They are everywhere. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a disabled submit button that never communicates what’s actually wrong, or tooltips that — once opened — cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. In this new series […]
Live, or inline validation in web forms is useful when it works, but frustrating when it fails. Too often it leads to an endless stream of disruptive error messages or dead-ends without any chance of getting out. Let’s fix it. Undoubtedly, there are major advantages of live validation. We validate input as users type, and
With such a complex multi-level navigation, showing the breadth of options requires quite a bit of space. Think of large eCommerce retailers and large corporate sites, catering to many audiences and having plenty of entry points. Do we need mega-dropdown hover menus in 2021? Probably not. Let’s explore things to keep in mind when designing and
How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? In this article, Vitaly Friedman will take a look to common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix these issues
When designing navigation on mobile, we don’t have to rely on slide-in-menus or nested accordions. We can also use the curtain and billboard design patterns, and show multiple levels of navigation at once. When it comes to complex navigation on mobile, we often think about hamburger menus, full-page overlays, animated slide-in-menus, and a wide range
Breadcrumbs UX are often neglected, but they can be extremely helpful when designing a complex navigation. We can improve them with sideways navigation, clearer breadcrumbs paths and accordions on mobile. Nobody gets particularly excited about breadcrumbs navigation. You know, those tiny little crumbles of pathways that illustrate where a user currently is in the intricate
That’s how people behave on the web in 2023. Some observations from real usability testing on what people do and what they don’t do on the web. From disabled copy-paste to magic link sign-in. Many projects start with assumptions. We assume that users understand hamburger icons and how mega-menus work; that they understand how to
Captioning can be much more than text. Design patterns for better UX of subtitles, captions, video players, transcripts and on-screen text. When we think about closed captioning, we often think about noisy environments, be it busy restaurants, shopping malls, or airport lounges. There, consuming content via audio is difficult, and so captions help communicate information
How do we design effective reviews and ratings? With a distribution chart, decimal scores, tags, recommendation score and unedited product photos. When we make purchasing decisions, we often rely on expertise from people like us who happen to have purchased that item already. And so we seek user reviews, often looking for a high enough
Too often the filtering experience on the web is broken and frustrating, making it just unnecessarily difficult for customers to get to that shiny comfortable range of relevant results. When designing the next filter, take a look at some of the common issues that you might want to avoid, and hopefully avoid all the frustration that comes
