The winners for best application user interfaces of the year are:
Complex Applications
The web-based BondWorks wealth management platform (BondDesk Group LLC) provides financial advisors with a streamlined system to trade fixed-income assets.
The portable GEN2i (Hottinger Baldwin Messtechnik GmbH, Germany) lets users record engineering data in the field.
OEConnection (OEConnection LLC) lets parts department employees at auto dealerships and repair facilities process more than 6 million original equipment parts transactions monthly.
Lightweight Applications
CycleStreets Mobile (CycleStreets Ltd. and Anna Powell-Smith, UK) helps cyclists plan safe, fast routes for cycle journeys using crowd-sourced map data.
VitreaTeach (Vital Images, Inc.) is an educational tool that radiology residents and practicing radiologists can...
Directness sometimes come at the cost of introducing additional complexity in the dialogue. For example, consider the action of pressing down the mouse button while the cursor is over the name of an icon in the Macintosh Finder and then moving the mouse while holding down the mouse button. If the
Passive notifications are typically not urgent and should be less intrusive. A typical implementation of a passive notification may be a badge icon or a small nonmodal popover in a corner of a screen. Passive notifications can easily be missed, since they require no user action. When the
Use a slider only when the precise value won’t matter to the user, but rather only the approximate range. Make sure that the users can select that range correctly without having to struggle too much to hit a precise value. In addition, any slider labels must be displayed above or beside the
5 Real Life Blockchain Implementations Outside of Cryptocurrency
Medicalchain aims to use blockchain technology to securely store medical records. Using a distributed ledger for healthcare is a godsend as it allows doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists, and health insurers to have more immediate access to health records, which could help save lives
JS-Kit Score: Turn Your Site into a Localized Digg
Of course, because this is the only page on ReadWriteWeb that is running a Score widget, it won’t have any data on which content is the highest rated site wide. But the ease of installation is what really catches the eye. JS-Kit is building a suite of tools for web publishers that are modular
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Before a siege, Blackbeard dressed himself in a dark heavy coat and captain’s hat to accentuate his domineering stature. He strapped pistols to his chest and tucked lit, smoking fuses under his hat and in his beard to create an image reminiscent of the devil himself having just emerged from some
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Portfolios for UX Researchers: Top 10 Recommendations
Clearly state your role in the project and explain which parts you were directly responsible for. Describe the team that you worked with on the project. Your future work as a researcher will often involve collaborating with user-interface designers, developers, project managers, content teams, and
Popups: 10 Problematic Trends and Alternatives
Many sites and applications use popups to ask for the users’ email address before they have even had a chance to interact with the content. Ecommerce, news websites and applications, as well as blogs were the biggest offenders in this category. This approach is problematic because not only will
Why User Interviews Fail
Analyzing transcripts is much better than relying on patchy notes or memory. You’ll stay closer to the data for longer, and you’ll be less likely to leap to conclusions that aren’t supported by the data. There are plenty of inexpensive transcription tools which will transcribe the audio
‘Our Users Are Everyone’: Designing Mass-Market Products for Large User Audiences
And vice versa — infrequent use implies less familiarity and less importance to the user. Of course, there are exceptions: some usage scenarios are infrequent but very important (such as buying a house), while some interfaces may remain a mystery even to people who use them every day. But for
Remote UX Work: The NN/g Case Study
But developing new UX talent is also a major challenge to remote work. New UX professionals often learn by closely shadowing or working alongside more experienced colleagues. Many people think that new UX employees shouldn’t be remote: they’ll feel disconnected from the organization, may be
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA
Last week, WP Engine employees from our Limerick and London offices came together for the bi-annual All Hands event in Limerick. All Hands is a 2-day event where employees come to engage with, collaborate, and strategize with employees from other offices. This year’s theme was “Boldly
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WP Engine Named a Great Place to Work in Ireland
I had never experienced a work culture as wonderful as the WP Engine culture before,” said Darren O’Dwyer, a Senior Talent Advisor at WP Engine’s Limerick office. “I love it here, the people genuinely enjoy working here, which makes the work environment a great place to be, and we have
WP Engine Raises $30K for Central Texas Food Bank
WP Engine employees are rarely hungry. Our office kitchens are fully stocked with cereal and snacks, and lunch is catered Monday through Thursday, every week, for the entire team. Unlike the 46,000 people who rely on Central Texas Food Bank for food assistance every week, our employees don’t have
Test Paper Prototypes to Save Time and Money: The Mozilla Case Study
In a later iteration of the design, shown below, task groupings for the help material were eventually moved under the products on the next layer down in the IA, in part because all tasks were not available for all products and services, and that order of layering helped manage that necessary
Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability
Of course, superior solutions that exceed current best practice are possible; after all, we haven't seen the perfect user interface yet. But most designers would be happy to nearly double their business metrics. Simply polishing a design's usability through an iterative design has extremely high
The exit popup can’t tell the difference. Imagine that a user is engaging in page parking to help her research a topic. She starts with a Google query, and then opens up several results into new tabs rapidly. The user begins moving through each tab, closing some that are irrelevant, but saving
Microsoft-GitHub Purchase’s Huge Price Tag Belies Big Competitive Worries
In 2006 Google’s acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, and Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Many dismissed these purchases as indulgences of cash-rich tech behemoths, and federal regulators took no action. But, these acquisitions were far from frivolous. They shut out
As Digital Identities Evolve, Data Security Should Too
Blockchain’s distributed and decentralized ledger is the latest innovation in this space. Startups are already leveraging this technology to create and protect transactional digital identities. More importantly, the public is starting to accept this technology. Bitcoin Market Journal estimated
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
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How to Fail Your Way to Success
It is probably worth seeing yourself as an “experimenter” in the business world. Consider that the enterprises you undertake or take on as a business are often experiments to see if your ideas are correct when faced with reality. In some ways the pioneers of electric cars and autonomous
Secrets of Financial Applications: Traits of Fintech Apps
Two-factor authentication is a good way of securing digital accounts. Two-factor authentication is the most widely-used security measure for these types of applications. Third party services such as Twilio Verify or Twilio Authy allow verification via SMS or a unique app that the user installs on
Best Application Designs | Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: UX Definition
Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: UX Definition
The carousel has always been a popular way to stick content on the front page without taking up too much space and has seen a resurgence with the advent of the iPad. (Original iPad designs were fascinated by the etched screen aesthetic and wanted to control the layout in the tiniest detail. As a
Website Logo Placement for Maximum Brand Recall
In a word, no. There were no statistically significant differences (according to a two-sample t-test) in how people rated the hotels with traditional left-aligned logos, compared to the ‘unconventional’ right-aligned logos. In fact, in most cases, the left-aligned logos were rated slightly more
Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
The Internet manager in charge of this losing design might defend the work by pointing out that it complies with #4 of my top-10 guidelines for homepage design: Offer a clear starting point for the main tasks users will undertake when visiting the site. Clearly, something was done right, with a
