Design

Every day a new neural network appears and every day more opportunities are opened to designers to simplify their workflow. Someone fundamentally refuses to use them, because “there is no life in machinex and technologies”, and someone is only happy to find a way to reduce the amount of work. Personally, I belong to the second type and want to share the most detailed gait on neurons I have acquired lately. 

Getting a task from a client, UX designers tend to pay attention to the design goals, not the contents of the website/app itself. There’s something completely wrong with it because the visual part might be superb, but when it frames a vague or wordy message, the client's goals won’t be reached.

To avoid this, a UX designer should dive deeper into the content, analyze it, and restructure it in an interface-friendly way. It doesn’t mean doing the copywriter’s job, it means collaborating. The reality is that sometimes the writing team is used to praising the product (because clients like that), or there is no copywriter involved in the project at all.

Provide proof instead of opinion

An impression is more powerful when the customer can conclude the product’s benefits on their own. Instead of a colorful line of adjectives like “ultimate” or “leading” you should aim at what exactly makes the product that cool. The trick is to be precise, preferably with an example.

It feels like everything about LPs has already been said, however, I still keep seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again both by start-ups and established companies. Here are some tips, backed up by my 10-year experience as a UX/UI Director in agencies and product-led companies. These alone will give a nice increase in your conversion rate, I guarantee. 

Use a descriptive, not a salesy hero header 

Answer the questions “What?” and “For whom?” as early on the page as possible. A very common pattern is the largest copy being an inspirational abstract slogan and below it in smaller font the actual statement about what the product is and what it does. 

On average, online store users make 64 clicks before adding a product to the cart. Some clicks are useful - so-called discovery clicks that help lead to users finding a product they wish to buy, and some are useless that come as the result of poor UX. With great competition for convenience and increasingly reducing attention spans of users, each useless click reduces the number of visitors that will reach checkout.

You all know our mascot — a unicorn — many people grew fond of him! However, PVS-Studio has a supporting character who is also the antagonist of our product — a bug! Well, a bug is not omnipresent, indestructible evil. It's more like an everyday or a work-related trouble. In this article, you'll learn how we created a new character, and why he looks like a ladybug. Oh, and if you wonder why the hell he has a belly button — keep reading!

I know that my article can help a designer who spends a lot of time working and not feeling his or her growth. This article has some tips on how to start building your soft skills.

So, I finally found a moment to write a bit about how we created the water for TReload. Our basic goal was to flood all of the levels with acid - a lot of acid, as the flooded area is massive :) Here’s one of the results which we got out of this process:

PVS-Studio has a mascot that became inseparable from the brand - a unicorn. Lately we've been getting many questions about our magic steed: why the unicorn, why has he changed so much, does he have hooves, how come he doesn't wear pants, and how do we draw him. The answers are finally here, in this very article.

Attention: there will be a lot of pictures. And I mean A LOT.

In this series, I would like to discuss some reaches of Go programming language. There is no shortage of Go-Language-Of-Cloud style articles in which you can explore the great benefits that Go indeed provides. However, there are lees to every wine, and Go does not go without blemish. In this highly opinionated series, we cover some controversies and, dare I say, pitfalls of the original Go design.

We start tough and begin with the essence of Go — it's inbuild data types. In this article, we put slice to the test. Let's move a step further from the Go Tour and use slice more extensively. For example, there is no separate data type as stack in Go, because slice type is intended to cover all its usage scenarios.

Let's briefly recap the usage of the stack. We can create a stack in two seconds using a couple of paper stickers. You write "buy milk" on the first sticker and put at the desk, and then "make the dishes" on the second and pile it on the first sticker. Now, you have a stack: the dishes sticker came last but will be served first, as it is on the top of the stack. Thus, there is an alternative name for stack — LIFO, Last-In-First-Out. To compare, there is the "opposite" data structure queue or FILO — first in, first out. In programming, stacks are everywhere, either in the explicit form or in the implicit as stack trace of the execution of a recursive function.

Ok, let's put slice into use and implement stack.

English translation of Philip Ranzim's post at his blog page here. (With author's permission)

Once upon a time, my girlfriend started using Instagram. She asked me to sign up for it and subscribe to it. I tried — I couldn't do it because you couldn't register at Instagram from a desktop computer. I then thought — how weird people are. Well, what kind of fool would make a software product that can't be used with a normal computer? They won't succeed, and this Instagram will be a marginal service for a bunch of strange women, who for some reason don't like desktops.

It has only been a few years, the market has put everything in place — and the biggest fool was me. And the geniuses at Instagram predicted how and where everything would develop. Today, most of the user applications are made primarily for mobile platforms. At best, they include a universal web client, which is still optimized for mobile phones. Because users love iPhones, not computers. Business people sat down, counted, and made a decision — let's make more money, let's have mobile First everywhere.

Introduction

Every single one of us gives presentations from time to time. What can be difficult about creating a couple of slides with great UI and nice content, right? Well… not really actually. In real life, things may get difficult.

You want to cover the whole topic and give as much information as fits on a slide. Then you go to Google to find some awesome pictures, and finally, cover it all with some fancy animation. And here is where things start falling apart: how do you balance all this stuff?

Take our helping hand, as we are here to show you how to create a presentation with both perfect user experience and user interface. Let's find out how to create perfect UI & UX design in a presentation.

My way

My name is Vladimir, and I develop mobile front-end for Yandex Mail. Our apps have had a dark theme for a while, but it was incomplete: only the interface and plain emails were dark. Messages with custom formatting remained light and stood out against the dark interface, hurting our users’ eyes at night.

Today I'll tell you how we fixed this problem. You will learn about two simple techniques that didn't work for us and the method that finally did the trick — adaptive page recoloring. I'll also share some ideas about adapting images to a dark theme. To be fair, darkening pages with custom CSS is a rather peculiar task, but I believe some of you may find our experience helpful.

Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.

And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!