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...

You already have a great app idea and are working furiously to build and launch it. Or you’re developing a mobile site, to compliment a desktop build. Or perhaps you’re refining a desktop design to scale responsively on devices. Whatever your goal for mobile development, before you launch, let’s take a quick break from that process to make sure you aren’t making a few of the most common mobile design mistakes. 1. Not refining the feature set When building software it is easy to get carried away by adding all these great features. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” is a dangerous phrase when it comes to meeting deadlines and delivering quality software. If you try to implement too many features, both the quality of the experience and design will suffer, not to mention what will happen to your deadlines. At the same time you don’t want to focus so narrowly that you miss potentially great ideas. That’s where this phrase comes in: “Dream big, implement small.” In the pla...

Your mobile phone is always with you. It’s always connected, and it has your stuff on it. As designers we focus on creating with the user in mind, and that means paying attention to the user’s mobile. This need to keep mobile in mind has lead Luke Wroblewski and many others to tout the phrase “Mobile First,” meaning that the mobile experience should be designed and considered first and foremost with desktops a secondary consideration. The pressure to create designs using the mobile first approach is not only present, but growing exponentially. John Doe may accept that a store’s web experience is more intuitive than the mobile experience, and Jane Doe may be ok knowing she has to use her computer to finish the taxes she began on her phone. But John and Jane’s patience is dwindling... Mobile first Cisco has projected that mobile connections will increase from 6billion today to 12billion in 2016 – just four years away. It’s not hard to grasp the importance of providing...

Eventually there may come a day when everyone on the planet has access to the best internet connection speed possible. For now, however, there are still people in highly developed nations (such as, say, the U.S.) who are dealing with dial-up speeds and computers that should have long been obsolete. This is the reality of technological advancement. Unfortunately, it’s an easy thing to forget for web developers who consider technology a priority. When you make it a point to find the best possible speeds from your ISP, the latest computer, and state of the art software, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine that your customers may be using less. In some cases, much less. And this divide can make for some very poor web design choices. User frustration According to a 1998 Georgia Tech survey of web users, the biggest problem people had when surfing the internet was speed. In fact, “speed” alone was only below “slow ads” when it came to the largest response percent...

Designing for responsive websites can be a bit challenging at first because the process is so different. As designers, we’ve gotten used to building pixel-perfect mockups as our web blueprints. But responsive design takes a different approach. A designer’s role is no longer to produce a mockup and then pass it off to the developer because responsive design is not just a two step process, it is a series of revisions. Most of which are made in the browser. It is a collaborative effort between the designer and developer, no longer two separate tasks. Here are some tips and a general workflow to make the transition from designing static sites to designing responsive ones a little easier. Knowing your viewports Before starting any project it is important to determine your viewports. A typical approach would be to build one layout for smartphones, one for tablets and smaller viewports, a larger desktop version, and maybe a second desktop version for even larger/wider ...