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UX/UI Links, July 2017

The web gets flooded with good content every month and July was no exception.

I handpicked 5 articles from a pool of wonderful resources we found this month, driven by the sentiment behind Alain de Botton's phrase “most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

I hope this is the right moment for you as well 😉

Here's the list.

Are You Wasting The Time of Your Users to Save Yourself?

A button placed there because everyone else is doing it, the modal window requesting our email to download a paper, or the intricate password protocols to get access to our information, are all challenges we could solve as designers. But, we've decided to turn them into problems for our users. Is bad UX becoming commonplace under the pressure of deadlines, metric-driven solutions, and ambitious business goals?

In his article Are You Wasting The Time of Your Users to Save Yourself? Paul Boag addresses this reality, offering a set of examples and solutions to typical issues where we put our needs above those of our users.

Design Systems, Style Guides, and Pattern Libraries

After Google put out its principles of good design, many others have followed. From the biggest brands to the smallest teams, everyone is trying to bring consistency to their work and the web with a broad offering of systems, guidelines and patterns. But, what are they, really? What's the difference? What are they good for?.

The folks at UX Excellence answer all these questions in Design Systems, Style Guides, and Pattern Libraries: Oh My!. This concise article will help you pick up the basic concepts and make informed decisions for your project's UI.

Designing The Perfect Date And Time Picker

Are there really over 8,000 words to write about date picker design? Yes! And it's worth a read. Smashing Magazine started a great series about responsive design patterns, with the purpose of painstakingly analysing different sets of UI components we use in our day-to-day work.

Designing The Perfect Date And Time Picker offers lots of examples, use cases and best practices to create better elements and improve our users' experience.

If you feel creative after reading the post, try the new date and time picker controls we just added in our latest release.

Empty States

Empty states - what our users see when there's no information to display on the screen - are often the last thing on designers' minds.

In Empty States? More like You-Have-No-Idea-How-Much-Work-Goes-Into-Those States, amirite??, Meg Robichaud, Illustrator at Shopify, shares her journey creating 39+ empty states for the new Shopify Design System, Polaris. In between jokes, there's a lot of UX lessons on why and how to tackle the design of these critical touch points of users' experience.

For inspiration when creating your product's empty states check out emptystat.es

How to Switch your Career to Product Design

Dropbox designers collaborated on How to Switch your Career to Product Design to help anyone seeking a transition in their career. The article gathers the distilled learnings from their experiences when entering the product design field.

It's full of good advice based on real life success stories to give you a motivational push if you're thinking about changing your path.


If you like to keep reading handpicked articles, here are our previous lists.

To check the rest of our selection, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Remember to share your favorites in the comments!

Jessica for the Balsamiq Team

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