As designers, we often wonder why certain standards become the “right” way to do things in our daily workflow.

Questions come about which target the reasoning behind certain decisions we make to solve design problems. For example, the new trendy flat design is all the hype, but have you ever sat back and wondered why? Are users engaged more or less? Does it make a website more usable? Or, is it just aesthetically pleasing for now until another trend hits?

Seeking to answer these, and hundreds of other design-related questions is Design Quips, a growing vault of quotable statistics that examines the web from both statistical and human perspectives: how people access the web, what they do online, and how technology evolves.

To put that in layman’s terms: Design Quips allows you to search common keywords associated with design and target what trends or statistics are happening in real time. With that data you can then be more confident in the direction of your final design.

Each “quip” helps designers defend their decisions. These factoids are tagged and filtered based on a search function which then narrows down results based on what decision you are trying to defend. For example, say you search for “mobile first design”, Design Quips will filter through tagged “Quips” and provide you with related sources to help dictate what answer you are looking for. With statistics, designers can look at issues from an analytical perspective rather than just a problem which needs a solution.

Quips is giving designers the ability to grow and to use tools that will improve their process and ultimately the design. Looking forward, ZURB, the makers of Design Quips, want to ensure that the direction of design is based on measurable evidence and not guesses.

Have you used Design Quips? How do you defend design decisions? Let us know in the comments.

Trickster for Mac: Quick access to your latest files – only $4.97!

You use it when, uhm, you want a button on your page that users can click, right? Well, unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that. It's not too bad though, let's figure it out.

It looks like this:

<button>
      Do Something
    </button>

What's the most common result of clicking something on a website? Moving to a new URL, like you would clicking a link (an <a href="/example/"></a>) element).

The <button> element, by itself, can't do that. There have been various conversations about allowing "href anywhere" over the years, but nothing has came of it.

Clicking on a button does do something though, when used in its natural environment...

Button is a Form Element

Web forms have submit buttons. You might think of that like this:

<form action="/" method="post">
      <input type="submit" value="Submit">
    </form>

A <button> element in a <form>, by default, behaves identically to that submit input above.

<form action="/" method="post">
      <button>Submit</button>
    </form>

However gross the UX, forms can have reset buttons as well. You can duplicate that behavior by changing the default submit type to reset.

<form action="/" method="post">
      <button type="reset">Reset</button>
    </form>

Clicking that button will clear all the other inputs (and textareas) with the parent <form>.

Buttons can have content

The primary reason for using a <button> is that it has both and opening and closing (</button>) tag. Which means there can be stuff inside. A common use case would be something like:

<button>
      <img src="tiny_birthday_cake.png" alt="">
      Submit
    </button>

While an input can be <input type="image">, this mixed content would be hard to pull off.

As far as I can tell, there is no limit to what kind of content you can put in a button, so feel free to get real weird with it. Pseudo elements can be used too.

Let's leave styling <button>s for another day, but different browsers generally have a special style they apply to buttons. You'll want to either leave that alone so the default comes through, or remove it thoroughly so your new styling can be consistent across browsers.

Let's consider: "if a button doesn’t have a meaningful href, it’s a <button>"

I said recently that I enjoyed that sentiment. That's what kicked off this article for me. At the time, I was thinking of how I enjoyed the semantics of it. As in:

<a href="#0">
      I'm kinda sick of doing this for buttons.
    </a>

There is no meaningful href there. The 0 is just there so it doesn't jump the page, because ID's can't start with a number.

Chances are, HTML like the above means: I'm going to make clicking that do something with JavaScript. Somehow that feels better than a <div> whatever, because you get the cursor change and whatever else default styles.

If you don't like those meaningless href's, a <button> can seem like a nice alternative. But unfortunately outside of the context of a <form>, a <button> is equally meaningless.

<button>
      Outside of a <form>, I'm just as useless.
    </button>

But <button> feels better anyway

Even if a <button> doesn't do anything outside of a form without the help of JavaScript, it still feels better for things you can click that do stuff other than change pages. A bogus href link definitely doesn't feel right.

Alright. Let's insert it with JavaScript then.

That's probably the best solution. If JavaScript is required for the clickable-thing to do anything at all, it might as well not even be there at all unless JavaScript runs. We can do:

// 1. Create the button
    var button = document.createElement("button");
    button.innerHTML = "Do Something";
    
    // 2. Append somewhere
    var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
    body.appendChild(button);
    
    // 3. Add event handler
    button.addEventListener ("click", function() {
      alert("did something");
    });

You could easily have "button adding" be a part of your JavaScript workflow.

When links make more sense

If there is any kind of href you could put on that link that makes sense, by all means, use an anchor. Even if you override that behavior with JavaScript. That's progressive enhancement at it's finest. For instance:

• A search button normally triggers a type-ahead ajax-search thingy - but the href could just point to a /search/ page.
• A publish button triggers the the next stage of publishing something a user built - but the href could just point to a /publish/ page.
• A thumbnail button opens a lightbox with a larger version - but the href could just point to the URL of that larger version.

If nothing makes sense, insert the button with JavaScript.

Accessibility concerns

Let's say using an anchor link does make sense. After you give yourself a nice little back-pat for being good at progressive enhancement, there is accessibility to consider as well.

You might be like, I got this!

<a href="#meaningful" class="button" role="button">
      I'm good
    </a>

But you aren't out of the woods yet. MDN covers it well:

Warning: Be careful when marking up links with the button role. Buttons are expected to be triggered using the Space key, while links are expected to be triggered through the Enter key. In other words, when links are used to behave like buttons, adding role="button" alone is not sufficient. It will also be necessary to add a key event handler that listens for the Space key in order to be consistent with native buttons.

Get that? You activate links and buttons with different keys, so consider that.

Go forth and uhm, make clickable things correctly.

When To Use The Button Element is a post from CSS-Tricks

A growing number of developers are opting to build their mobile apps in cross-platform HTML5 code that can be compiled into native apps that can be sold in app stores and markets. Learn how you can do this too!

UMBC Athletics is pleased to announce that seven alumni and one current beloved staff member will comprise its 2014 UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame class:

Justin Bronson ’09, men’s swimming & diving, earned five gold medals in America East Championship competition in individual races and three golds in relay events, in addition to numerous silver and bronze medals. He was selected as the America East Conference Swimmer of the Week once as a freshman, twice as a junior and three times in his senior year. The native of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada still holds the school record in 500-yard freestyle.

Kelly Fiorani ’06, women’s lacrosse, currently ranks third on UMBC’s all-time scoring list in lacrosse with 189 points. She scored 140 goals and added 49 assists from 2003-06. Fiorani was a member of UMBC’s Northeast Conference champion and NCAA Tournament team in 2003. She was named Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year in 2003 and received America East First Team honors and All-Championship Team honors in 2004 and 2006. She also received two letters in soccer and ranked second in points (10) for the 2004 squad. Fiorani was named UMBC’s Outstanding Female Senior Athlete in 2006.

Jay Greene ’09, men’s basketball, has played the most basketball games, 122, and logged the most minutes, 4,192, in Retriever basketball history. A current assistant coach with UMBC, Greene dished out 683 assists, the most in school history, the third-most ever in America East Conference history and the third-most of any NCAA Division I player in the state of Maryland. He was named the Reggie Lewis Most Outstanding Player in the 2008 America East Tournament, leading the Retrievers to their first tournament title and NCAA berth. In his junior season, he was the lone player in the nation to be ranked in the top five in the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio and assists per game. An America East All-Rookie team member in 2005-06, Greene earned First-Team All-Conference honors in 2007-08 and Second Team honors in his senior campaign.

Ray Ignacio ’87, men’s lacrosse, earned Honorable Mention All-American in 1987. He is currently tenth in NCAA history in face-off winning percentage (63.4%) and his 69.6% mark led the nation in 1987. Ignacio is UMBC’s single season leader in draws and is the current leader with 450 face-offs won. He is a member of the UMBC All Time Lacrosse Team, was the 1987 UMBC Lacrosse team captain and played in the 1987 North-South All-Star Game.

Cindy Kubiet, Director of Sports Medicine, 1978-present, established a training program which includes recruitment, educational forums, clinical experiences and a career development and mentor program. Her holistic approach toward working with student athletes led to the creation of a life skills program at UMBC in 1986. Kubiet was awarded the Board of Regents’ University System of Maryland Staff Award for her outstanding service to students in an academic or residential environment in 2007.

Alessandra Pedergnana ’06, women’s tennis, becomes the first women’s tennis player selected to the UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame. As a freshman in 2003, she won 27 matches and was named All Conference in both singles and doubles in the Northeast Conference. She earned All-America East honors in 2004 and played at No. 1 singles for her final two seasons. As a senior, she won her 100th career match and finished the campaign with an impressive 13-4 record. She was named UMBC’s co-Senior Female Athlete of the Year in 2006.

Kristie Pickeral ’06, softball, was the 2002 Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year, helping UMBC reach the NCAA Championships. A year later, she earned NEC Player of the Year with a .387 batting average, 12 HR’s and 59 RBI. The third baseman is currently UMBC’s all-time hits leader with 263 and she slugged 40 home runs. She is also the all-time leader in RBI (179), games played and started (242), total bases (416) and walks, and was the 2005 UMBC Most Outstanding Female Athlete.

Brian Rowland ’03, men’s soccer, holds UMBC’s single season (11, 2002) and career shutouts record (25) as a goalkeeper in men’s soccer. He earned First Team All-Northeast Conference honors in his senior season of 2002. He is currently seventh in school history with 227 saves and has played professionally both indoors (Baltimore, Milwaukee, Orlando) and outdoors (Crystal Palace USA, Toronto Lynx). Rowland is currently an assistant men’s soccer coach at the University of Maryland.

The UMBC Athletic Hall of Fame dinner and inductions will take place on Saturday evening, January 25, at the Southeast Club Level of M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. The inductees will also be honored at halftime of the UMBC men’s basketball game versus Hartford that afternoon. Get tickets today.

Honors College Professor Ellen Handler Spitz is participating in a roundtable discussion at the Helix Center in New York City devoted to the topic of children’s drawing. The program will focus on linguistic, art historical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on drawings by Ethiopian children.

The roundtable, titled “From Children’s Sights to Our Insights: Ethiopian Children’s Drawings, Stories and Inner Lives,” is scheduled to take place Saturday, January 25th from 2:30-4:30 p.m.

Other panelists include Theodore Shapiro, Professor Emeritus at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and Nathan M. Szajnberg, Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. 

You can read more about the event here.

UPDATE 2/12/14: The complete video of the Helix Center roundtable discussion is now posted online and it can be watched in its entirety below.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zKT448JlWc&w=560&h=315]

The present is always the best time to take a step back and analyze your design process, because there’s nothing more valuable than your limited time on this planet. Could you spend your time making a bigger impact? Are you getting bogged down in details that don’t matter? How can you use your time more wisely?

Time is precious. Don’t waste it! – Photo from Flickr user Neal Fowler.

If you have a good design process, you’ll create better design and more of it (which should also mean more money). These tips are mostly applicable to designers, but developers can certainly benefit as well. Let’s dig in.

Understand

The most important step in any design process is to understand the problem. In this early phase, you should spend most of your time talking to your stakeholders (whether that’s a client, your boss, or yourself). Time spent understanding the problem will save massive amounts of time later on, because the changes you make should be smaller. Iteration is inevitable, but making changes early is cheaper than changes made later on.

When speaking with clients, make sure your questions are centered on the user’s goals. Nobody opens a web app or a mobile app arbitrarily. Rather, they have some sort of goal in mind, even if it’s a subconscious goal. The user might want to book an appointment, browse the latest news, or learn a new skill. Push this line of questioning until both you and your stakeholders share a detailed understanding of the product’s role in the user’s life.

How to Freelance and How to Run a Web Design Business on Treehouse can help you understand more about how to work with clients.

Sketch

After you have a keen understanding of the user’s goals, it’s time to start putting ideas into visuals. Designing in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar tools can take a tremendous amount of time because they’re more detail than you need (at first). Even a wireframing tool like Balsamiq Mockups or Omnigraffle might be overkill.

An example of a wireframe mockup created in Balsamiq Mockups.

The best way to start rendering visuals is with a simple drawing tool. I prefer a writing utensil and paper, but a simple sketching app for a tablet can work as well. As long as it’s fast and cheap for you to try ideas. At this point, you should mostly focus on fundamental shapes and composition. Create the rough outline for each page element and then place them together. The most important elements should be emphasized through any combination of unique shape, increased size, or contrast of value (lightness and darkness).

Focus

Your sketches don’t have to represent a final result, but they should get you far enough so that you don’t have to make major layout adjustments later. When you feel like you’ve got it, clean up your wireframes and resync with stakeholders. Chances are, you’ll need to iterate before advancing. That’s OK though, because adjustments at this stage are still very easy to make.

Now is the time to focus on what the app is actually going to be in the most concrete and practical terms. Cut any features that aren’t necessary and scope the remaining features so that they’re atomic and realistic for the time available. You want to make sure that your initial ideas are reflective of a project that you can actually accomplish.

At this point, you might want to make a high fidelity mockup using Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other “pixel perfect” drawing tool. Personally, I prefer to skip Photoshop whenever I can and just start coding an HTML/CSS prototype using a framework like Bootstrap. Often my code prototypes end up becoming the real project, which saves time.

Rendering your ideas in more detail will shine a spotlight on any remaining areas of ambiguity. If there’s something in your initial sketches that wasn’t detailed enough, you’ll uncover those problems now. Iterate and repeat.

Critique

We live in a wonderful time where it’s easy to get opinions from other people. If your work is not confidential, you can use sites like Dribbble or the design critique sub-Reddit to solicit honest feedback. If your work is confidential, you can still probably get away with asking your peers or other designers that you trust and know personally.

Sites like Dribbble can help you fine tune your work through honest critique.

You may also want to resync with stakeholders once you have a high fidelity mockup, just to make sure that everything was transferred from sketches as envisioned. If you’ve been communicating at the previous phases, colors, fonts, and copy should make up the majority of the changes. Layout changes can occur at this point, but they’ll take much longer than they should, so do your best to finalize the layouts sooner rather than later.

You may also want to start conducting simple usability tests using your prototypes to ensure that you’re still on the right track. Usability Foundations on Treehouse can help you with this.

You’ve probably noticed by now, but you should make sure you iterate at every phase of the design process as well. Iterating isn’t a step. Rather, it’s a pervasive aspect of any workflow. Your ideas will morph and change no matter what, so make those changes in the most efficient way possible.

Deliver

A project is no good unless it actually gets delivered to the people that use it. Many projects end up in limbo where designs change over and over. You can circumvent these issues by setting deadlines and milestones for every phase of the process. When does the client need to settle on a page layout? When should there be no more features added? When should a release candidate be ready for bug testing (and bug testing only, not feature changes)? It varies for every project and scenario, but it’s important to make sure that measurable progress is being made. If the project seems to be stuck at a phase for too long, it’s time to step back and figure out why.

A nice service that can help make sure you’re ready for launch is Lauchlist. The free version can help you get started, and if you use Launchlist a lot they have paid features that can take you further.

Speeding up your design process and staying focused is easier said than done. If you have any additional tips that I’ve left out here, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

The post Optimize Your Design Process appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The present is always the best time to take a step back and analyze your design process, because there’s nothing more valuable than your limited time on this planet. Could you spend your time making a bigger impact? Are you getting bogged down in details that don’t matter? How can you use your time more wisely?

Time is precious. Don’t waste it! – Photo from Flickr user Neal Fowler.

If you have a good design process, you’ll create better design and more of it (which should also mean more money). These tips are mostly applicable to designers, but developers can certainly benefit as well. Let’s dig in.

Understand

The most important step in any design process is to understand the problem. In this early phase, you should spend most of your time talking to your stakeholders (whether that’s a client, your boss, or yourself). Time spent understanding the problem will save massive amounts of time later on, because the changes you make should be smaller. Iteration is inevitable, but making changes early is cheaper than changes made later on.

When speaking with clients, make sure your questions are centered on the user’s goals. Nobody opens a web app or a mobile app arbitrarily. Rather, they have some sort of goal in mind, even if it’s a subconscious goal. The user might want to book an appointment, browse the latest news, or learn a new skill. Push this line of questioning until both you and your stakeholders share a detailed understanding of the product’s role in the user’s life.

How to Freelance and How to Run a Web Design Business on Treehouse can help you understand more about how to work with clients.

Sketch

After you have a keen understanding of the user’s goals, it’s time to start putting ideas into visuals. Designing in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar tools can take a tremendous amount of time because they’re more detail than you need (at first). Even a wireframing tool like Balsamiq Mockups or Omnigraffle might be overkill.

An example of a wireframe mockup created in Balsamiq Mockups.

The best way to start rendering visuals is with a simple drawing tool. I prefer a writing utensil and paper, but a simple sketching app for a tablet can work as well. As long as it’s fast and cheap for you to try ideas. At this point, you should mostly focus on fundamental shapes and composition. Create the rough outline for each page element and then place them together. The most important elements should be emphasized through any combination of unique shape, increased size, or contrast of value (lightness and darkness).

Focus

Your sketches don’t have to represent a final result, but they should get you far enough so that you don’t have to make major layout adjustments later. When you feel like you’ve got it, clean up your wireframes and resync with stakeholders. Chances are, you’ll need to iterate before advancing. That’s OK though, because adjustments at this stage are still very easy to make.

Now is the time to focus on what the app is actually going to be in the most concrete and practical terms. Cut any features that aren’t necessary and scope the remaining features so that they’re atomic and realistic for the time available. You want to make sure that your initial ideas are reflective of a project that you can actually accomplish.

At this point, you might want to make a high fidelity mockup using Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other “pixel perfect” drawing tool. Personally, I prefer to skip Photoshop whenever I can and just start coding an HTML/CSS prototype using a framework like Bootstrap. Often my code prototypes end up becoming the real project, which saves time.

Rendering your ideas in more detail will shine a spotlight on any remaining areas of ambiguity. If there’s something in your initial sketches that wasn’t detailed enough, you’ll uncover those problems now. Iterate and repeat.

Critique

We live in a wonderful time where it’s easy to get opinions from other people. If your work is not confidential, you can use sites like Dribbble or the design critique sub-Reddit to solicit honest feedback. If your work is confidential, you can still probably get away with asking your peers or other designers that you trust and know personally.

Sites like Dribbble can help you fine tune your work through honest critique.

You may also want to resync with stakeholders once you have a high fidelity mockup, just to make sure that everything was transferred from sketches as envisioned. If you’ve been communicating at the previous phases, colors, fonts, and copy should make up the majority of the changes. Layout changes can occur at this point, but they’ll take much longer than they should, so do your best to finalize the layouts sooner rather than later.

You may also want to start conducting simple usability tests using your prototypes to ensure that you’re still on the right track. Usability Foundations on Treehouse can help you with this.

You’ve probably noticed by now, but you should make sure you iterate at every phase of the design process as well. Iterating isn’t a step. Rather, it’s a pervasive aspect of any workflow. Your ideas will morph and change no matter what, so make those changes in the most efficient way possible.

Deliver

A project is no good unless it actually gets delivered to the people that use it. Many projects end up in limbo where designs change over and over. You can circumvent these issues by setting deadlines and milestones for every phase of the process. When does the client need to settle on a page layout? When should there be no more features added? When should a release candidate be ready for bug testing (and bug testing only, not feature changes)? It varies for every project and scenario, but it’s important to make sure that measurable progress is being made. If the project seems to be stuck at a phase for too long, it’s time to step back and figure out why.

A nice service that can help make sure you’re ready for launch is Lauchlist. The free version can help you get started, and if you use Launchlist a lot they have paid features that can take you further.

Speeding up your design process and staying focused is easier said than done. If you have any additional tips that I’ve left out here, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

The post Optimize Your Design Process appeared first on Treehouse Blog.