We design intuitive, high-performance responsive websites and user interfaces.
Brutal review of the Nest thermostat from a UX standpoint:
Not any product can solicit this kind of animosity. The fact that I loved it first is the real fuel here. It’s sort of like a bad breakup: If you really adored the person before the relationship’s end, the finale can be so much more bitter or vicious than if you were apathetic toward the person and things just fizzled. So when my Nest let me down, it didn’t just drop me; it kicked me to the curb.
New site to search for Broccoli plugins. Not surprising how quickly this project is gaining traction in the JavaScript community.
Handy site for testing regular expressions in JavaScript and Python.
Really cool bicycle art from Geoff McFetridge.
App unbundling, search and discovery
Benedict Evans:
Just as Yahoo’s hierarchical directory didn’t really scale after 1996 or so, so too app stores have not scaled as a discovery platform. Further, though there are lots of ways that the execution of the app stores could be improved, this still ultimately boils down to saying ‘Yahoo’s home page should be better’ back in 1996. Indeed it should have been, but the answer was still PageRank. And we have no analogue of PageRank for mobile apps.
Snap.svg a JavaScript SVG library
The Snap.svg JavaScript library makes working with your SVG assets as easy as jQuery makes working with the DOM.
Looks useful.
The trick is disabling pointer events on the body tag during scroll, which turns out to be a simple enhancement with big performance gains. His demo goes from 30fps without disabling pointer events, to 60fps with them disabled.
Frank Chimero on how we talk about design behaviors:
We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another. And we probably need to steal these words from places like animation, theater, puppetry, dance, and choreography.
Words matter. They are abstractions, too—an interface to thought and understanding by communication. The words we use mold our perception of our work and the world around us. They become a frame, just like the interfaces we design.
I can’t agree more on with Frank about this. Having to prototype something because we aren’t able to accurately describe the behavior isn’t a great place to find ourselves in.
Frank is also making another print run of his book, The Shape of Design. I suggest picking up a copy if you can, or it’s free to read online or download as an e-pub.
