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UX/UI Links, June 2018

Can you imagine a simpler way of testing your designs than just squinting a bit? Somehow that trick always escapes my mind when I need it. But this month I found a great link about it to reinforce the idea and make it stick. Hopefully, it will be useful to you too.

That's the beauty of curating articles. Learning and sharing.

Here are five articles worthy of your time to learn and share about our craft. Let's start. 

The Squint Test: Making Your Design Better Since Today (UI Case Study)

"If you don’t know what’s important on your website, you can only create a good design on accident."
- Erick D. Kennedy, Independent Designer

Try looking at this page with both eyes partly closed. What do you see? A big block of text aligned to the center of the page. Red subheadings. Some contrast between sentences. Different text styles. The list can go on.

That's a Squint Test. A simple way of evaluating specific principles on your work. These principles are Contrast, Hierarchy, Proximity, and Alignment.

In The Squint Test: Making Your Design Better Since Today, you'll uncover the full potential of its application.

Visibility of System Status

"At its essence, it is about communication and transparency, which are critical to many aspects of life."
- Aurora Harley, Senior User Experience Specialist with NNGroup

Mitigating usability problems in our designs is possible if we follow some principles. The most relevant set of principles for evaluating usability are Nielsen's ten heuristics. Knowing them well can enhance our design on every iteration.

The article Visibility of System Status pores over the first of Nielsen's heuristics. A great read to dive deep into the role of communication and feedback in your design work.

From First Mile To Nth: Onboarding Beyond User Onboarding

"Users integrating a feature into their lives isn’t something that just happens, it’s something you pursue, and something you fight for."
- Yohann Kunders, Product Marketer at Chargebee

Onboarding is a key factor in customer retention. But, when is a user onboard? And, does it really end there? 

From First Mile To Nth: Onboarding Beyond User Onboarding offers answers to these questions. Considerations to keep top-of-mind when thinking of feature adoption and customers success.

Downplaying Empty States in Design

"Downplayed empty states are wasted opportunities."
- Moses Kim, UX Writer and Researcher at Shakuro

Empty states are the in-between. The interactions that "can boost engagement, build consent, educate, delight, and entertain users." But we keep forgetting to design them.

Downplaying Empty States in Design is about taking advantages of these opportunities. A great starting point to learn how to go about using these states.

Integrating Privacy by Design Into Your UI Design Strategy

"You can’t simply block all EU IP addresses in order to avoid having to comply with the GDPR."
- Rich Staats, Founder and Chief Slacker at Secret Stache Media

There's no way around the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR. Although it seems like an intricate and prohibitive set of rules, it is not. Becoming compliant boils down to common sense and a few practical implementations.

Integrating Privacy by Design Into Your UI Design Strategy presents a viable way of reaching GDPR-compliance. It takes four main steps:

  1. Introduce clear privacy and data sharing notices.
  2. Provide information about how you manage users' personal information.
  3. Empower your users to manage their personal data.
  4. Reduce the amount of data you collect.

These were my favorite five articles of the month. 

How about yours? I'm sure I missed some good ones. If you have suggestions, please help us all learn more by sharing in the comments.

For more curated articles visit our previous post, there are some good ones there.

See you next month.

- Jess for The Balsamiq Team

Jessica for the Balsamiq Team

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