80% of users only use 20% of features. Part of good product design is hiding 80% of advanced features from those users so things do not easily go astray.

As per Marc’s piece, my process isn’t an exact match-up, but I do wholeheartedly believe –

Don’t force a process on a design team that everyone must follow.

&

Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a [seemingly] better design process.

Bad design processes are like 1984. They dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator so no one feels excluded. They make the team slow, bloated, and insipid. They allow non-designers to make terrible design decisions. They furthermore get non-designers to believe those decisions are better than their designer’s.

Luckily, there isn’t a sharp toned pitch in this story, so we are able to diagnose the poison. I wish I had good advice for how to navigate this situation. It would be right here [ ]! Check back in 5 years.

Ben Kamens:

At every position of the cursor you can picture a triangle between the current mouse position and the upper and lower right corners of the dropdown menu. If the next mouse position is within that triangle, the user is probably moving their cursor into the currently displayed submenu. Amazon uses this for a nice effect. As long as the cursor stays within that blue triangle the current submenu will stay open. It doesn’t matter if the cursor hovers over “Appstore for Android” momentarily — the user is probably heading toward “Learn more about Cloud Drive.”

And if the cursor goes outside of the blue triangle, they instantly switch the submenu, giving it a really responsive feel.

The Trulia geo team introduced me to generative color palette tools.

A collection of landing pages before you have any content.

A Dark Pattern is a type of user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.

Spoilers: Napa, CA. A wonderful, well done data analysis.

Great NPR x TED coverage on Susan Cain’s thoughts on introversion.

Remember this? It made an appearance. An honor!

No, I won’t shut up about how much Iove these essays by @workjon. I reread most of them today. It’s hard to choose an excerpt to feature, but this post, your sign-up form tells me all I need to know, is highly relevant to the past few hours of productivity.

We swept all our forms on Sociallist to get consistent capitalization and created as many classes as needed to ensure the spacing on every label was done right. There are also a few (hopefully) delightful interactions in the form filling experience we hope our users will like. Yes, FORM FILLING — They are going to be some of the nicest forms on the internet.

FJP:

Some designers treat sign-up/sign-in forms as being outside the core experience for a web app. A few necessarily frustrating hoops before getting to the real fun of the site.

I disagree. Forms are the handshake, the joke to break the ice, the first impression. Your form tells me everything I need to know about your app, and by extension, your interaction design skills.