Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. From Minsk in Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, discovered the passage a passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online magazine dedicated to design and web development. Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of all Smashing books. He currently works as editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine in the lovely city of Freiburg, Germany.
You’ve seen them before. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a birthday selector dropdown that always starts in 2021, or a disabled submit button that never communicates what’s actually wrong, or tooltips that — once opened — always cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. They are everywhere, and they are annoying, often tossing us from one dead-end to another, in something that seems like a well-orchestrated and poorly designed mousetrap.
In this talk, we’ll take a closer look at some frustrating design patterns and explore better alternatives, along with plenty of examples and checklists to keep in mind when building or designing one. We’ll look into birthday input, mega-drop-down-hover-menus, disabled “Continue” buttons, newsletter boxes showing on first load, draconian password requirements, unusable sliders, poor inline validation, invisible tooltips, broken filters and of course parallax and scrolljacking — along with identifying buses and fire hydrants.
The insights are coming from usability tests and user research conducted by yours truly or our colleagues in the community. You’ll walk away with a packed toolbox of techniques that you’ll be able to apply to your projects right away.
Not much can surprise you when it comes to interface challenges, doesn’t it? You can design a decent card, a well-rounded accordion and an exquisite hamburger navigation. But what if there are slightly more complex UX challenges ahead of us? How do we make the accessible to everyone around the world? What if you are dealing with complex filters, multi-page forms or multi-step modals and overlays? What about intricate enterprise-grade tables and dashboards? Or perhaps creating a resilient navigation system for a family of 115 websites?
Well, complex UI doesn’t have to be complicated. We need to hide the complexity under the surface, making it easier for everyone to get complex tasks done easier. In this session with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems to make applications accessible and usable, maximizing clarity and minimizing ambiguity along the way. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating complex tables, this session will give you some strategies and tools you need to get better at your work.