Think of the dusty pinks and faded blues in ads for popular products like the underwear brand Thinx, or the makeup company Glossier. Soft gradients have seeped into trendy web design. Then, earlier this year, Pantone broke with tradition to name not one but two shades for its color of the year. Rose Quartz and Serenity, apparently selected to speak to a more gender-fluid world, also served to solidify the trending pastel palette. If pastels weren't dominating consumer products before, they definitely are now. So why are all these pale tones coming on so strong? To predict the future of color, look back at the past.
For most news publishers, their audiences increasingly prefer visiting them on mobile devices. Forbes, which usually sees half its traffic coming to it this way in any given month, felt the problem firsthand. So six months ago, Chief Product Officer Lewis D’Vorkin decided to come up with a new way to present news for the mobile web – and the results are very promising. Forward with mobile.
Currently, good UX design focuses on obvious navigation, uncluttered content and knowledge of your audience. But as technology advances, so does UX and UI. Ten technology experts from Forbes Technology Council offer their insights on how these current best practices will change in the next few years, and what companies can do to prepare for the shift. Start making and playing today.
Websites - like any digital platform, it seems - so often become "kitchen sinks" of features, content, and information during design and in-market operation. What do customers actually want from business websites? What drives shopping or retail traffic behavior? Here's a nice data set from a survey of 800 customers, across various demographics, asking customers what they REALLY want on a website, and what information will affect their behavior. If satisfaction, or happiness, for that matter, can be calculated as "Experience in Reality, Divided by Your Expectations", here's some helpful information, from the mouths of customers, about what people want from a local business website - in a world where just about every business is local at some point. "Gender vs. Age: what different consumer groups REALLY want from a local business website"
The kind folks at Baymard Institute have conducted some year-long, large-scale usability studies of e-commerce websites. Their very helpful piece on Smashing Magazine shares the results of tests on mobile and desktop e-commerce shopping behaviors. If you're wondering whether your e-commerce site should be organized into pages or infinitely scroll, here's a nice resource for you. "Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons?"
Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 has reached its “end of life” and that they will no longer support them with security updates or any other kind of patches. Even Internet Explorer 11 is a legacy product, and Microsoft is trying to move customers to use Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. But this is great news for developers who often still need to target older browsers. There is good in this goodbye.
Originally created as 47 simple blue and red posters, Yang Liu’s series playfully captures the difference between Eastern and Western cultures from workplace hierarchy to restaurant etiquette. See selects from the series here.
Everyone hates lines; now, Google will help you beat them. The company has rolled out a new search feature that allows you to see when a specific business is most likely to be busy. Within location cards, users can see a “Popular Time” section alongside other basic information about locations that you can break down week-by-week or hour-by-hour. It’s a perfect example digital improving offline experiences, and a great tool to help consumers plan their lives. Google’s competitors will have a hard time copying this trick
While companies typically focus on the in-the-moment interaction a consumer has with a brand, there’s a lot to be said for engaging consumers with the joy of anticipation. Happiness research indicates that more than half of someone’s happiness is built in moments of anticipation and remembering, while marketing research indicates that the emotional component of customer experience is a better predictor of loyalty than the functional, cognitive component. If that’s the case, most brands are missing out on opportunities to deliver happiness (as well as earn customer loyalty). Design for happiness with these 6 tips
Major media organizations are redesigning their classic layouts in favor of modern digital properties that account for how today’s users discover and consume content. The homepage will remain an anchor for users, but design team and newsrooms will need to work together if they hope to build lasting relationships with them. “This is going to sound a little weird, but I feel like homepages are sort of like blind dates...”
