Adam Silver
@adamsilverhq
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Designer with engineering background. I share tips to help you design products that are ridiculously simple and accessible to use.
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Joined September 2009
When I was 16 years old, I wanted to design logos and websites. I had an eye for design, but lacked the practical skill to do it. So I ended up going into frontend development which was more technical. But most of the designers I worked with gave me complicated and inaccessible
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Can you make toast messages accessible? Last week I posted about how Github’s design system banned toast messages because their user research showed that they’re hard to use and inaccessible. I received 135 comments, including pushback from accessibility specialists who insist
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Github’s Design System now bans toast messages. In case you don’t know, toast messages are little messages shown on top of the UI to give feedback about an action that you’ve just taken. Banning toast messages is an excellent decision because they have bad UX and are terrible
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Last week I shared the first two laws of form design: Law 1: Nobody wants to use your form Law 2: Completion time = Question Time + Pause Time Here’s the final law: Law 3: Users will make mistakes no matter how well your form is designed. Of course you should do everything in
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New form design tip: end with one thing per page. You may have heard of this rule: ➡︎ Start with one thing per page. This was first written about by designers Tim Paul and Caroline Jarrett. In case you’re not familiar, putting one thing (usually one field) on each page in a
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Yesterday, I shared the first law of form design: ➡︎ Nobody wants to use your form. Like I said yesterday, it’s crucial to know because it emphasises respecting the user over trying to make your form fun, engaging, novel or “on brand”. And showing respect means doing
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Last week I shared my 3 laws of form design. Here’s a breakdown of the first law which is perfectly captured by a question one of my subscribers asked me: “How can we bring joy to people who use enterprise applications for 40 hours a week?” It’s a good question because it
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"User needs are a harmful concept." Will Myddelton, who led product at GDS said that. Here's why he said it (and what he suggests instead): (1) It's confusing - even senior researchers at GDS didn't understand what it meant (2) People treat needs like collectibles, rather
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And if there is space to expand, just have them expanded all the time.
I like these interaction explorations, but I often wonder how they’d fit into the wider interface. There aren’t many places you can put something that has space to expand, in most interfaces. e.g. I imagine this one could be a floating bar at the bottom of an interface.
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I regularly see user needs written like this: → As a user → I need to be able to filter the messages by type → So that I can find the message I'm looking for But that's just a solution written as a need. Instead it should read more like: → As a user → I need to find
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I dunno if I'd count as one. I'm a designer who codes. But when I hear it, it just sounds like a software developer who cares about UI/UX. But also: What is the difference between frontend engineer and design engineer?
I think an important way to define what “design engineer” means is to look at people who have taken jobs with that title and see what work they do. As far as I can tell it’s rarely “standard” interface design work. Instead it’s e.g. marketing websites, and design systems work.
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p.s. reducing clicks may be the result of good design, but it’s not the goal in and of itself.
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“But that’s a lot of clicks” I hear this from stakeholders (and even UI/UX designers) quite regularly when I share flows with multiple steps. But here’s the truth: Users don’t care about clicks, as long as each click takes them logically towards their goal. The real problem
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Over the last 20 years I’ve collected 83 form design rules. For example, rule 7 is: Every input needs a label → Sighted users see them → Screen readers announce them → Motor-impaired users can more easily set focus to the input thanks to the larger hit area. If you like,
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but when on the right there is a greater risk of you clicking the wrong row, and not so good for people who zoom in using a screen magnifier for example.
If you have chevrons in an expandable hierarchical list like this, you can put them on the left or the right. One of the benefits of the right is that the left edge of the hierarchy can be much clearer. The chevrons tend to get in the way a bit.
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For the last 20+ years, I’ve built and designed various products and services that are full of forms. And most of them had a lot of UX and accessibility issues. But I realised that every solution I’ve ever come up with to address these issues can be traced back to 3 simple
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Design tip: don't test two versions of a design (at the same time) I often hear designers and product managers say: “Let's test both versions and see which is better” Sounds reasonable, except that there are a bunch of downsides with this (and it’s totally unnecessary).
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UI/UX tip: write form labels that make sense in all contexts. For example, let’s imagine you need to ask the user to provide a reason for rejecting an application. You could use different labels in different contexts, for example: → “Tell us why you are rejecting the
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Accessibility tip: visually hidden content isn’t always accessible, even in screen readers. For example, let’s say you have a table with a column that shows acronyms. You say to yourself “that’s not accessible, because screen reader users will hear “I. M. P. L.” So you add
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