There are many irksome and downright headache-inducing additions to contemporary websites, we at Creative Freedom have seen many. With coding becoming a lot simpler and people having greater access to templates which feature wide varieties of add-ons, we’ve seen a rise in site quality over the last 20 years. However, there is a downside to… Read more »
A game app’s user interface is the platform where the user interacts i.e. enters his inputs and receive feedbacks from the game. Henceforth, UI is considered as the means to achieve a satisfying user experience for the gamers. A game app’s utility primarily lies in the kind of user experience it delivers. If it fails… Read more »
In our last post, we explored the Pokémon Go interface in a couple of different ways – with a particular focus on how its well-designed icons help make its otherwise sparse and unintuitive interface aesthetically pleasing and usable. As an almost entirely map-based app and one of the most ‘popular’ games in the world currently,… Read more »
These days, apps are frequently touted as the ‘must-have’ fix-all solution to any and all PR and branding woes. There’s been plenty of discussion about whether or not brands really need apps to succeed in today’s markets, and it has been often noted that the app market has become completely over-saturated by useless, identikit apps…. Read more »
Despite there now being over 4 million apps on the market worldwide, many app designs are severely lacking in the imagination department. It doesn’t help that both Apple and Google produce lengthy, prescriptive ‘guidelines’ on how app interfaces on their platforms should be produced. While these are important in terms of explaining to designers how… Read more »
There’s been a lot of hype about VR technology in recent months. Ever since the Oculus Rift concept was announced, it seems like everyone and their grandma has been pushing to develop and release their own ‘unique’ VR technology—with Google, Samsung, HTC, and Sony following suit. We have talked in the past about how VR… Read more »
Ever since the first iPhone, location-based apps and services have been a central part of the smartphone user experience. From the ubiquitous Maps app to hybrid reality games like Geocaching and Ingress, location data continues to spur innovation and continues to have a real impact on augmenting our physical and virtual realities—just look at Tinder…. Read more »
Video games have never been more popular, especially since the advent of affordable mobile gaming. Revenue for mobile gaming in the US alone is estimated to reach approx. $3.31 billion in 2016, up from 2.03 billion in 2013. With the same source revealing that the mobile gaming market is “the fastest growing segment of the… Read more »
As we explored in our previous post, it’s important to make sure that the most important elements of your site – your content and your services – are at the heart of any information architecture you develop. Web design can be an immensely powerful beast, and as we’re about to see, the worst thing you… Read more »
This week saw the release of Apple’s new (and much hyped) iOS 9, the primary operating system for all of its mobile devices – in particular, the iPhone and iPad. iOS 9 boasts a range of new features and functions, including improved mapping, note-taking capabilities, multi-tasking, and customisation. While it was the much earlier iOS… Read more »
It was around a decade ago that the number of new web-based platforms, operating systems, and devices began to really snowball. This process seems only to have accelerated. Now in 2015, digital designers of all stripes are faced with a common challenge: the need to keep up with an infinity of new frameworks, systems, and most importantly, resolutions.
If there’s one thing that has characterised the user experience in the last ten years, it’s the desire for integration. These days, the average user is engaging with content – the same sites, social networks and email accounts – across at least two devices, if not more. Estimates suggest that 80% of all adults with online access now own a smartphone. The potential to connect with others has never been greater.
However, this poses a problem for the Web 2.0 way of doing things. The old approach would be to design different, separate pages for different devices and browsers. Remember those ‘Best viewed on… [browser]’ banners that designers used to have to put on sites? Or those early ‘mobile’ sites designed for the first iPhone, redundant on all other devices? Such a ‘solution’ cannot possibly keep up with the lightning-fast changes in user needs and demands.
An answer? Responsive web design.
Responsive design is already coming to dominate the web that we interact with. It derives from “responsive architecture”; an architectural school that aims to develop environments which actively respond to the needs of people within them. It is “a class of architecture that demonstrates an ability to alter its form, to continually reflect the environmental conditions that surround it.” This includes both aesthetic and functional responses.
Traditional, modernist architecture aimed to constitute a live environment and shape a user’s response to it. Using the best technology available, responsive architecture instead seeks to create a continuous and mutual discourse between environment and inhabitant. Take the example of the ORAMBRA ‘Prairie House’ in Illinois; emitting less than half of the carbon of a typical house in the region, it uses photo and thermo-chromatic inks to alter the colour of the interior membrane depending on the weather, thereby breaking down the barriers between the inhabitant and their surroundings.
It’s this principle of blurring technology, environment, user and structure which underlies responsive web design. As Ethan Marcotte argues in his article, Responsive Web Design:
“Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.”
Many commentators have talked about the importance of screen resolution in responsive web design; that is, the importance of making designs scalable, regardless of the resolution of its viewport:
However, screen resolution isn’t the only thing responsive designers need to account for – looking at the ‘material design’ philosophy behind the latest iteration of Google’s Android, it’s clear that whole systems are now being developed around these principles. In our next post on this topic, we’ll be discussing how exactly designers can weave these principles into their work. A good example to leave with is that of scaling icons. Android thankfully provides a comprehensive icon size rule-set to enable the work of developers to function in any number of different scenarios, allowing us to account for all possibilities.
