure that important information is within a “safe zone” circle with a radius equal to 40% of the image’s size.

All pixels within this zone are guaranteed to be visible. Pixels outside the zone may be cropped off depending on the icon shape and the platform.

Warning: If you already have an Android app, avoid copying and pasting the icon from your Android app to your web app. The ratios are different, so your icons would look too small.

Adding the icon to your Web App Manifest

Once the icons are created, you can add an entry to your Web App Manifest similar to other icon assets. The Web App Manifest provides information about your web app in a JSON file, and includes an "icons" array.

{
  ...
  "icons": [
    ...
    {
      "src": "path/to/maskable_icon.png",
      "sizes": "196x196",
      "type": "image/png",
      "purpose": "maskable"
  ]
  ...
}

Maskable icons use a special new key, "purpose", to indicate that they are meant to be used with icon masks. Icons with transparent backgrounds have a default "purpose" of "any", and icons can be used for multiple purposes by separating each option with a space.

"purpose": "maskable any"

Preview your icons

Do you want to see what your own maskable icons will look like? I’ve created a tool, Maskable.app, to help you evaluate how the icon appears in different shapes.

The app lets you preview your icon in various shapes that can be found on Android devices. I hope this tool helps you create unique icons for your Progressive Web Apps.

Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can start testing your app with Mozilla’s Reference Browser. This special browser is a testing ground for features before they reach Firefox Preview, and you can use it to check out how your PWA looks.

Tools like PWACompat also have support for maskable icons. You can automatically generate icons for iOS and other devices based on your new maskable icons!

Time to build your own icons

If you want to more control over how your PWA icons are displayed on Android, maskable icons is the way to go. With maskable icons you can customize how your icon is displayed from edge-to-edge. Hopefully this article can get you started on creating your first maskable icon.

---

Icon Credits:

• https://notwoods.github.io/color-breakdown/
• https://notwoods.github.io/insightful-energy/
• https://notwoods.github.io/big-island-buses/
• https://proxx.app/
• https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

The post Maskable Icons: Android Adaptive Icons for Your PWA appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The landing page for Apple Arcade has a cool effect where some “white” text has a sort of translucent effect. You can see some of the color of the background behind it through the text. It’s not like knockout text where you see the exact background. In this case, live video is playing underneath. It’s like if you were to blur the video and then show that blurry video through the letters.

Well, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Here’s a video so you can see it in action (even after they change that page or you are in a browser that doesn’t support the effect):

And hey, if you don’t like the effect, that’s cool. The rest of this is a technological exploration of how it was done — not a declaration of when and how you should use it.

There are two main properties here that have to work together perfectly to pull this off:

1. backdrop-filter
2. clip-path

The backdrop-filter property is easy as heck to use. Set it, and it can filter whatever background is seen through that element.

See the Pen
Basic example of backdrop-filter by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

Next we’ll place text in that container, but we’ll actually hide it. It just needs to be there for accessibility. But we’ll end up sort of replacing the text by making a clip path out of the text. Yes indeed! We’ll use the SVG inside a element and then use that to clip the entire element that has backdrop-filter on it.

See the Pen
Text with Blurred Background by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

For some reason (that I think is a bug), Chrome renders that like this:

It’s failing to clip the element properly, even though it supposedly supports both of those properties. I tried using an @supports block, but that’s not helpful here. It looks like Apple’s site has a .no-backdrop-blur class on the element (Modernizr-style) that is set on Chrome to avoid using the effect at all. I just let my demo break. Maybe someday it’ll get that fixed.

It looks right in Safari:

And Firefox doesn’t support backdrop-filter at the moment, so the @supports block does its thing and gives you white text instead.

The post A Glassy (and Classy) Text Effect appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Bottom Navigation Pattern On Mobile Web Pages: A Better Alternative?

Arthur Leonov

2019-08-29T13:30:59+02:002019-08-29T15:07:46+00:00

Whenever you hear of “mobile navigation”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? My guess would be the hamburger slide-out menu. This design pattern had been in use since the first responsive design days, and even though a lot has changed since then, this particular pattern has not. Why is that?

How did we start using the top navigation with the hamburger menu in the first place? Is there a better alternative? In this article, I will try to explore these questions.

The History Of The Top Navigation And The Hamburger

The first hamburger menu icons started appearing in the ‘80s. It was designed by Norm Cox for the Xerox Star — the world’s first graphical user interface. He also designed the document icon for the same interface. This piece of history was uncovered by Geof Allday (who actually emailed Norm Cox). You can read the whole email response by clicking here. Later, it was seen on Windows 1 &
and DOS.

The current mobile navigation — as we know it — was popularized by Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design” book back in 2011. Since then, the top navigation and the hamburger became the industry’s standard.

The Mobile Phone Screen Size Doubled In 10 Years

Since the original iPhone, mobile sales have been increasing year after year. 2019 is the first year that the market reached saturation point and the sales have started to decrease. But that doesn’t mean people are not using phones. By 2020, we will spend 80% of our time on the Internet on mobile phones, reports Quartz and Ciodive. Compare that to 2010, when only a fourth of Internet users were phone-based.

As phone sales increased, screen sizes have more than doubled, too. The average screen size of smartphones has increased from 3.2 inches all the way to 5.5 inches. In 2017, device makers started to adopt the taller 18:9 aspect ratio with 5.7-inch and 6-inch 18:9 displays. Now, we are starting to see 6-inch 18:9 displays become the new standard in flagships as well as in the mid-range price segments, as they have more screen area than 5.5-inch 16:9 displays, XDA-Developers reports.

Basically, the mobile phone screen size is getting bigger and bigger. That’s fine, but how do we adapt our design patterns to reflect these changes?

Thumb-Driven Design

I first heard of the term “thumb-driven design” from Vitaly Friedman. It’s based on the Steven Hoober‘s and Josh Clark‘s research on how people hold their devices.

The gist of it is that in nearly every case, three basic grips were most common. 49% held their phones with a one-handed grip, 36% cradled the phone in one hand and jabbed with the finger or thumb of the other, and the remaining 15% adopted the two-handed BlackBerry-prayer posture, tapping away with both thumbs, states Josh Clark. Steven Hoober had found that 75% of users touch the screen with only one thumb. Hence, the term thumb-driven design.

In 2016, Samantha Ingram wrote an article named “The Thumb Zone: Designing For Mobile Users” which further explores these ideas. She defined easy-to-reach, hard-to-reach and in-between areas.

However, I would argue, that with increasing phone sizes, the mapping has shifted a bit:

When the phones were small, most areas were easy to reach. As our screens got bigger, the top part became virtually impossible to touch without adjusting your phone. From the example above, we can see where the most expensive screen real estate is. Yet, it’s often neglected on web pages. How can we fix this?

Bottom Navigation Pattern

Every now and then, bottom navigation pattern pops up on the web. The idea itself is quite simple: move the navigation bar further down.

Positioning the navigation bar at the bottom makes it easier for users to click on the menu icon, while secondary items can be moved to the top. Basically, you simply switch the order. Mobile apps have been using this logic with the tap bar pattern. It’s not a new idea in itself, but it’s still not as popular in web design as it is in app design.

This is not a foolproof solution since it raises a few critical questions, but it’s a worthy alternative. Let’s explore some of the questions that may come up.

Primary And Secondary Items

As the top of the screen is becoming hard to reach, placing the primary menu items closer to the bottom is a better alternative. But what about the other things that are just as important?

I propose two ideas to tackle this problem:

1. Placing the search bar or any non-primary items to the top;
2. CTA buttons should remain at the bottom next to the menu items as it is a vital part of the navigation.

How Will This Affect Scrolling With Large Menus?

Some websites have extensive menus, submenus and everything in between. Naturally, there will be scrolling involved. How does flipping the primary/secondary items work in this scenario?

Make the primary and secondary items (menu link, logo, search input) fixed while leaving the menu list scrollable. That way, your users will be able to reach the critical things they need.

Where Do You Place The Logo?

You might have concerns about the logo placement. There are two ways to go about it:

• Placing the logo at the bottom might be a bit awkward, however, the thumb will most likely not obstruct it. It can be missed, though, as we tend to scan top to bottom.
• A more reasonable option is to keep the logo at the top of the page, but not to have it fixed. Make it a part of the content so it goes away as you scroll. That way, people will still be able to see it perfectly.

As you can see, I used the menu label in the wireframe. Kevin Robinson had found that putting a label next to the icon increased engagement by 75%:

How Does This Work With Handlebars?

Some operating systems and browsers tend to use the bottom area of the screen for their own purposes. iOS handlebars can get in the way of bottom navigation. Make sure the navigation is spacious enough to accommodate the iOS safe area.

If you place the logo dead in the center, the link might clash with the handlebar functionality. A bit of padding will do the trick.

Will The Users Adjust To This Pattern Or Find It Disorentating?

As I was writing this article, I kept thinking of whether this would turn out into a big redesign or a simple usability improvement for users navigating through your website. After all, according to Jakob’s Law, users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they’re already familiar with.

As a counter-argument to Jakob’s Law, I would like to propose Fitts Law. It argues that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance and size of the target. Basically, the smaller and further away the target is, the higher the interaction cost. NN/g has a wonderful video explaining this in more detail:

“A bottom hamburger menu icon will have a much lower interaction cost compared to the top menu icon because it’s closer. By placing the menu CTA near the thumb, we are allowing the user to reach it’s end goal faster. Would the users find the feature disorientating if it lowers their interaction cost? Probably not.”

How Will This Integrate With The Tap Bar Pattern?

A tap bar patterns lists three to five most common first-level actions to click on a single row. You may have seen it in popular apps and some websites:

Hamburger menus have sparked a lot of controversy over the years. Just take a few moments to read this article, and this one, and this one, and most importantly, this one. You’ll then understand why the tap bar became the preferred navigation pattern in mobile app design.

Nielsen argues that hidden navigation (hamburger menu) significantly decreases user experience both on mobile and desktop. On mobile, people used the hidden navigation in 57% of the cases, and the combo navigation in 86% of the cases, i.e. 1.5 times more! The combo navigation that Nielsen refers to is a tab bar pattern combined with a hamburger menu — here’s an example:

It might seem like the tap bar is the perfect solution, but it has its problems too. Fabian Sebastian raised a good point that it only works on top-level views. It does not work with secondary navigation items. To solve this problem, a hamburger/tap bar hybrid was born. If you pay attention to the Samsung app, you’ll see that the last item on the menu is the “*More*” button which calls up the hamburger menu.

In essence, the bottom navigation pattern integrates quite well into the tap bar pattern if you want to combine both of them. The best place to look for good examples is in the mobile app world.

Some Popular Websites Reimagined

I opened up Photoshop and did a quick mockup of a few popular websites in order to explain that changing the navbar to go bottom-up is not that difficult.

Let’s first take a look at Bloomberg:

Next, let’s take a look at Invision:

Last but not least, the good ol’ Reddit:

<img srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg 400w,
https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_800/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg 800w,
https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_1200/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg 1200w,
https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_1600/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg 1600w,
https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_2000/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg 2000w" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/ec449d40-5558-4681-8744-3613f7f6a631/14a-reddit-example.jpg" sizes="100vw" alt="The Reddit website with a reimagined bottom navigation”>

Yes, this idea does raise questions, but it’s simple enough to be adapted to the web. It does make a usability difference as the interaction cost is much lower.

That Sounds Great, But How Do I Convince My Clients?

You, as the designer, might see the potential of this pattern, but what if your client or your boss doesn’t? I would answer this problem with a couple of arguments:

• Mobile apps have been placing valuable menu items to the bottom for years already. Just send them these two articles for starters:
• “The Golden Rules Of Bottom Navigation Design,” written by Nick Babich
• “Basic Patterns For Mobile Navigation: A Primer,” written by Raluca Budiu
• I had noticed cases in which popular mobile apps started to shift important bits to the bottom. A good example is Uber. For them, the search bar is one of the most important items on the screen. In the old design, its position was at the top. Now, they’ve shifted it to the bottom. Could we be on to something here?

Shifting important navigation items to the bottom is not a new thing in mobile app design. It’s just that — for some reason — the web industry has not caught up on this just yet.

Summary

The facts are quite clear: Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. Maybe it’s time for the web design world to start using these ideas on websites as well?

I understand that all of this is not a foolproof solution for all use cases, but it’s worth a shot. It helps make the experience just a tad bit better. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts below!

Useful Reading Resources

• “Why Not Have The Hamburger Menu At The Bottom?,” Stack Overflow (Nov. 2014)
• “The Genius — And Potential Dangers — Of The Hamburger Icon (Flyout Menu),” Jesse Rand, Vital Design
• “To Hamburger Or Not To Hamburger?,” Dan Nessler, Medium
• “A Brief History Of The Hamburger Icon,” Antonio, Placeit blog
• “Design For Fingers, Touch And People (Part 1),” Steven Hoober, UXMatters
• “Designing For Thumbs: The Thumb Zone,” Oliver McGough, Usabilla blog
• “One-Handed Mobile Interface,” Konstantin Savchenko, Medium
• “How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?,” Steven Hoober, UXmatters
• “Facebook Paper’s Gestural Hell,” Scott Hurff
• “Designing For Large Screen Smartphones,” Luke Wroblewski

Further Related Resources

• Windows1 (1985) PC XT Hercules, the hamburger menu on Windows 1 (video)
• Hamburger menu in DOS, as tweeted by Paul Ford
• “Check The Thumb”, created by Nicolás J. Engler and Antonela Debiasi

(cc, il)