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You're reading from  101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2022
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803234885
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Will Grant
Will Grant
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Will Grant

Will Grant is a British UI/UX expert and a digital product designer. He is a web technology entrepreneur with over 25 years' experience, leading teams (and products) at the intersection of technology and usability. After his Computer Science degree, Will trained with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini at the Nielsen Norman Group – the world leaders in usable design. Since then, Will has overseen the user experience and interaction design of several large-scale web sites and apps, reaching over a billion users in the process. Will is a "design purist" and obsessed with building beautiful, compelling, and familiar products that customers intuitively know how to use.
Read more about Will Grant

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Don’t Invent New, Arbitrary Controls

These could be:

  • An isometric pseudo-3D wheel to choose the color of your car
  • A volume dial that you must click and drag up-and-down to “rotate”
  • A button you must click and hold for a few seconds to indicate that you really want to do this action

Just don’t invent them. As designers, we already have a rich palette of existing controls to choose from. If you’re thinking about making a new UI control, please stop and think about how hard it will be for users to learn yet another interface pattern. I promise you this—there’s already a way to do what you want to do.

However, every now and then, something new comes along that is genuinely an advance in UI. Back in 2008, Loren Brichter made a Twitter app called Tweetie, with a unique pull-to-refresh interaction. Pulling the view down would show “release to refresh” and releasing would show a spinner. The...

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101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition
Published in: May 2022Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803234885

Author (1)

author image
Will Grant

Will Grant is a British UI/UX expert and a digital product designer. He is a web technology entrepreneur with over 25 years' experience, leading teams (and products) at the intersection of technology and usability. After his Computer Science degree, Will trained with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini at the Nielsen Norman Group – the world leaders in usable design. Since then, Will has overseen the user experience and interaction design of several large-scale web sites and apps, reaching over a billion users in the process. Will is a "design purist" and obsessed with building beautiful, compelling, and familiar products that customers intuitively know how to use.
Read more about Will Grant