User Experience Insights | Experience Dynamics

Flat Design pitfalls- skip these 5 most common mistakes

By Frank Spillers

on April 23, 2018 - 5:28pm

Summary: Flat Design has become an industry-standard approach to UI/UX Design with Microsoft, Apple and Google all backing Flat UI styles. Flat Design's minimalism aims to bring visual breathing room to a design by eliminating visual clutter and chrome (UI extras). The problem with this approach is it is easier to imagine than to execute with maximum usability intact. In this post we will discuss some of the common pitfalls in designing Flat or Flat 2.0 Design.

Minimalism needs to balance with function. This is particularly challenging for Visual or Graphic designers who can embrace minimalism at the cost of hiding UI signals, "information scent" or triggers for user action. A few years ago this led to the "Flat 2.0" update to the approach, which seeks to minimize yet allow UI's to be perceived and used.

Feature rich UI: What's your dumb-phone strategy?

By Frank Spillers

on March 2, 2018 - 9:33am

Summary: Feature-rich UI's run the risk of doing too much and being difficult for users to discover. The cure is to remove features and replace them with tasks. Task-features anchor your feature sets in what users want to do, not what you think they want from you.

Popularity is building for a new minimalist smartphone called a 'dumb-phone' aka the Light Phone 2 (pictured above). The phone was deliberately designed without social media apps, to reflect the growing problem of smartphone addiction. The minimalist design strategy of this product offers a good reflection point to consider your 'dumb-phone' strategy for minimalizing feature creep and getting results from Flat Design approaches.

These 3 skills are required to do good VR/AR UX Design

By Frank Spillers

on February 15, 2018 - 3:48pm

Summary: To design immersive narratives for VR and AR, you must become a strong Storyteller, Improviser and Imagineer.

One of the things we've realized from our VR/ AR design projects over the past few years, is that 3D storytelling is central to the Interaction Design technique and to how users experience immersive (virtual, augmented, mixed) realities. As you approach the user experience of Virtual Reality and mixed reality (we'll refer to that as AR), you need 3 skills under your hat:

Storytelling
Improv
Imagineering

The key is to learn from these traditions in theater, comedy and animation/entertainment and apply them to immersive experiences and VR UX Design. Let's look at each of these in more detail and how they are relevant to 3D Interaction Design.

How a wine glass instructs us about UX Design

By Frank Spillers

on December 28, 2017 - 6:16pm

Summary: The size of a wine glass has increased sevenfold in the past 300 years. The increase in wine consumption is speculated to follow this design shift toward larger wine glass size. This underscores an important and often overlooked factor in UX design: context of use.

Wine consumption has rocketed, and historically keeps increasing with the size of the glass. Researchers suspect wine glass design is increasing consumption.

According to a recent BBC report:

University of Cambridge researchers found glass size grew from an average 66ml in the 1700s to 449ml today - a near sevenfold increase - and wine drinking nearly doubled from 1980-2004.

Learn this important Visual Design lesson from Google

By Admin User

on December 27, 2017 - 11:40am

Summary: Google's Material Design language reinforces one of the most valuable principles of graphic design and user experience: provide design elements that make it clear that a control is present for use. This technique is called a "signifier": it signifies how to interact with the UI.

Visual designers, Creative Directors and UX designers have been on a mission for the past five years to "clean up" or minimalize UI design. The approach is called Flat Design. Design minimalism is not new and the intentions of de-cluttering your design are vital. However, industry studies and our own usability tests conducted on Web, Web App and Mobile apps tell us that there are a few things missing from most approaches to Flat design or new hybrids like "Flat 2.0".

A piece of our mind / our blog