Hey there! Brian Dys here — I’m a visual and visceral person at heart. Ever since my mom lent me her old film camera, I fell in love with photography. All of my creative musings were exemplified by my second brain, the computer. This journey is a topsy-turvy ride of creative pursuits — from electronic music to UX design.
I enjoy every dull and wild moments of it — yes, this life of mine that I share with a woman named Jaycelle and a boy named Bryce. Take a peek into my kaleidoscope!
Ideally, design guides, brand guidelines, style guides, etc. are based on research.
They did not appear in a vacuum.
Collaborate with the people who made the guides and find out if you are aligned with the same objectives.
The user and business objectives are the guidelines for the team, whether in UI design or frontend development.
These are the Elements of UX according to Jesse James Garrett:
UI Design practically comes after having objectives and requirements. It constitutes the design of the interface based on Information Architecture and Interaction Design.
The Elements of UX shows the abstraction of what constitutes UX Design. It involves the whole process of research and testing at different planes and at different stages of the process.
Now, must a UI designer dive right into UI design without referring to any previous work done such as objectives and requirements, information architecture and interaction designs?
What is the mental model of the user interface—or at least the UI buttons?
Just like with most physical buttons, if a user wants to press it, he or she touches it. The feedback comes from its look and feel (it looks like a button; it feels like it can be pressed by actually pressing it).
With UI buttons, a user could get feedback from the following:
With some techniques in Visual Design, a designer could reinforce the feeling that the button functions as expected.
Does the button budge up when hovered? Or does it budge down?
If up, then the shade becomes lighter as it moves closer to the light source—which is naturally above us (in the real world). If down, then darker.
Does the button light up when hovered?
If yes, then the shade becomes lighter—whether the light comes from the body of the button or simply around the button.
You may combine those different techniques—but basically, those are the considerations why the shade of a button would be darker or lighter when hovered.
Please note that for devices with pointing device, the mouse changing to a pointer is enough feedback for the button to feel like it is clickable.
However, for touch devices, to feel like it is clickable, a user will actually press it.
This is the first round of Cascading Style Sheets—CSS for short. CSS is a Style Language that defines the visual design of an HTML document. This single responsibility of CSS makes the structured content of the document reusable in different contexts.
Interactive Elements (IE) in a web page pertain to elements that can be interacted upon. Common examples of IE are links, textboxes, buttons, and other form elements. A way of improving the usability of IE is by optimizing its Active Area (AA) so that it is big enough for clicks and taps. A good rule of thumb is having a minimum dimensions of 44 x 44.
Linked texts such as navigation items could have an optimized active area by having a padding. Form Elements such as textboxes and buttons, on the other hand, could be styled with a legible font size and a height.
.secondary-navigation a {
display: inline-block;
padding: .75em 0;
}
.text-search input {
height: 36px;
font-size: 1em;
}
.search-actions button {
height: 36px;
font-size: 1em;
}
This part of the activity is where we would style the elements according to the visual design or look of the web page. The colors pertain to background and foreground color—in the case of a button, the background color is the color of the button and the foreground color is the color of the text.
Graphic Elements include borders, shadows, lines, among other things that make up the look of the element.
.account-action a {
background-color: blue;
color: white;
text-decoration: none;
}
See the Pen RE:Creation No. 1: Google | CSS (Round 1) by Brian Dys Sahagun (@briandys) on CodePen.