Which web design approach will meet the next era of UX

November 28, 2018 DESIGNirvana 0

Web design is the paramount that helps attain the viewer’s attention and keep them engaged with a website. An outdated web design will eventually push your website down in ranking and thus, will affect your site’s potential traffic.

Though, it is quite hard to keep pace with the ever-fluctuating web design trends but, it’s extremely essential to make your website boast a visually appealing and trendy design in order to maintain a successful online presence.

With the advancement in the Internet and mobile technology, today, we have truckloads of devices in the market that possesses different platforms, screen size, hardware, and software. The current designing trends including Responsive and Adaptive designs allow websites to easily target a huge user base who access them through diverse devices. However since no UX (user experience) is the same as the other, there has to be some other way out to ensure ultimate UX.

How about stopping the guesswork and letting users decide the course of a website design?

You can keep the creative control to yourself, but allow your users to tinker around the display specs of your website. But, more on that later. Let us first go back to the more popular approaches and take it off from there.

Responsive Designs

It is true that, with the evolution of Smartphones and other Internet-enabled devices, the number of access made to websites from mobile devices has increased exponentially, and this is only expected to continue. Hence, optimizing the web content for mobile devices would be a great idea. This is where the idea of responsive designs came into, according to this web design, a website must adapt itself to the screen sizes of the targeted devices. The primary aim is to make a website automatically adapt to the layout changes from a device to another (which exhibits different display sizes and device-specific capabilities).

The responsive web design concept allows auto-simplification of multiple column layouts into a few column layouts depending upon the available screen size. Unlike traditional graphic designs, this approach separates the web content and its presentation. For responding to any display size, developers can implement standard CSS3 media queries. It includes a flexible grid layout, instead of fixed grids.

This approach is quite popular and has been adopted by several global companies including Boston Globe, American Express, and more.

Adaptive Designs

Defining another essential User Experience (UX) element, the Adaptive Designs refers to the progressive enhancement of a website. It aims at delivering responsive design at the client side by following several resourceful tactics. This design is ideal for creating an adaptive web content that can be easily shared or distributed across any platform.

This approach includes content re-usability, assiduous content structure, integration of resourceful metadata, implementation of an absolute Content Management System (CMS), etc.

If you consider the emerging designs of the latest mobile devices, it can be observed that there are two trends that are being followed by mobile devices. It is that the Smartphone and tablets like mobile devices say that “bigger is better”, on the contrary, the devices like wearable follow “smaller is simpler” approach.

Adjustive Designs

In order to stand up to the expectations of all the different types of mobile devices and to make strive for an absolute UX, here we are pondering into a better approach, which is known as Adjustive design.

Adjustive Web Designs are ideal for designing a website with a feature that enables the user to adjust certain aspects layout in a desirable fashion in order to access the site with greater convenience. It basically includes the key aspects of Adaptive content and follows the responsive approach to represent the web content while auto adjusting to the targeted screen sizes.

For instance, accessing some UI elements on the large-screen mobile devices (including tablets, “phablets”, etc.) could be a daunting task for hands. The fix-positioned hamburger-style site header (or any other responsively adjusted UI control) won’t ensure easy accessibility to a user.

However, with the Adjustive web design approach, you can allow your website users to adjust (relocate) the crucial UI elements at an easily accessible location on their mobile screen. Thus, they can have a more intuitive and interesting UI.

With the rapid improvements in the mobile realm, especially considering the User Experience, it is essential to make strives to enhance the online content to successfully reach a huge audience base of mobile users. To target the gigantic mobile market that features numerous screen sizes, platform capabilities, etc., you must deploy a web design that is simple, intuitive, adjustive and updated with the latest trend.

The fluctuating user behavior and web trends, one ensure that their site possesses an optimized designing approach and frameworks. Adapting the pace with which the technology is advancing will help you ensure a powerful and successful presence in the market.

 

Creative Restraints: Why They Are Not Necessarily Bad

November 26, 2018 DESIGNirvana 0

It freaks you out when you get interrupted by your senior designer just when you are about to do some awesome things with Photoshop. Yeah, this is a part of a website designer’s life. Every day we have to deal with extreme pressure, not to mention chasing insane target, and yet, people expect us to be creative 24×7 as if we are some sort of Martians. Well, we are not whining all the time. Work pressure is something normal with any creative work and definitely, we are not against this; rather what makes our job all the more difficult is the designing constraints. There are so many creative constraints in web design that make it tough for a designer to come up with something truly inspiring.

But constraints are not necessarily bad. They may look liked barbed wires restraining your movements and your creative freedom but in reality, they are not. They are the best tools for creativity. They challenge you and get the best out of you by pitting you in a position where you can let your creative part go wild. And because of these constraints, you will be trying to do new things and continue making experiments with the design part unless and until you come up with something aesthetically pleasing.

What these restrictions are?

Restrictions vary project wise. But there are certain restrictions that we have to encounter in almost all projects irrespective of their nature and clients’ specifications. Following are some basic constraints that trouble almost all web designers irrespective of the project scope –

*  Timeline
*  Preferences of the client
*  Expectation of the Customer
*  Browser restrictions
*  Screen Size restrictions
*  Our own personal preference
*  Our inability to work on certain platforms
*  Software restrictions

However, no matter how long this list of these restrictions may appear, these restrictions are not necessarily a bad thing. These restrictions will put you in a challenging position and thereby instigating you to rise above adversaries and deliver your best.

Too Much Freedom is certainly not A Great Thing

Freedom is all we desire. But in some cases, too much freedom can lead to trouble especially when you are in a creative domain. Chances are that when you are given unbridled freedom; you might get yourself lost in its vastness or vagueness. For say, if the client only says that he needs a great design and nothing else, will you be able to come up with anything? Definitely not, because the client has failed to specify in clear English, what he actually wants. So, if he has given some sort of specification like what he wants in the design and what he does not want, it will be easier for you to come up with something creative.

In short, restrictions help you stay focused and do our job the best way possible; without these restrictions, you will not be able to concentrate and waste your precise time on things that may not be related to the project. Here are the following benefits of restrictions that even the strongest supporters of freedom and democracy cannot rule out:

*  Making it easier to take quick decision
*  It helps us focus on things we are assigned with
*  Increases precision
*  It draws out our best

Take you out of our comfort Zone

Designing a website with a subtle touch of creativity is certainly not an easy feat. Now, staying creative 24×7 is super tough and definitely not something for the faint-hearted. So, the easiest way to stay creative is to eliminate the unwanted distractions that come thick and fast whenever you hit the work desk. The best way you can eliminate these distractions is by imposing self restrictions. These restrictions will not let you go wild while designing templates and speed up the process. And you may never know these restrictions may help you rise above everything and excel in your field.

You can even try new things like. You can impose a few more restrictions in a designing project apart from all those already set by the client just to challenge yourself a bit. You may never know you might be able to come up with something more interesting and awesome that you might have imaged ever. You can try any of these followings and I hope, it will get you out of your comfort zone:

*  Using only standard web fonts
*  Using only illustrator and no Photoshop
*  No images above the fold

When you will be imposing restrictions like these, you will be entrusted with the responsibility of doing something great with the available resources. And because of the limitation of resources, you will have to do something extraordinary with the available options and probably, this will lead to the birth of something awesome.

So, hopefully, you have come to realize the importance of restrictions in a creative process.