Navneet Panchariya - Web Designer | UI Designer | Front End Developer

The key to great user interface design is user confidence. But designing user confidence isn't the easiest thing in the world. It requires more than correctly labeled buttons and interactions-although that does help. Confidence is important because you don't want the user to get annoyed at all with the interactions in your websites or apps. You don't need users to be proud of themselves for being able to use your interface and to brag to all of their buddies on Twitter, nor do you need them to rank their knowledge of your UI in an infographic-style gauge on their resumés (unless you're designing Photoshop). You just want them to feel good about using your site and confident in navigating it. You want them to understand its purpose. Your purpose should be to design something simple and invisible-but memorable-so that the user can access what they need to access without being bothered. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked. Let's go through six things to...

Responsive web design has become a near ubiquitous buzzword on the web. Try searching for #rwd on Twitter to find equal parts content and Twitter spam. This is a common phase in the maturing of a new idea. I remember when AJAX was all the rage; the term got driven into the ground. Now, few people talk about AJAX but libraries like jQuery are fully embraced in a developer’s workflow. This seems to mirror what’s happening to responsive web design. The term is everywhere. A friend of mine is in magazine publishing, she went to a conference recently, and an editor for a well-known new magazine was talking about upcoming trends and mentioned responsive web design. Editors may not be web professionals, but they know the buzzwords. As responsive web design gained steam, the way we build websites changed. As the term moves from buzzword into a common part of every web design project, the way we work as web professionals needs to change. With this in mind, we need to lay some new gr...

Mark Zuckerberg opened up recently about HTML5 and the difficulties that Facebook has faced in developing mobile apps. In a quote heard round the world, Zuckerberg called HTML5 “one of the biggest strategic mistakes we made.” Those are pretty strong words from the CEO of the most influential company in the mobile market today. Facebook is experiencing slower performance with HTML5 compared to native apps on mobile devices and the diversity of mobile browsers, which leads to confusion among web hosting developers over which parts of the programming they can use-hence, the appeal of native apps. A native app doesn’t need an internet connection to run; it’s much faster than loading an HTML5 web app; and, because native apps run directly from the phone, they have easier access to the microphone and camera, making them more capable than HTML5-based web apps. Long live HTML5! Before you take Mark Zuckerberg’s HTML5 bashing as evidence that web apps are dead, remember that...