Metal Toad is passionate about User Experience - and about sharing what we know. Learn more about the ins-and-outs of UX and UI here.
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My Promotion to UX Designer
I’ve been working at Metal Toad for almost eight months, I joined the company as a Graphic Designer and Video Editor, and now I’ve been promoted to UX Designer. In my new role, my responsibility is to solve business and user problems with elegant and intuitive UX design solutions.
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How to become a User Experience Researcher?
This blog, like the previous related to UX frequently asked questions, is best left to the experts. Below, I have shared some related suggestions from User Experience experts out in the world: Springboard
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What Is User Experience Design?
UXD, or User Experience Design, is the design of experiences for users. That sounds easy enough to understand …..or is it? There’s a wide breadth of work that goes into UXD. UX Designers research, iterate and test various design solutions.
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How to become a user experience designer?
This blog, like the previous two related to UX frequently asked questions, is best left to the experts. Below, I have shared some related suggestions from User Experience experts out in the world:
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Thumb Zone
I’m used to thinking of ergonomics in terms of chairs, desks, physical plant, tennis rackets, etc., but this week our expert UX designer, Cami, blew my mind when she shared a “natural thumb extension” image that she uses to help design for mobile.
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Resolution: Talk to Users in 2018
In 2018, make it a goal to interact with as many users of your application as possible. Even better, start a formal practice of testing your application with users once a quarter.
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Turning Your UI Into a Well Organized Symphony With Conductor
User interfaces have evolved over time. However, the archetypal approach to creating great user interfaces on Android has not.
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6 Design Tips for iOS and Android
Recently I've been designing a few mobile apps. The first app was designed from scratch for both iOS and Android. The other was taking a pre-existing iOS app and translating the design and UX to be more suited for Android.
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Design as a System
Design needs to be able to adapt and change with the needs of the project. It can get messy and confusing, especially when you begin to introduce CSS. That is why teams have started to use design systems. They will help your team communicate and deliver a consistent design across all platforms.
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UX Immersion: Interactions 2016 Conference
This year I had the pleasure of attending the UX Immersion: Interactions Conference held on April 18–20, 2016 in San Diego.
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Site Administration: Remember the Admin
Meet Jake. Jake administers a Drupal site. Jake is not a developer, nor does he want to be. Jake does not care about field formatters, image styles, or even draggable views.
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New Competition: Will WordPress and Drupal Learn to Share?
After years of building and publishing on them, I'd love to say I knew CMS frameworks like Drupal and WordPress would be this huge. In truth they got this popular because of their great open-source communities; both of which I'm trying to participate and contribute to more. Why? Because closed platforms like SquareSpace and Adobe's content platform are rushing ahead without having to worry about backward compatibility like WordPress and Drupal does. These newer, closed systems insulate users from the backend and abstract away many of the same complexities WordPress.org and WordPress.com solved. They can push forward faster with newer, cleaner, “from-scratch” user-experiences because they don't need to maintain compatibility like "the big PHP" CMS's.
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Drupal UI: The Usability Challenge
Anyone who has delivered a Drupal site to a client knows that the user interface does not always receive a warm reception. As Drupal geeks we have grown accustomed to the admin interface and workflow of creating and managing content.
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Where's the Love for Drupal Content Editors? (UPDATED)
One of the great things about Drupal from a developer perspective is access to a large, supportive community of other Drupal developers from which I learn every day.
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Drupal 7 Tutorial: Creating Edit Content links in Views
Update: Use this module Old Method: Views can be very handy, but the views interface can be a little tricky. A question that comes up when training clients is "Why can't I edit this content?" when they are looking at a view. If you use the node row style, Views will add them for you but not if you use the fields style. You can surely explain how views work (results may vary depending on the client), but an even easier method is to create edit links that link directly to your content and use a little CSS/jQuery to make sure it's shown when and where it's needed. Using this method creates a handy little gear button when you roll over the content, with a link that says "Edit Content" when you click on it.
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6 ways to make Drupal easier for non-technical admins
Over the years, I've created a list of ways to make Drupal easier for one of my target audiences: the non-technical admins and editors that run the day-to-day operations of a website. My list is getting huge, but the following six ideas are always reliable.
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Websites Don't Use Carburetors Anymore
It used to be that cars were simple. If your car broke down, a guy could pop the hood, check a few wires, hit things with a hammer and actually get things to go again. Modern car engines have come a long way, and now are a complex system of 500+ components. Gone are the days of carburetors.
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Top 5 reasons why web designers should love Drupal
If you are a web designer and you haven't worked with Drupal before, you should really give it a try. Here are the top 5 reasons why...
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Getting Content Administrators to Crush on Drupal
We're just getting back from a great weekend at DrupalCampLA. A lot of topics were raised there but the message that really came home for me was this: as Drupal service providers we have to get CMS administrators to fall in love with Drupal.
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Do your clients send you presents? If not, maybe we can figure it out together, lets talk about D7UX.
Do your clients love you with such a furious passion that it borders on problematic? Do you find new customers calling you and saying things like, "I must have your services! My friend has been bugging me all week to call you. Seriously, I just want him to stop camping out on my lawn. It's scaring the children."
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Stop talking about scaling, make Drupal easier to use
It seems that I hear a lot of people within the Drupal community focusing on how to make Drupal scalable.
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How to Select a Good Drupal Development Shop: Trust, UX & Security
If you are in the market for Drupal development, you may feel like you are trying to pick a car mechanic without knowing anything about cars. Like picking a mechanic, you often have to go on how you feel about the vendor. You should listen to what they say, and how they say it - carefully considering how that makes you feel.
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I like to be spoiled, but not too much
First of all, let me preface this post by saying: I love web standards, I love browsers that support web standards, I love most internet browsers except for Internet Explorer (maybe I'll make an exception for IE8).
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Paper Prototypes
When it comes to planning a technology application, you can't beat low tech. Given that I run a web technology company clients are often surprised that I rarely use my computer when planning a user interface. Instead I opt to create paper prototypes using a pen, paper, scissors and scotch tape. There are a number of reasons why this just works better.