Dealing with Design: A Few UX/UI Design Blogs Worth Checking Out
Developers are developers. Designers are designers. It reminds me of the quote, "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," from Rudyard Kipling's poem The Ballad of East and West. While that is indeed true with compass points, you can't develop websites without an eye to design. If a site looks clunky or is tough to navigate, no one will go there. I once again turn to the blogosphere to see what I can find.
One that caught my eye was
Addy Osmani's blog. He is an engineering manager with Google. One of Addy's recent posts works through JavaScript Start-up Performance.
"As web developers, we know how easy it is to end up with web page bloat. But loading a webpage is much more than shipping bytes down the wire. Once the browser has downloaded our page's scripts it then has to parse, interpret & run them. In this post, we'll dive into this phase for JavaScript, why it might be slowing down your app's start-up & how you can fix it."
Some of his other posts get into Progressive Web Apps with React, Offline installation of npm packages, Getting started with Progressive Web Apps, Instant Loading Web Apps with a Service Worker Application Shell Architecture, and Auto-formatting JavaScript code style with JSCS.
Boxes and Arrows is a compendium of articles and posts around the subjects of design and development. In "Make the Commercial First," Steve Turbek writes, "If an app launches in the app store, and no one hears it, did it really launch? Today, digital products like apps and sites require marketing. Luckily, this has become easier to do, even a limited budget."
Other stories in the Boxes and Arrows quiver include "Designing Progressive Web Applications for the Future" by Mark Pedersen, "How to Avoid UX Burnout" by Benjamin Earl Evans, and "Benchmark Your UX at All Costs" by Ben Rogers.
And finally—at least for now—no discussion about UX/UI would be complete without mentioning the one and only Billy Hollis. Many of you have probably caught one of his engaging and entertaining Visual Studio Live! presentations. He's a regular, and with good reason. He knows his stuff and his delivery is right on. Billy posts a blog on the official site for his company Next Version Systems. His recent posts include a whitepaper on XAML application navigation shells, Developer on Fire–User Focus, and one of Billy's latest Channel 9 videos.
So if you find yourself struggling with UX/UI issues as you're developing your next site, there is help out there. You just have to know where to look.
What are your favorite UX/UI design blogs? Let me know at llow@1105media.com!
Posted by Lafe Low on 04/25/2017