CategoryExperience Design

October 20, 2016 — Icons are an essential part of many user interfaces, visually expressing objects, actions and ideas. When done correctly, they communicate the core idea and intent of a product or action, and they bring a lot of nice benefits to user interfaces, such as saving screen real estate and enhancing aesthetic appeal. Last but not least, most apps and websites have icons. It’s a design pattern that is familiar to users. Despite these advantages, icons can cause usability problems when designers hide functionality behind icons that are hard to recognize. An icon’s first job is to guide users to where they need to go, and in this article we’ll see what it takes to make that possible. If you want to take a go at creating your own icons, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away. Read more…

October 11, 2016 — Web and mobile apps are moving away from pages towards completely personalized experiences. These new experiences are built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. The way this content is now being presented is in the form of cards. The card-based interaction model is spreading pretty widely, and you can see digital cards almost everywhere — from news sites to food delivery apps. In this article, I’ll explain what cards mean to UI designers, and I’ll review three popular card-based services. If you’re interested in prototyping your own card-based user interface, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away. Read more…

October 6, 2016 — Remember the days when hovering and clicking using the mouse were the most used trigger for interaction with site or app? Those days are gone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, multi-touch technology became mainstream and users learned that they could not only point and tap on the interface, but also pinch, spread, and swipe. Gestures are the new clicks. The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices has dramatically changed the way we think about interaction. Gestures are more than merely entertaining, they are very useful and feel familiar. Today, the success of a mobile app significantly depends on how well gestures are implemented into the user experience. Even Adobe introduced a new design and wireframing app called Experience Design CC (Adobe XD) that lets you prototype on everything from simple wireframes to multi-screen experiences. Read more…

September 21, 2016 — The best error message is the one that never shows up. It is always better to prevent errors from happening in the first place by guiding users in the right direction ahead of time. But, when errors do arise, well-designed error handling not only helps teach users how to use the app as you intended, but also prevents users from feeling ignorant. Read more…

August 31, 2016 — Prototyping is essential to help your team create the best product possible. It’s a chance to experiment with ideas and turn them into something tangible that you can test and build upon. When you fail with your prototype, you land softly — there’s always the chance to iterate and improve. The team behind Adobe’s new prototyping tool Experience Design (Adobe XD) uses prototyping as a method to test new features before they make it into the program. Being a product manager on the Adobe XD team, I’ll share some insights into how the team uses prototyping to build and improve Adobe XD, and make prototyping more efficient for designers. Read more…

August 10, 2016 — Dariel Fitzkee, the famous magician, once said, “Magic is both in the details and in the performance.” Interaction design is just like that. Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. The magic is all in the details. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. To get a better understanding of how your design benefits from microinteractions, it will help to sketch out your app ideas. Adobe introduced a new design and wireframing app called Experience Design (or Adobe XD) which lets you design wireframes and make them interactive. You can download and test Adobe XD for free. Read more…

July 27, 2016 — In this tutorial, you can learn how to create a set of office icons for a new app with XD’s new features to interact with your newly-created user interfaces during the prototyping phase. Read more…