How to Design a Successful Interface

This week, we dive deep on several design principles that will help you make better decisions when creating interfaces and interactions. In Follow-up, we discuss the etiquette of responding to recruiter emails, and in News, we cover Twitter's latest exploration into presence and status. And as always, we share a couple cool things, including an innovative basketball shoe and an updated personal site.

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Follow-up:

• Here's Morgan Knutson’s tweetstorm again, for reference

News:

• MG Seigler tweeted: "As redundant as it may sound at first, I love the Twitter “status” idea. A throwback to OG Twitter too! (Still don’t love the idea of presence though.)"
• Article: "Twitter tests new profile features, including presence indicators and ‘ice breakers’"
• Site: Spec.fm now has a "global player" that continues playing as you browse

Listener Question:

• Dmitry Veremchuk (@d_ver on Twitter) asks: "Is there a limit to number of the side projects one takes on? Because personally, I am interested in animation, video editing, illustration, programming, photography, and many more things. Starting projects in all of these fields would be daunting and of a low quality."

Discussion:

• Site: Jon Yablonski collected these Laws of UX
• Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target."
• Article: Luke Wroblewski wrote "Designing for Large Screen Smartphones"
• Material Design: Floating Action Button
• FABs in Material Design 2.0 can be centered for better reachability
• Action sheets in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
• Jakob's Law: "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
• Loren Brichter introduced pull-to-refresh in Tweetie
• Video: "Loren Brichter on Tweetie"
• Apple uses scroll-jacking on their Mojave site
• Bock's Law: "Most people don't have the newest shit."
• Note: The "grandparent phone" Marshall was thinking of is called Jitterbug
• Wenni's Principle: "Don't move tap targets."
• The Doherty Threshold: "Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other."
• Article: "Improved Perceived Performance with Skeleton Screens"
• Hick's Law: "The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices."
• Video: "The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz"
• Book: "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
• "Faster Horses" is a quote by Henry Ford
• Miller's Law: "The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory."
• Gestalt Grouping
• Law of Common Region: "Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary."
• Law of Proximity: "Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together."
• Law of Similarity: "The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated."
• Image: iOS Settings
• GIF: Emergency Alert System
• Image: Don't Dead Open Inside
• r/dontdeadopeninside
• Affordance: "the qualities or properties of an object that define its possible uses or make clear how it can or should be used"
• Book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman
• Article: "Norman Doors: Don’t Know Whether to Push or Pull? Blame Design."
• Video: "It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere."
• Article: "Affordances and Signifiers in Mobile Interface Design"
• GIF: Apple Music's Now Playing sheet
• Image: Confusing segmented controller (Which one is selected?)
• Did we miss your favorite law, rule, or principle? Do have one of your own principles? Let us know on Twitter :) or Spectrum

One Cool Thing:

• Marshall shared the new Air Jordan XXXIII
• Note: Marshall mistakenly called it the "Flight System," but it's really called "Fast-Fit". Way off.
• Brian shared his updated personal site
• Design Details Blog
• The Internet Archive Project

Design Details on the Web:

• We are @designdetailsfm
• Brian is @brian_lovin
• Marshall is @marshallbock
• @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
• Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

Stinger:

• Master P - Make 'em Say Ugh (Ft. Fiend, Silkk The Shocker, Mia X & Mystikal)

BYEEEEEEE!