in the markup.
In this article, I’m going to take a look at the common features of our new layout systems, along with a couple of examples which serve to highlight the differences between them.
To see the grid layout examples you will need to enable grid in your browser. The easiest thing to do is to enable the experimental web platform features flag in Chrome. Details of current browser support can be found here.
Relationship
Items only become flex or grid items if they are a direct child of the element that has display:flex, display:grid or display:inline-grid applied. Those direct children then understand themselves in the context of the complete layout. This makes many things possible. It’s the lack of relationship between elements that makes our existing layout methods difficult to use. If we float two columns, left and right, we have no way to tell the shorter column to extend to the height of the taller one. We have expended a lot of effort trying to figure out the best way to make full-height columns work, using techniques that were never really designed for page layout.
At a very simple level, the relationship between elements means that we can easily achieve full-height columns. In flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid equal height columns by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Alignment
Full-height columns rely on our flex and grid items understanding themselves as part of an overall layout. They also draw on a third new specification: the box alignment module. If vertical centring is a gift you’d like to have under your tree this Christmas, then this is the box you’ll want to unwrap first.
The box alignment module takes the alignment and space distribution properties from flexbox and applies them to other layout methods. That includes grid layout, but also other layout methods. Once implemented in browsers, this specification will give us true vertical centring of all the things.
Our examples above achieved full-height columns because the default value of align-items is stretch. The value ensured our columns stretched to the height of the tallest. If we want to use our new vertical centring abilities on all items, we would set align-items:center on the container. To align one flex or grid item, apply the align-self property.
The examples below demonstrate these alignment properties in both grid layout and flexbox. The portrait image of Widget the cat is aligned with the default stretch. The other three images are aligned using different values of align-self.
Take a look at an example in flexbox:
See the Pen Flexbox alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
And also in grid layout (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid alignment by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The alignment properties used with CSS grid layout.
Fluid grids
A cornerstone of responsive design is the concept of fluid grids.
“[…]every aspect of the grid—and the elements laid upon it—can be expressed as a proportion relative to its container.”
—Ethan Marcotte, “Fluid Grids”
The method outlined by Marcotte is to divide the target width by the context, then use that value as a percentage value for the width property on our element.
h1 {
margin-left: 14.575%; /* 144px / 988px = 0.14575 */
width: 70.85%; /* 700px / 988px = 0.7085 */
}
In more recent years, we’ve been able to use calc() to simplify this (at least, for those of us able to drop support for Internet Explorer 8). However, flexbox and grid layout make fluid grids simple.
The most basic of flexbox demos shows this fluidity in action. The justify-content property – another property defined in the box alignment module – can be used to create an equal amount of space between or around items. As the available width increases, more space is assigned in proportion.
In this demo, the list items are flex items due to display:flex being added to the ul. I have given them a maximum width of 250 pixels. Any remaining space is distributed equally between the items as the justify-content property has a value of space-between.
See the Pen Flexbox: justify-content by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
For true fluid grid-like behaviour, your new flexible friends are flex-grow and flex-shrink. These properties give us the ability to assign space in proportion.
The flexbox flex property is a shorthand for:
flex-grow
flex-shrink
flex-basis
The flex-basis property sets the default width for an item. If flex-grow is set to 0, then the item will not grow larger than the flex-basis value; if flex-shrink is 0, the item will not shrink smaller than the flex-basis value.
flex: 1 1 200px: a flexible box that can grow and shrink from a 200px basis.
flex: 0 0 200px: a box that will be 200px and cannot grow or shrink.
flex: 1 0 200px: a box that can grow bigger than 200px, but not shrink smaller.
In this example, I have a set of boxes that can all grow and shrink equally from a 100 pixel basis.
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
What I would like to happen is for the first element, containing a portrait image, to take up less width than the landscape images, thus keeping it more in proportion. I can do this by changing the flex-grow value. By giving all the items a value of 1, they all gain an equal amount of the available space after the 100 pixel basis has been worked out.
If I give them all a value of 3 and the first box a value of 1, the other boxes will be assigned three parts of the available space while box 1 is assigned only one part. You can see what happens in this demo:
See the Pen Flexbox: flex-grow by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Once you understand flex-grow, you should easily be able to grasp how the new fraction unit (fr, defined in the CSS grid layout specification) works. Like flex-grow, this unit allows us to assign available space in proportion. In this case, we assign the space when defining our track sizes.
In this demo (which requires a CSS grid-supporting browser), I create a four-column grid using the fraction unit to define my track sizes. The first track is 1fr in width, and the others 2fr.
grid-template-columns: 1fr 2fr 2fr 2fr;
See the Pen Grid fraction units by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The four-track grid.
Separation of concerns
My younger self petitioned my peers to stop using tables for layout and to move to CSS. One of the rallying cries of that movement was the concept of separating our source and content from how they were displayed. It was something of a failed promise given the tools we had available: the display leaked into the markup with the need for redundant elements to cope with browser bugs, or visual techniques that just could not be achieved without supporting markup.
Browsers have improved, but even now we can find ourselves compromising the ideal document structure so we can get the layout we want at various breakpoints. In some ways, the situation has returned to tables-for-layout days. Many of the current grid frameworks rely on describing our layout directly in the markup. We add divs for rows, and classes to describe the number of desired columns. We nest these constructions of divs inside one another.
Here is a snippet from the Bootstrap grid examples – two columns with two nested columns:
Not a million miles away from something I might have written in 1999.
Grid and flexbox layouts do not need to be described in markup. The layout description happens entirely in the CSS, meaning that elements can be moved around from within the presentation layer.
Flexbox gives us the ability to reverse the flow of elements, but also to set the order of elements with the order property. This is demonstrated here, where Widget the cat is in position 1 in the source, but I have used the order property to display him after the things that are currently unimpressive to him.
See the Pen Flexbox: order by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Grid layout takes this a step further. Where flexbox lets us set the order of items in a single dimension, grid layout gives us the ability to position things in two dimensions: both rows and columns. Defined in the CSS, this positioning can be changed at any breakpoint without needing additional markup. Compare the source order with the display order in this example (requires a CSS grid-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid positioning in two dimensions by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
Laying out our items in two dimensions using grid layout.
As these demos show, a straightforward way to decide if you should use grid layout or flexbox is whether you want to position items in one dimension or two. If two, you want grid layout.
A note on accessibility and reordering
The issues arising from this powerful ability to change the way items are ordered visually from how they appear in the source have been the subject of much discussion. The current flexbox editor’s draft states
“Authors must use order only for visual, not logical, reordering of content. Style sheets that use order to perform logical reordering are non-conforming.”
—CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1, Editor’s Draft (3 December 2015)
This is to ensure that non-visual user agents (a screen reader, for example) can rely on the document source order as being correct. Take care when reordering that you do so from the basis of a sound document that makes sense in terms of source order. Avoid using visual order to convey meaning.
Automatic content placement with rules
Having control over the order of items, or placing items on a predefined grid, is nice. However, we can often do that already with one method or another and we have frameworks and tools to help us. Tools such as Susy mean we can even get away from stuffing our markup full of grid classes. However, our new layout methods give us some interesting new possibilities.
Something that is useful to be able to do when dealing with content coming out of a CMS or being pulled from some other source, is to define a bunch of rules and then say, “Display this content, using these rules.”
As an example of this, I will leave you with a Christmas poem displayed in a document alongside Widget the cat and some of the decorations that are bringing him no Christmas cheer whatsoever.
The poem is displayed first in the source as a set of paragraphs. I’ve added a class identifying each of the four paragraphs but they are displayed in the source as one text. Below that are all my images, some landscape and some portrait; I’ve added a class of landscape to the landscape ones.
The mobile-first grid is a single column and I use line-based placement to explicitly position my poem paragraphs. The grid layout auto-placement rules then take over and place the images into the empty cells left in the grid.
At wider screen widths, I declare a four-track grid, and position my poem around the grid, keeping it in a readable order.
I also add rules to my landscape class, stating that these items should span two tracks. Once again the grid layout auto-placement rules position the rest of my images without my needing to position them. You will see that grid layout takes items out of source order to fill gaps in the grid. It does this because I have set the property grid-auto-flow to dense. The default is sparse meaning that grid will not attempt this backfilling behaviour.
Take a look and play around with the full demo (requires a CSS grid layout-supporting browser):
See the Pen Grid auto-flow with rules by rachelandrew (@rachelandrew) on CodePen.
The final automatic placement example.
My wish for 2016
I really hope that in 2016, we will see CSS grid layout finally emerge from behind browser flags, so that we can start to use these features in production — that we can start to move away from using the wrong tools for the job.
However, I also hope that we’ll see developers fully embracing these tools as the new system that they are. I want to see people exploring the possibilities they give us, rather than trying to get them to behave like the grid systems of 2015. As you discover these new modules, treat them as the new paradigm that they are, get creative with them. And, as you find the edges of possibility with them, take that feedback to the CSS Working Group. Help improve the layout systems that will shape the look of the future web.
Some further reading
I maintain a site of grid layout examples and resources at Grid by Example.
The three CSS specifications I’ve discussed can be found as editor’s drafts: CSS grid, flexbox, box alignment.
I wrote about the last three years of my interest in CSS grid layout, which gives something of a history of the specification.
More examples of box alignment and grid layout.
My presentation at Fronteers earlier this year, in which I explain more about these concepts.",2015,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/grid-flexbox-box-alignment-our-new-system-for-layout/,code
67,What I Learned about Product Design This Year,"2015 was a humbling year for me. In September of 2014, I joined a tiny but established startup called SproutVideo as their third employee and first designer. The role interests me because it affords the opportunity to see how design can grow a solid product with a loyal user-base into something even better.
The work I do now could also have a real impact on the brand and user experience of our product for years to come, which is a thrilling prospect in an industry where much of what I do feels small and temporary. I got in on the ground floor of something special: a small, dedicated, useful company that cares deeply about making video hosting effortless and rewarding for our users.
I had (and still have) grand ideas for what thoughtful design can do for a product, and the smaller-scale product design work I’ve done or helped manage over the past few years gave me enough eager confidence to dive in head first. Readers who have experience redesigning complex existing products probably have a knowing smirk on their face right now. As I said, it’s been humbling. A year of focused product design, especially on the scale we are trying to achieve with our small team at SproutVideo, has taught me more than any projects in recent memory. I’d like to share a few of those lessons.
Product design is very different from marketing design
The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love.
Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures, and display fonts made no sense in this new context.
That’s because the product isn’t about us, and it isn’t about telling our story. Product design is about getting out of the way so people can do their job. The visual design is there to create a pleasant atmosphere for people to work in, and to help support the user experience. Learning to take “us” out of the equation took some work after years of creating gorgeous imagery and content for the sales-driven side of businesses.
I’ve learned it’s very valuable to design both sides of the experience, because marketing and product design flex different muscles. If you’re currently in an environment where the two are separate, consider switching teams in 2016. Designing for product when you’ve mostly done marketing, or vice versa, will deepen your knowledge as a designer overall. You’ll face new unexpected challenges, which is the only way to grow.
Product design can not start with what looks good on Dribbble
I have an embarrassing confession: when I began the redesign, I had a secret goal of making something that would look gorgeous in my portfolio. I have a collection of product shots that I admire on Dribbble; examples of beautiful dashboards and widgets and UI elements that look good enough to frame. I wanted people to feel the same way about the final outcome of our redesign. Mistakenly, this was a factor in my initial work. I opened Photoshop and crafted pixel-perfect static buttons and form elements and color palettes that — when applied to our actual product — looked like a toddler beauty pageant. It added up to a lot of unusable shininess, noise, and silliness.
I was disappointed; these elements seemed so lovely in isolation, but in context, they felt tacky and overblown. I realized: I’m not here to design the world’s most beautiful drop down menu. Good design has nothing to do with ego, but in my experience designers are, at least a little bit, secret divas. I’m no exception. I had to remind myself that I am not working in service of a bigger Dribbble following or to create the most Pinterest-ing work. My function is solely to serve the users — to make life a little better for the good people who keep my company in business.
This meant letting go of pixel-level beauty to create something bigger and harder: a system of elements that work together in harmony in many contexts. The visual style exists to guide the users. When done well, it becomes a language that users understand, so when they encounter a new feature or have a new goal, they already feel comfortable navigating it. This meant stripping back my gorgeous animated menu into something that didn’t detract from important neighboring content, and could easily fit in other parts of the app. In order to know what visual style would support the users, I had to take a wider view of the product as a whole.
Just accept that designing a great product – like many worthwhile pursuits – is initially laborious and messy
Once I realized I couldn’t start by creating the most Dribbble-worthy thing, I knew I’d have to begin with the unglamorous, frustrating, but weirdly wonderful work of mapping out how the product’s content could better be structured. Since we’re redesigning an existing product, I assumed this would be fairly straightforward: the functionality was already in place, and my job was just to structure it in a more easily navigable way.
I started by handing off a few wireframes of the key screens to the developer, and that’s when the questions began rolling in: “If we move this content into a modal, how will it affect this similar action here?” “What happens if they don’t add video tags, but they do add a description?” “What if the user has a title that is 500 characters long?” “What if they want their video to be private to some users, but accessible to others?”.
How annoying (but really, fantastic) that people use our product in so many ways. Turns out, product design isn’t about laying out elements in the most ideal scenario for the user that’s most convenient for you. As product designers, we have to foresee every outcome, and anticipate every potential user need.
Which brings me to another annoying epiphany: if you want to do it well, and account for every user, product design is so much more snarly and tangled than you’d expect going in. I began with a simple goal: to improve the experience on just one of our key product pages. However, every small change impacts every part of the product to some degree, and that impact has to be accounted for. Every decision is based on assumptions that have to be tested; I test my assumptions by observing users, talking to the team, wireframing, and prototyping. Many of my assumptions are wrong. There are days when it’s incredibly frustrating, because an elegant solution for users with one goal will complicate life for users with another goal. It’s vital to solve as many scenarios as possible, even though this is slow, sometimes mind-bending work.
As a side bonus, wireframing and prototyping every potential state in a product is tedious, but your developers will thank you for it. It’s not their job to solve what happens when there’s an empty state, error, or edge case. Showing you’ve accounted for these scenarios will win a developer’s respect; failing to do so will frustrate them.
When you’ve created and tested a system that supports user needs, it will be beautiful
Remember what I said in the beginning about wanting to create a Dribbble-worthy product? When I stopped focusing on the visual details of the design (color, spacing, light and shadow, font choices) and focused instead on structuring the content to maximize usability and delight, a beautiful design began to emerge naturally.
I began with grayscale, flat wireframes as a strategy to keep me from getting pulled into the visual style before the user experience was established. As I created a system of elements that worked in harmony, the visual style choices became obvious. Some buttons would need to be brighter and sit off the page to help the user spot important actions. Some elements would need line separators to create a hierarchy, where others could stand on their own as an emphasized piece of content. As the user experience took shape, the visual style emerged naturally to support it. The result is a product that feels beautiful to use, because I was thoughtful about the experience first.
A big takeaway from this process has been that my assumptions will often be proven wrong. My assumptions about how to design a great product, and how users will interact with that product, have been tested and revised repeatedly. At SproutVideo we’re about to undertake the biggest test of our work; we’re going to launch a small part of the product redesign to our users. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I will continue to be humbled by the ongoing effort of making the best product I can, which is a wonderful thing.
Next year, I hope you all get to do work that takes you out of our comfort zone. Be regularly confounded and embarrassed by your wrong assumptions, learn from them, and come back and tell us what you learned in 2016.",2015,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/,design
72,Designing with Contrast,"When an appetite for aesthetics over usability becomes the bellwether of user interface design, it’s time to reconsider who we’re designing for.
Over the last few years, we have questioned the signifiers that gave obvious meaning to the function of interface elements. Strong textures, deep shadows, gradients — imitations of physical objects — were discarded. And many, rightfully so. Our audiences are now more comfortable with an experience that feels native to the technology, so we should respond in kind.
Yet not all of the changes have benefitted users. Our efforts to simplify brought with them a trend of ultra-minimalism where aesthetics have taken priority over legibility, accessibility and discoverability. The trend shows no sign of losing popularity — and it is harming our experience of digital content.
A thin veneer
We are in a race to create the most subdued, understated interface. Visual contrast is out. In its place: the thinnest weights of a typeface and white text on bright color backgrounds. Headlines, text, borders, backgrounds, icons, form controls and inputs: all grey.
While we can look back over the last decade and see minimalist trends emerging on the web, I think we can place a fair share of the responsibility for the recent shift in priorities on Apple. The release of iOS 7 ushered in a radical change to its user interface. It paired mobile interaction design to the simplicity and eloquence of Apple’s marketing and product design. It was a catalyst. We took what we saw, copied and consumed the aesthetics like pick-and-mix.
New technology compounds this trend. Computer monitors and mobile devices are available with screens of unprecedented resolutions. Ultra-light type and subtle hues, difficult to view on older screens, are more legible on these devices. It would be disingenuous to say that designers have always worked on machines representative of their audience’s circumstances, but the gap has never been as large as it is now. We are running the risk of designing VIP lounges where the cost of entry is a Mac with a Retina display.
Minimalist expectations
Like progressive enhancement in an age of JavaScript, many good and sensible accessibility practices are being overlooked or ignored. We’re driving unilateral design decisions that threaten accessibility. We’ve approached every problem with the same solution, grasping on to the integrity of beauty, focusing on expression over users’ needs and content.
Someone once suggested to me that a client’s website should include two states. The first state would be the ideal experience, with low color contrast, light font weights and no differentiation between links and text. It would be the default. The second state would be presented in whatever way was necessary to meet accessibility standards. Users would have to opt out of the default state via a toggle if it wasn’t meeting their needs. A sort of first-class, upper deck cabin equivalent of graceful degradation. That this would divide the user base was irrelevant, as the aesthetics of the brand were absolute.
It may seem like an unusual anecdote, but it isn’t uncommon to see this thinking in our industry. Again and again, we place the burden of responsibility to participate in a usable experience on others. We view accessibility and good design as mutually exclusive. Taking for granted what users will tolerate is usually the forte of monopolistic services, but increasingly we apply the same arrogance to our new products and services.
Imitation without representation
All of us are influenced in one way or another by one another’s work. We are consciously and unconsciously affected by the visual and audible activity around us. This is important and unavoidable. We do not produce work in a vacuum. We respond to technology and culture. We channel language and geography. We absorb the sights and sounds of film, television, news. To mimic and copy is part and parcel of creating something an audience of many can comprehend and respond to. Our clients often look first to their competitors’ products to understand their success.
However, problems arise when we focus on style without context; form without function; mimicry as method. Copied and reused without any of the ethos of the original, stripped of deliberate and informed decision-making, the so-called look and feel becomes nothing more than paint on an empty facade.
The typographic and color choices so in vogue today with our popular digital products and services have little in common with the brands they are meant to represent.
For want of good design, the message was lost
The question to ask is: does the interface truly reflect the product? Is it an accurate characterization of the brand and organizational values? Does the delivery of the content match the tone of voice?
The answer is: probably not. Because every organization, every app or service, is unique. Each with its own personality, its own values and wonderful quirks. Design is communication. We should do everything in our role as professionals to use design to give voice to the message. Our job is to clearly communicate the benefits of a service and unreservedly allow access to information and content. To do otherwise, by obscuring with fashionable styles and elusive information architecture, does a great disservice to the people who chose to engage with and trust our products.
We can achieve hierarchy and visual rhythm without resorting to extreme reduction. We can craft a beautiful experience with fine detail and curiosity while meeting fundamental standards of accessibility (and strive to meet many more).
Standards of excellence
It isn’t always comfortable to step back and objectively question our design choices. We get lost in the flow of our work, using patterns and preferences we’ve tried and tested before. That our decisions often seem like second nature is a gift of experience, but sometimes it prevents us from finding our blind spots.
I was first caught out by my own biases a few years ago, when designing an interface for the Bank of England. After deciding on the colors for the typography and interactive elements, I learned that the site had to meet AAA accessibility standards. My choices quickly fell apart. It was eye-opening. I had to start again with restrictions and use size, weight and placement instead to construct the visual hierarchy.
Even now, I make mistakes. On a recent project, I used large photographs on an organization’s website to promote their products. Knowing that our team had control over the art direction, I felt confident that we could compose the photographs to work with text overlays. Despite our best effort, the cropped images weren’t always consistent, undermining the text’s legibility. If I had the chance to do it again, I would separate the text and image.
So, what practical things can we consider to give our users the experience they deserve?
Put guidelines in place
Think about your brand values. Write down keywords and use them as a framework when choosing a typeface. Explore colors that convey the organization’s personality and emotional appeal.
Define a color palette that is web-ready and meets minimum accessibility standards. Note which colors are suitable for use with text. Only very dark hues of grey are consistently legible so keep them for non-essential text (for example, as placeholders in form inputs).
Find which background colors you can safely use with white text, and consider integrating contrast checks into your workflow.
Use roman and medium weights for body copy. Reserve lighter weights of a typeface for very large text. Thin fonts are usually the first to break down because of aliasing differences across platforms and screens.
Check that the size, leading and length of your type is always legible and readable. Define lower and upper limits. Small text is best left for captions and words in uppercase.
Avoid overlaying text on images unless it’s guaranteed to be legible. If it’s necessary to optimize space in the layout, give the text a container. Scrims aren’t always reliable: the text will inevitably overlap a part of the photograph without a contrasting ground.
Test your work
Review legibility and contrast on different devices. It’s just as important as testing the layout of a responsive website. If you have a local device lab, pay it a visit.
Find a computer monitor near a window when the sun is shining. Step outside the studio and try to read your content on a mobile device with different brightness levels.
Ask your friends and family what they use at home and at work. It’s one way of making sure your feedback isn’t always coming from a closed loop.
Push your limits
You define what the user sees. If you’ve inherited brand guidelines, question them. If you don’t agree with the choices, make the case for why they should change.
Experiment with size, weight and color to find contrast. Objects with low contrast appear similar to one another and undermine the visual hierarchy. Weak relationships between figure and ground diminish visual interest. A balanced level of contrast removes ambiguity and creates focal points. It captures and holds our attention.
If you’re lost for inspiration, look to graphic design in print. We have a wealth of history, full of examples that excel in using contrast to establish visual hierarchy.
Embrace limitations. Use boundaries as an opportunity to explore possibilities.
More than just a facade
Designing with standards encourages legibility and helps to define a strong visual hierarchy. Design without exclusion (through neither negligence or intent) gets around discussions of demographics, speaks to a larger audience and makes good business sense. Following the latest trends not only weakens usability but also hinders a cohesive and distinctive brand.
Users will make means when they need to, by increasing browser font sizes or enabling system features for accessibility. But we can do our part to take as much of that burden off of the user and ask less of those who need it most.
In architecture, it isn’t buildings that mimic what is fashionable that stand the test of time. Nor do we admire buildings that tack on separate, poorly constructed extensions to meet a bare minimum of safety regulations. We admire architecture that offers well-considered, remarkable, usable spaces with universal access.
Perhaps we can take inspiration from these spaces. Let’s give our buildings a bold voice and make sure the doors are open to everyone.",2015,Mark Mitchell,markmitchell,2015-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/designing-with-contrast/,design
63,Be Fluid with Your Design Skills: Build Your Own Sites,"Just five years ago in 2010, when we were all busy trying to surprise and delight, learning CSS3 and trying to get whole websites onto one page, we had a poster on our studio wall. It was entitled ‘Designers Vs Developers’, an infographic that showed us the differences between the men(!) who created websites.
Designers wore skinny jeans and used Macs and developers wore cargo pants and brought their own keyboards to work. We began to learn that designers and developers were not only doing completely different jobs but were completely different people in every way. This opinion was backed up by hundreds of memes, millions of tweets and pages of articles which used words like void and battle and versus.
Thankfully, things move quickly in this industry; the wide world of web design has moved on in the last five years. There are new devices, technologies, tools – and even a few women. Designers have been helped along by great apps, software, open source projects, conferences, and a community of people who, to my unending pride, love to share their knowledge and their work.
So the world has moved on, and if Miley Cyrus, Ruby Rose and Eliot Sumner are identifying as gender fluid (an identity which refers to a gender which varies over time or is a combination of identities), then I would like to come out as discipline fluid!
OK, I will probably never identify as a developer, but I will identify as fluid! How can we be anything else in an industry that moves so quickly? That’s how we should think of our skills, our interests and even our job titles. After all, Steve Jobs told us that “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Sorry skinny-jean-wearing designers – this means we’re all designing something together. And it’s not just about knowing the right words to use: you have to know how it feels. How it feels when you make something work, when you fix that bug, when you make it work on IE.
Like anything in life, things run smoothly when you make the effort to share experiences, empathise and deeply understand the needs of others. How can designers do that if they’ve never built their own site? I’m not talking the big stuff, I’m talking about your portfolio site, your mate’s business website, a website for that great idea you’ve had. I’m talking about doing it yourself to get an unique insight into how it feels.
We all know that designers and developers alike love an
, so here it is.
Ten reasons designers should be fluid with their skills and build their own sites
1. It’s never been easier
Now here’s where the definition of ‘build’ is going to get a bit loose and people are going to get angry, but when I say it’s never been easier I mean because of the existence of apps and software like WordPress, Squarespace, Tumblr, et al. It’s easy to make something and get it out there into the world, and these are all gateway drugs to hard coding!
2. You’ll understand how it feels
How it feels to be so proud that something actually works that you momentarily don’t notice if the kerning is off or the padding is inconsistent. How it feels to see your site appear when you’ve redirected a URL. How it feels when you just can’t work out where that one extra space is in a line of PHP that has killed your whole site.
3. It makes you a designer
Not a better designer, it makes you a designer when you are designing how things look and how they work.
4. You learn about movement
Photoshop and Sketch just don’t cut it yet. Until you see your site in a browser or your app on a phone, it’s hard to imagine how it moves. Building your own sites shows you that it’s not just about how the content looks on the screen, but how it moves, interacts and feels.
5. You make techie friends
All the tutorials and forums in the world can’t beat your network of techie friends. Since I started working in web design I have worked with, sat next to, and co-created with some of the greatest developers. Developers who’ve shared their knowledge, encouraged me to build things, patiently explained HTML, CSS, servers, divs, web fonts, iOS development. There has been no void, no versus, very few battles; just people who share an interest and love of making things.
6. You will own domain names
When something is paid for, online and searchable then it’s real and you’ve got to put the work in. Buying domains has taught me how to stop procrastinating, but also about DNS, FTP, email, and how servers work.
7. People will ask you to do things
Learning about code and development opens a whole new world of design. When you put your own personal websites and projects out there people ask you to do more things. OK, so sometimes those things are “Make me a website for free”, but more often it’s cool things like “Come and speak at my conference”, “Write an article for my magazine” and “Collaborate with me.”
8. The young people are coming!
They love typography, they love print, they love layout, but they’ve known how to put a website together since they started their first blog aged five and they show me clever apps they’ve knocked together over the weekend! They’re new, they’re fluid, and they’re better than us!
9. Your portfolio is your portfolio
OK, it’s an obvious one, but as designers our work is our CV, our legacy! We need to show our skill, our attention to detail and our creativity in the way we showcase our work. Building your portfolio is the best way to start building your own websites. (And please be that designer who’s bothered to work out how to change the Squarespace favicon!)
10. It keeps you fluid!
Building your own websites is tough. You’ll never be happy with it, you’ll constantly be updating it to keep up with technology and fashion, and by the time you’ve finished it you’ll want to start all over again. Perfect for forcing you to stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the industry.
",2015,Ros Horner,roshorner,2015-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/be-fluid-with-your-design-skills-build-your-own-sites/,code
71,Upping Your Web Security Game,"When I started working in web security fifteen years ago, web development looked very different. The few non-static web applications were built using a waterfall process and shipped quarterly at best, making it possible to add security audits before every release; applications were deployed exclusively on in-house servers, allowing Info Sec to inspect their configuration and setup; and the few third-party components used came from a small set of well-known and trusted providers. And yet, even with these favourable conditions, security teams were quickly overwhelmed and called for developers to build security in.
If the web security game was hard to win before, it’s doomed to fail now. In today’s web development, every other page is an application, accepting inputs and private data from users; software is built continuously, designed to eliminate manual gates, including security gates; infrastructure is code, with servers spawned with little effort and even less security scrutiny; and most of the code in a typical application is third-party code, pulled in through open source repositories with rarely a glance at who provided them.
Security teams, when they exist at all, cannot solve this problem. They are vastly outnumbered by developers, and cannot keep up with the application’s pace of change. For us to have a shot at making the web secure, we must bring security into the core. We need to give it no less attention than that we give browser compatibility, mobile design or web page load times. More broadly, we should see security as an aspect of quality, expecting both ourselves and our peers to address it, and taking pride when we do it well.
Where To Start?
Embracing security isn’t something you do overnight.
A good place to start is by reviewing things you’re already doing – and trying to make them more secure. Here are three concrete steps you can take to get going.
HTTPS
Threats begin when your system interacts with the outside world, which often means HTTP. As is, HTTP is painfully insecure, allowing attackers to easily steal and manipulate data going to or from the server. HTTPS adds a layer of crypto that ensures the parties know who they’re talking to, and that the information exchanged can be neither modified nor sniffed.
HTTPS is relevant to any site. If your non-HTTPS site holds opinions, reading it may get your users in trouble with employers or governments. If your users believe what you say, attackers can modify your non-HTTPS to take advantage of and abuse that trust. If you want to use new browser technologies like HTTP2 and service workers, your site will need to be HTTPS. And if you want to be discovered on the web, using HTTPS can help your Google ranking. For more details on why I think you should make the switch to HTTPS, check out this post, these slides and this video.
Using HTTPS is becoming easier and cheaper. Here are a few free tools that can help:
Get free and easy HTTPS delivery from Cloudflare (be sure to use “Full SSL”!)
Get a free and automation-friendly certificate from Let’s Encrypt (now in open beta).
Test how well your HTTPS is set up using SSLTest.
Other vendors and platforms are rapidly simplifying and reducing the cost of their HTTPS offering, as demand and importance grows.
Two-Factor Authentication
The most sensitive data is usually stored behind a login, and the authentication process is the primary gate in front of this data. Making this process secure has many aspects, including using HTTPS when accepting credentials, having a strong password policy, never storing the password, and more.
All of these are important, but the best single step to boost your authentication security is to introduce two-factor authentication (2FA). Adding 2FA usually means prompting users for an additional one-time code when logging in, which they get via SMS or a mobile app (e.g. Google Authenticator). This code is short-lived and is extremely hard for a remote attacker to guess, thus vastly reducing the risk a leaked or easily guessed password presents.
The typical algorithm for 2FA is based on an IETF standard called the time-based one-time password (TOTP) algorithm, and it isn’t that hard to implement. Joel Franusic wrote a great post on implementing 2FA; modules like speakeasy make it even easier; and you can swap SMS with Google Authenticator or your own app if you prefer. If you don’t want to build 2FA support yourself, you can purchase two/multi-factor authentication services from vendors such as DuoSecurity, Auth0, Clef, Hypr and others.
If implementing 2FA still feels like too much work, you can also choose to offload your entire authentication process to an OAuth-based federated login. Many companies offer this today, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, GitHub and others. These bigger players tend to do authentication well and support 2FA, but you should consider what data you’re sharing with them in the process.
Tracking Known Vulnerabilities
Most of the code in a modern application was actually written by third parties, and pulled into your app as frameworks, modules and libraries. While using these components makes us much more productive, along with their functionality we also adopt their security flaws. To make things worse, some of these flaws are well-known vulnerabilities, making it easy for hackers to take advantage of them in an attack.
This is a real problem and happens on pretty much every platform. Do you develop in Java? In 2014, over 6% of Java modules downloaded from Maven had a known severe security issue, the typical Java applications containing 24 flaws. Are you coding in Node.js? Roughly 14% of npm packages carry a known vulnerability, and over 60% of dev shops find vulnerabilities in their code. 30% of Docker Hub containers include a high priority known security hole, and 60% of the top 100,000 websites use client-side libraries with known security gaps.
To find known security issues, take stock of your dependencies and match them against language-specific lists such as Snyk’s vulnerability DB for Node.js, rubysec for Ruby, victims-db for Python and OWASP’s Dependency Check for Java. Once found, you can fix most issues by upgrading the component in question, though that may be tricky for indirect dependencies.
This process is still way too painful, which means most teams don’t do it. The Snyk team and I are hoping to change that by making it as easy as possible to find, fix and monitor known vulnerabilities in your dependencies. Snyk’s wizard will help you find and fix these issues through guided upgrades and patches, and adding Snyk’s test to your continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) will help you stay secure as your code evolves.
Note that newly disclosed vulnerabilities usually impact old code – the one you’re running in production. This means you have to stay alert when new vulnerabilities are disclosed, so you can fix them before attackers can exploit them. You can do so by subscribing to vulnerability lists like US-CERT, OSVDB and NVD. Snyk’s monitor will proactively let you know about new disclosures relevant to your code, but only for Node.js for now – you can register to get updated when we expand.
Securing Yourself
In addition to making your application secure, you should make the contributors to that application secure – including you. Earlier this year we’ve seen attackers target mobile app developers with a malicious Xcode. The real target, however, wasn’t these developers, but rather the users of the apps they create. That you create. Securing your own work environment is a key part of keeping your apps secure, and your users from being compromised.
There’s no single step that will make you fully secure, but here are a few steps that can make a big impact:
Use 2FA on all the services related to the application, notably source control (e.g. GitHub), cloud platform (e.g. AWS), CI/CD, CDN, DNS provider and domain registrar. If an attacker compromises any one of those, they could modify or replace your entire application. I’d recommend using 2FA on all your personal services too.
Use a password manager (e.g. 1Password, LastPass) to ensure you have a separate and complex password for each service. Some of these services will get hacked, and passwords will leak. When that happens, don’t let the attackers access your other systems too.
Secure your workstation. Be careful what you download, lock your screen when you walk away, change default passwords on services you install, run antivirus software, etc. Malware on your machine can translate to malware in your applications.
Be very wary of phishing. Smart attackers use ‘spear phishing’ techniques to gain access to specific systems, and can trick even security savvy users. There are even phishing scams targeting users with 2FA. Be alert to phishy emails.
Don’t install things through curl
| sudo bash, especially if the URL is on GitHub, meaning someone else controls it. Don’t do it on your machines, and definitely don’t do it in your CI/CD systems. Seriously.
Staying secure should be important to you personally, but it’s doubly important when you have privileged access to an application. Such access makes you a way to reach many more users, and therefore a more compelling target for bad actors.
A Culture of Security
Using HTTPS, enabling two-factor authentication and fixing known vulnerabilities are significant steps in building security at your core. As you implement them, remember that these are just a few steps in a longer journey.
The end goal is to embrace security as an aspect of quality, and accept we all share the responsibility of keeping ourselves – and our users – safe.",2015,Guy Podjarny,guypodjarny,2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/upping-your-web-security-game/,code
54,Putting My Patterns through Their Paces,"Over the last few years, the conversation around responsive design has shifted subtly, focusing not on designing pages, but on patterns: understanding the small, reusable elements that comprise a larger design system. And given that many of those patterns are themselves responsive, learning to manage these small layout systems has become a big part of my work.
The thing is, the more pattern-driven work I do, the more I realize my design process has changed in a number of subtle, important ways. I suppose you might even say that pattern-driven design has, in a few ways, redesigned me.
Meet the Teaser
Here’s a recent example. A few months ago, some friends and I redesigned The Toast. (It was a really, really fun project, and we learned a lot.) Each page of the site is, as you might guess, stitched together from a host of tiny, reusable patterns. Some of them, like the search form and footer, are fairly unique, and used once per page; others are used more liberally, and built for reuse. The most prevalent example of these more generic patterns is the teaser, which is classed as, uh, .teaser. (Look, I never said I was especially clever.)
In its simplest form, a teaser contains a headline, which links to an article:
Fairly straightforward, sure. But it’s just the foundation: from there, teasers can have a byline, a description, a thumbnail, and a comment count. In other words, we have a basic building block (.teaser) that contains a few discrete content types – some required, some not. In fact, very few of those pieces need to be present; to qualify as a teaser, all we really need is a link and a headline. But by adding more elements, we can build slight variations of our teaser, and make it much, much more versatile.
Nearly every element visible on this page is built out of our generic “teaser” pattern.
But the teaser variation I’d like to call out is the one that appears on The Toast’s homepage, on search results or on section fronts. In the main content area, each teaser in the list features larger images, as well as an interesting visual treatment: the byline and comment count were the most prominent elements within each teaser, appearing above the headline.
The approved visual design of our teaser, as it appears on lists on the homepage and the section fronts.
And this is, as it happens, the teaser variation that gave me pause. Back in the old days – you know, like six months ago – I probably would’ve marked this module up to match the design. In other words, I would’ve looked at the module’s visual hierarchy (metadata up top, headline and content below) and written the following HTML:
But then I caught myself, and realized this wasn’t the best approach.
Moving Beyond Layout
Since I’ve started working responsively, there’s a question I work into every step of my design process. Whether I’m working in Sketch, CSSing a thing, or researching a project, I try to constantly ask myself:
What if someone doesn’t browse the web like I do?
…Okay, that doesn’t seem especially fancy. (And maybe you came here for fancy.) But as straightforward as that question might seem, it’s been invaluable to so many aspects of my practice. If I’m working on a widescreen layout, that question helps me remember the constraints of the small screen; if I’m working on an interface that has some enhancements for touch, it helps me consider other input modes as I work. It’s also helpful as a reminder that many might not see the screen the same way I do, and that accessibility (in all its forms) should be a throughline for our work on the web.
And that last point, thankfully, was what caught me here. While having the byline and comment count at the top was a lovely visual treatment, it made for a terrible content hierarchy. For example, it’d be a little weird if the page was being read aloud in a speaking browser: the name of the author and the number of comments would be read aloud before the title of the article with which they’re associated.
That’s why I find it’s helpful to begin designing a pattern’s hierarchy before its layout: to move past the visual presentation in front of me, and focus on the underlying content I’m trying to support. In other words, if someone’s encountering my design without the CSS I’ve written, what should their experience be?
So I took a step back, and came up with a different approach:
Much, much better. This felt like a better match for the content I was designing: the headline – easily most important element – was at the top, followed by the author’s name and an excerpt. And while the comment count is visually the most prominent element in the teaser, I decided it was hierarchically the least critical: that’s why it’s at the very end of the excerpt, the last element within our teaser. And with some light styling, we’ve got a respectable-looking hierarchy in place:
Yeah, you’re right – it’s not our final design. But from this basic-looking foundation, we can layer on a bit more complexity. First, we’ll bolster the markup with an extra element around our title and byline:
With that in place, we can use flexbox to tweak our layout, like so:
.teaser-hed {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column-reverse;
}
flex-direction: column-reverse acts a bit like a change in gravity within our teaser-hed element, vertically swapping its two children.
Getting closer! But as great as flexbox is, it doesn’t do anything for elements outside our container, like our little comment count, which is, as you’ve probably noticed, still stranded at the very bottom of our teaser.
Flexbox is, as you might already know, wonderful! And while it enjoys incredibly broad support, there are enough implementations of old versions of Flexbox (in addition to plenty of bugs) that I tend to use a feature test to check if the browser’s using a sufficiently modern version of flexbox. Here’s the one we used:
var doc = document.body || document.documentElement;
var style = doc.style;
if ( style.webkitFlexWrap == '' ||
style.msFlexWrap == '' ||
style.flexWrap == '' ) {
doc.className += "" supports-flex"";
}
Eagle-eyed readers will note we could have used @supports feature queries to ask browsers if they support certain CSS properties, removing the JavaScript dependency. But since we wanted to serve the layout to IE we opted to write a little question in JavaScript, asking the browser if it supports flex-wrap, a property used elsewhere in the design. If the browser passes the test, then a class of supports-flex gets applied to our html element. And with that class in place, we can safely quarantine our flexbox-enabled layout from less-capable browsers, and finish our teaser’s design:
.supports-flex .teaser-hed {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column-reverse;
}
.supports-flex .teaser .comment-count {
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 1.1em;
}
If the supports-flex class is present, we can apply our flexbox layout to the title area, sure – but we can also safely use absolute positioning to pull our comment count out of its default position, and anchor it to the top right of our teaser. In other words, the browsers that don’t meet our threshold for our advanced styles are left with an attractive design that matches our HTML’s content hierarchy; but the ones that pass our test receive the finished, final design.
And with that, our teaser’s complete.
Diving Into Device-Agnostic Design
This is, admittedly, a pretty modest application of flexbox. (For some truly next-level work, I’d recommend Heydon Pickering’s “Flexbox Grid Finesse”, or anything Zoe Mickley Gillenwater publishes.) And for such a simple module, you might feel like this is, well, quite a bit of work. And you’d be right! In fact, it’s not one layout, but two: a lightly styled content hierarchy served to everyone, with the finished design served conditionally to the browsers that can successfully implement it. But I’ve found that thinking about my design as existing in broad experience tiers – in layers – is one of the best ways of designing for the modern web. And what’s more, it works not just for simple modules like our teaser, but for more complex or interactive patterns as well.
Open video
Even a simple search form can be conditionally enhanced, given a little layered thinking.
This more layered approach to interface design isn’t a new one, mind you: it’s been championed by everyone from Filament Group to the BBC. And with all the challenges we keep uncovering, a more device-agnostic approach is one of the best ways I’ve found to practice responsive design. As Trent Walton once wrote,
Like cars designed to perform in extreme heat or on icy roads, websites should be built to face the reality of the web’s inherent variability.
We have a weird job, working on the web. We’re designing for the latest mobile devices, sure, but we’re increasingly aware that our definition of “smartphone” is much too narrow. Browsers have started appearing on our wrists and in our cars’ dashboards, but much of the world’s mobile data flows over sub-3G networks. After all, the web’s evolution has never been charted along a straight line: it’s simultaneously getting slower and faster, with devices new and old coming online every day. With all the challenges in front of us, including many we don’t yet know about, a more device-agnostic, more layered design process can better prepare our patterns – and ourselves – for the future.
(It won’t help you get enough to eat at holiday parties, though.)",2015,Ethan Marcotte,ethanmarcotte,2015-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/putting-my-patterns-through-their-paces/,code
61,Animation in Responsive Design,"Animation and responsive design can sometimes feel like they’re at odds with each other. Animation often needs space to do its thing, but RWD tells us that the amount of space we’ll have available is going to change a lot. Balancing that can lead to some tricky animation situations.
Embracing the squishiness of responsive design doesn’t have to mean giving up on your creative animation ideas. There are three general techniques that can help you balance your web animation creativity with your responsive design needs. One or all of these approaches might help you sneak in something just a little extra into your next project.
Focused art direction
Smaller viewports mean a smaller stage for your motion to play out on, and this tends to amplify any motion in your animation. Suddenly 100 pixels is really far and multiple moving parts can start looking like they’re battling for space. An effect that looked great on big viewports can become muddled and confusing when it’s reframed in a smaller space.
Making animated movements smaller will do the trick for simple motion like a basic move across the screen. But for more complex animation on smaller viewports, you’ll need to simplify and reduce the number of moving parts. The key to this is determining what the vital parts of the animation are, to zone in on the parts that are most important to its message. Then remove the less necessary bits to distill the motion’s message down to the essentials.
For example, Rally Interactive’s navigation folds down into place with two triangle shapes unfolding each corner on larger viewports. If this exact motion was just scaled down for narrower spaces the two corners would overlap as they unfolded. It would look unnatural and wouldn’t make much sense.
Open video
The main purpose of this animation is to show an unfolding action. To simplify the animation, Rally unfolds only one side for narrower viewports, with a slightly different animation. The action is still easily interpreted as unfolding and it’s done in a way that is a better fit for the available space. The message the motion was meant to convey has been preserved while the amount of motion was simplified.
Open video
Si Digital does something similar. The main concept of the design is to portray the studio as a creative lab. On large viewports, this is accomplished primarily through an animated illustration that runs the full length of the site and triggers its animations based on your scroll position. The illustration is there to support the laboratory concept visually, but it doesn’t contain critical content.
Open video
At first, it looks like Si Digital just turned off the animation of the illustration for smaller viewports. But they’ve actually been a little cleverer than that. They’ve also reduced the complexity of the illustration itself. Both the amount of motion (reduced down to no motion) and the illustration were simplified to create a result that is much easier to glean the concept from.
Open video
The most interesting thing about these two examples is that they’re solved more with thoughtful art direction than complex code. Keeping the main concept of the animations at the forefront allowed each to adapt creative design solutions to viewports of varying size without losing the integrity of their design.
Responsive choreography
Static content gets moved around all the time in responsive design. A three-column layout might line up from left to right on wide viewports, then stack top to bottom on narrower viewports. The same approach can be used to arrange animated content for narrower views, but the animation’s choreography also needs to be adjusted for the new layout. Even with static content, just scaling it down or zooming out to fit it into the available space is rarely an ideal solution. Rearranging your animations’ choreography to change which animation starts when, or even which animations play at all, keeps your animated content readable on smaller viewports.
In a recent project I had three small animations that played one after the other, left to right, on wider viewports but needed to be stacked on narrower viewports to be large enough to see. On wide viewports, all three animations could play one right after the other in sequence because all three were in the viewable area at the same time. But once these were stacked for the narrower viewport layouts, that sequence had to change.
Open video
What was essentially one animation on wider viewports became three separate animations when stacked on narrower viewports. The layout change meant the choreography had to change as well. Each animation starts independently when it comes into view in the stacked layout instead of playing automatically in sequence. (I’ve put the animated parts in this demo if you want to peek under the hood.)
Open video
I choose to use the GreenSock library, with the choreography defined in two different timelines for this particular project. But the same goals could be accomplished with other JavaScript options or even CSS keyframe animations and media queries.
Even more complex responsive choreography can be pulled off with SVG. Media queries can be used to change CSS animations applied to SVG elements at specific breakpoints for starters. For even more responsive power, SVG’s viewBox property, and the positioning of the objects within it, can be adjusted at JavaScript-defined breakpoints. This lets you set rules to crop the viewable area and arrange your animating elements to fit any space.
Sarah Drasner has some great examples of how to use this technique with style in this responsive infographic and this responsive interactive illustration. On the other hand, if smart scalability is what you’re after, it’s also possible to make all of an SVG’s shapes and motion scale with the SVG canvas itself. Sarah covers both these clever responsive SVG techniques in detail. Creative and complex animation can easily become responsive thanks to the power of SVG!
Open video
Bake performance into your design decisions
It’s hard to get very far into a responsive design discussion before performance comes up. Performance goes hand in hand with responsive design and your animation decisions can have a big impact on the overall performance of your site.
The translate3D “hack”, backface-visibility:hidden, and the will-change property are the heavy hitters of animation performance. But decisions made earlier in your animation design process can have a big impact on rendering performance and your performance budget too.
Pick a technology that matches your needs
One of the biggest advantages of the current web animation landscape is the range of tools we have available to us. We can use CSS animations and transitions to add just a dash of interface animation to our work, go all out with webGL to create a 3D experience, or anywhere in between. All within our browsers! Having this huge range of options is amazing and wonderful but it also means you need to be cognizant of what you’re using to get the job done.
Loading in the full weight of a robust JavaScript animation library is going to be overkill if you’re only animating a few small elements here and there. That extra overhead will have an impact on performance. Performance budgets will not be pleased.
Always match the complexity of the technology you choose to the complexity of your animation needs to avoid unnecessary performance strain. For small amounts of animation, stick to CSS solutions since it’s the most lightweight option. As your animations grow in complexity, or start to require more robust logic, move to a JavaScript solution that can accomplish what you need.
Animate the most performant properties
Whether you’re animating in CSS or JavaScript, you’re affecting specific properties of the animated element. Browsers can animate some properties more efficiently than others based on how many steps need to happen behind the scenes to visually update those properties.
Browsers are particularly efficient at animating opacity, scale, rotation, and position (when the latter three are done with transforms). This article from Paul Irish and Paul Lewis gives the full scoop on why. Conveniently, those are also the most common properties used in motion design. There aren’t many animated effects that can’t be pulled off with this list. Stick to these properties to set your animations up for the best performance results from the start. If you find yourself needing to animate a property outside of this list, check CSS Triggers… to find out how much of an additional impact it might have.
Offset animation start times
Offsets (the concept of having a series of similar movements execute one slightly after the other, creating a wave-like pattern) are a long-held motion graphics trick for creating more interesting and organic looking motion. Employing this trick of the trade can also be smart for performance. Animating a large number of objects all at the same time can put a strain on the browser’s rendering abilities even in the best cases. Adding short delays to offset these animations in time, so they don’t all start at once, can improve rendering performance.
Go explore the responsive animation possibilities for yourself!
With smart art direction, responsive choreography, and an eye on performance you can create just about any creative web animation you can think up while still being responsive. Keep these in mind for your next project and you’ll pull off your animations with style at any viewport size!",2015,Val Head,valhead,2015-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/animation-in-responsive-design/,design
56,Helping VIPs Care About Performance,"Making a site feel super fast is the easy part of performance work. Getting people around you to care about site speed is a much bigger challenge. How do we keep the site fast beyond the initial performance work? Keeping very important people like your upper management or clients invested in performance work is critical to keeping a site fast and empowering other designers and developers to contribute.
The work to get others to care is so meaty that I dedicated a whole chapter to the topic in my book Designing for Performance. When I speak at conferences, the majority of questions during Q&A are on this topic. When I speak to developers and designers who care about performance, getting other people at one’s organization or agency to care becomes the most pressing question.
My primary response to folks who raise this issue is the question: “What metric(s) do your VIPs care about?” This is often met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. But it’s also our biggest clue to what we need to do to help empower others to care about performance and work on it. Every organization and executive is different. This means that three major things vary: the primary metrics VIPs care about; the language they use about measuring success; and how change is enacted. By clueing in to these nuances within your organization, you can get a huge leg up on crafting a successful pitch about performance work.
Let’s start with the metric that we should measure. Sure, (most) everybody cares about money - but is that really the metric that your VIPs are looking at each day to measure the success or efficacy of your site? More likely, dollars are the end game, but the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) people focus on might be:
rate of new accounts created/signups
cost of acquiring or retaining a customer
visitor return rate
visitor bounce rate
favoriting or another interaction rate
These are just a few examples, but they illustrate how wide-ranging the options are that people care about. I find that developers and designers haven’t necessarily investigated this when trying to get others to care about performance. We often reach for the obvious – money! – but if we don’t use the same kind of language our VIPs are using, we might not get too far. You need to know this before you can make the case for performance work.
To find out these metrics or KPIs, start reading through the emails your VIPs are sending within your company. What does it say on company wikis? Are there major dashboards internally that people are looking at where you could find some good metrics? Listen intently in team meetings or thoroughly read annual reports to see what these metrics could be.
The second key here is to pick up on language you can effectively copy and paste as you make the case for performance work. You need to be able to reflect back the metrics that people already find important in a way they’ll be able to hear. Once you know your key metrics, it’s time to figure out how to communicate with your VIPs about performance using language that will resonate with them.
Let’s start with visit traffic as an example metric that a very important person cares about. Start to dig up research that other people and companies have done that correlates performance and your KPI. For example, cite studies:
“When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70–80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.” (source).
Read through websites like WPOStats, which collects the spectrum of studies on the impact of performance optimization on user experience and business metrics. Tweet and see if others have done similar research that correlates performance and your site’s main KPI.
Once you have collected some research that touches on the same kind of language your VIPs use about the success of your site, it’s time to present it. You can start with something simple, like a qualitative description of the work you’re actively doing to improve the site that translates to improved metrics that your VIPs care about. It can be helpful to append a performance budget to any proposal so you can compare the budget to your site’s reality and how it might positively impact those KPIs folks care about.
Words and graphs are often only half the battle when it comes to getting others to care about performance. Often, videos appeal to folks’ emotions in a way that is missed when glancing through charts and graphs. On A List Apart I recently detailed how to create videos of how fast your site loads. Let’s say that your VIPs care about how your site loads on mobile devices; it’s time to show them how your site loads on mobile networks.
Open video
You can use these videos to make a number of different statements to your VIPs, depending on what they care about:
Look at how slow our site loads versus our competitor!
Look at how slow our site loads for users in another country!
Look at how slow our site loads on mobile networks!
Again, you really need to know which metrics your VIPs care about and tune into the language they’re using. If they don’t care about the overall user experience of your site on mobile devices, then showing them how slow your site loads on 3G isn’t going to work. This will be your sales pitch; you need to practice and iterate on the language and highlights that will land best with your audience.
To make your sales pitch as solid as possible, gut-check your ideas on how to present it with other co-workers to get their feedback. Read up on how to construct effective arguments and deliver them; do some research and see what others have done at your company when pitching to VIPs. Are slides effective? Memos or emails? Hallway conversations? Sometimes the best way to change people’s minds is by mentioning it in informal chats over coffee. Emulate the other leaders in your organization who are successful at this work.
Every organization and very important person is different. Learn what metrics folks truly care about, study the language that they use, and apply what you’ve learned in a way that’ll land with those individuals. It may take time to craft your pitch for performance work over time, but it’s important work to do. If you’re able to figure out how to mirror back the language and metrics VIPs care about, and connect the dots to performance for them, you will have a huge leg up on keeping your site fast in the long run.",2015,Lara Hogan,larahogan,2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/helping-vips-care-about-performance/,business
52,Git Rebasing: An Elfin Workshop Workflow,"This year Santa’s helpers have been tasked with making a garland. It’s a pretty simple task: string beads onto yarn in a specific order. When the garland reaches a specific length, add it to the main workshop garland. Each elf has a specific sequence they’re supposed to chain, which is given to them via a work order. (This is starting to sound like one of those horrible calculus problems. I promise it isn’t. It’s worse; it’s about Git.)
For the most part, the system works really well. The elves are able to quickly build up a shared chain because each elf specialises on their own bit of garland, and then links the garland together. Because of this they’re able to work independently, but towards the common goal of making a beautiful garland.
At first the elves are really careful with each bead they put onto the garland. They check with one another before merging their work, and review each new link carefully. As time crunches on, the elves pour a little more cheer into the eggnog cooler, and the quality of work starts to degrade. Tensions rise as mistakes are made and unkind words are said. The elves quickly realise they’re going to need a system to change the beads out when mistakes are made in the chain.
The first common mistake is not looking to see what the latest chain is that’s been added to the main garland. The garland is huge, and it sits on a roll in one of the corners of the workshop. It’s a big workshop, so it is incredibly impractical to walk all the way to the roll to check what the last link is on the chain. The elves, being magical, have set up a monitoring system that allows them to keep a local copy of the main garland at their workstation. It’s an imperfect system though, so the elves have to request a manual refresh to see the latest copy. They can request a new copy by running the command
git pull --rebase=preserve
(They found that if they ran git pull on its own, they ended up with weird loops of extra beads off the main garland, so they’ve opted to use this method.) This keeps the shared garland up to date, which makes things a lot easier. A visualisation of the rebase process is available.
The next thing the elves noticed is that if they worked on the main workshop garland, they were always running into problems when they tried to share their work back with the rest of the workshop. It was fine if they were working late at night by themselves, but in the middle of the day, it was horrible. (I’ve been asked not to talk about that time the fight broke out.) Instead of trying to share everything on their local copy of the main garland, the elves have realised it’s a lot easier to work on a new string and then knot this onto the main garland when their pattern repeat is finished. They generate a new string by issuing the following commands:
git checkout master
git checkout -b 1234_pattern-name
1234 represents the work order number and pattern-name describes the pattern they’re adding. Each bead is then added to the new link (git add bead.txt) and locked into place (git commit). Each elf repeats this process until the sequence of beads described in the work order has been added to their mini garland.
To combine their work with the main garland, the elves need to make a few decisions. If they’re making a single strand, they issue the following commands:
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only 1234_pattern-name
To share their work they publish the new version of the main garland to the workshop spool with the command git push origin master.
Sometimes this fails. Sharing work fails because the workshop spool has gotten new links added since the elf last updated their copy of the main workshop spool. This makes the elves both happy and sad. It makes them happy because it means the other elves have been working too, but it makes them sad because they now need to do a bit of extra work to close their work order.
To update the local copy of the workshop spool, the elf first unlinks the chain they just linked by running the command:
git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD
This works because the garland magic notices when the elves are doing a particularly dangerous thing and places a temporary, invisible bookmark to the last safe bead in the chain before the dangerous thing happened. The garland no longer has the elf’s work, and can be updated safely. The elf runs the command git pull --rebase=preserve and the changes all the other elves have made are applied locally.
With these new beads in place, the elf now has to restring their own chain so that it starts at the right place. To do this, the elf turns back to their own chain (git checkout 1234_pattern-name) and runs the command git rebase master. Assuming their bead pattern is completely unique, the process will run and the elf’s beads will be restrung on the tip of the main workshop garland.
Sometimes the magic fails and the elf has to deal with merge conflicts. These are kind of annoying, so the elf uses a special inspector tool to figure things out. The elf opens the inspector by running the command git mergetool to work through places where their beads have been added at the same points as another elf’s beads. Once all the conflicts are resolved, the elf saves their work, and quits the inspector. They might need to do this a few times if there are a lot of new beads, so the elf has learned to follow this update process regularly instead of just waiting until they’re ready to close out their work order.
Once their link is up to date, the elf can now reapply their chain as before, publish their work to the main workshop garland, and close their work order:
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only 1234_pattern-name
git push origin master
Generally this process works well for the elves. Sometimes, though, when they’re tired or bored or a little drunk on festive cheer, they realise there’s a mistake in their chain of beads. Fortunately they can fix the beads without anyone else knowing. These tools can be applied to the whole workshop chain as well, but it causes problems because the magic assumes that elves are only ever adding to the main chain, not removing or reordering beads on the fly. Depending on where the mistake is, the elf has a few different options.
Let’s pretend the elf has a sequence of five beads she’s been working on. The work order says the pattern should be red-blue-red-blue-red.
If the sequence of beads is wrong (for example, blue-blue-red-red-red), the elf can remove the beads from the chain, but keep the beads in her workstation using the command git reset --soft HEAD~5.
If she’s been using the wrong colours and the wrong pattern (for example, green-green-yellow-yellow-green), she can remove the beads from her chain and discard them from her workstation using the command git reset --hard HEAD~5.
If one of the beads is missing (for example, red-blue-blue-red), she can restring the beads using the first method, or she can use a bit of magic to add the missing bead into the sequence.
Using a tool that’s a bit like orthoscopic surgery, she first selects a sequence of beads which contains the problem. A visualisation of this process is available.
Start the garland surgery process with the command:
git rebase --interactive HEAD~4
A new screen comes up with the following information (the oldest bead is on top):
pick c2e4877 Red bead
pick 9b5555e Blue bead
pick 7afd66b Blue bead
pick e1f2537 Red bead
The elf adjusts the list, changing “pick” to “edit” next to the first blue bead:
pick c2e4877 Red bead
edit 9b5555e Blue bead
pick 7afd66b Blue bead
pick e1f2537 Red bead
She then saves her work and quits the editor. The garland magic has placed her back in time at the moment just after she added the first blue bead.
She needs to manually fix up her garland to add the new red bead. If the beads were files, she might run commands like vim beads.txt and edit the file to make the necessary changes.
Once she’s finished her changes, she needs to add her new bead to the garland (git add --all) and lock it into place (git commit). This time she assigns the commit message “Red bead – added” so she can easily find it.
The garland magic has replaced the bead, but she still needs to verify the remaining beads on the garland. This is a mostly automatic process which is started by running the command git rebase --continue.
The new red bead has been assigned a position formerly held by the blue bead, and so the elf must deal with a merge conflict. She opens up a new program to help resolve the conflict by running git mergetool.
She knows she wants both of these beads in place, so the elf edits the file to include both the red and blue beads.
With the conflict resolved, the elf saves her changes and quits the mergetool.
Back at the command line, the elf checks the status of her work using the command git status.
rebase in progress; onto 4a9cb9d
You are currently rebasing branch '2_RBRBR' on '4a9cb9d'.
(all conflicts fixed: run ""git rebase --continue"")
Changes to be committed:
(use ""git reset HEAD ..."" to unstage)
modified: beads.txt
Untracked files:
(use ""git add ..."" to include in what will be committed)
beads.txt.orig
She removes the file added by the mergetool with the command rm beads.txt.orig and commits the edits she just made to the bead file using the commands:
git add beads.txt
git commit --message ""Blue bead -- resolved conflict""
With the conflict resolved, the elf is able to continue with the rebasing process using the command git rebase --continue. There is one final conflict the elf needs to resolve. Once again, she opens up the visualisation tool and takes a look at the two conflicting files.
She incorporates the changes from the left and right column to ensure her bead sequence is correct.
Once the merge conflict is resolved, the elf saves the file and quits the mergetool. Once again, she cleans out the backup file added by the mergetool (rm beads.txt.orig) and commits her changes to the garland:
git add beads.txt
git commit --message ""Red bead -- resolved conflict""
and then runs the final verification steps in the rebase process (git rebase --continue).
The verification process runs through to the end, and the elf checks her work using the command git log --oneline.
9269914 Red bead -- resolved conflict
4916353 Blue bead -- resolved conflict
aef0d5c Red bead -- added
9b5555e Blue bead
c2e4877 Red bead
She knows she needs to read the sequence from bottom to top (the oldest bead is on the bottom). Reviewing the list she sees that the sequence is now correct.
Sometimes, late at night, the elf makes new copies of the workshop garland so she can play around with the bead sequencer just to see what happens. It’s made her more confident at restringing beads when she’s found real mistakes. And she doesn’t mind helping her fellow elves when they run into trouble with their beads. The sugar cookies they leave her as thanks don’t hurt either. If you would also like to play with the bead sequencer, you can get a copy of the branches the elf worked.
Our lessons from the workshop:
By using rebase to update your branches, you avoid merge commits and keep a clean commit history.
If you make a mistake on one of your local branches, you can use reset to take commits off your branch. If you want to save the work, but uncommit it, add the parameter --soft. If you want to completely discard the work, use the parameter, --hard.
If you have merged working branch changes to the local copy of your master branch and it is preventing you from pushing your work to a remote repository, remove these changes using the command reset with the parameter --merge ORIG_HEAD before updating your local copy of the remote master branch.
If you want to make a change to work that was committed a little while ago, you can use the command rebase with the parameter --interactive. You will need to include how many commits back in time you want to review.",2015,Emma Jane Westby,emmajanewestby,2015-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/git-rebasing/,code
70,Bringing Your Code to the Streets,"— or How to Be a Street VJ
Our amazing world of web code is escaping out of the browser at an alarming rate and appearing in every aspect of the environment around us. Over the past few years we’ve already seen JavaScript used server-side, hardware coded with JavaScript, a rise of native style and desktop apps created with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and even virtual reality (VR) is getting its fair share of front-end goodness.
You can go ahead and play with JavaScript-powered hardware such as the Tessel or the Espruino to name a couple. Just check out the Tessel project page to see JavaScript in the world of coffee roasting or sleep tracking your pet. With the rise of the internet of things, JavaScript can be seen collecting information on flooding among other things. And if that’s not enough ‘outside the browser’ implementations, Node.js servers can even be found in aircraft!
I previously mentioned VR and with three.js’s extra StereoEffect.js module it’s relatively simple to get browser 3D goodness to be Google Cardboard-ready, and thus set the stage for all things JavaScript and VR. It’s been pretty popular in the art world too, with interactive works such as Seb Lee-Delisle’s Lunar Trails installation, featuring the old arcade game Lunar Lander, which you can now play in your browser while others watch (it is the web after all). The Science Museum in London held Chrome Web Lab, an interactive exhibition featuring five experiments, showcasing the magic of the web. And it’s not even the connectivity of the web that’s being showcased; we can even take things offline and use web code for amazing things, such as fighting Ebola.
One thing is for sure, JavaScript is awesome. Hell, if you believe those telly programs (as we all do), JavaScript can even take down the stock market, purely through the witchcraft of canvas! Go JavaScript!
Now it’s our turn
So I wanted to create a little project influenced by this theme, and as it’s Christmas, take it to the streets for a little bit of party fun! Something that could take code anywhere. Here’s how I made a portable visual projection pack, a piece of video mixing software and created some web-coded street art.
Step one: The equipment
You will need:
One laptop: with HDMI output and a modern browser installed, such as Google Chrome.
One battery-powered mini projector: I’ve used a Texas Instruments DLP; for its 120 lumens it was the best cost-to-lumens ratio I could find.
One MIDI controller (optional): mine is an ICON iDJ as it suits mixing visuals. However, there is more affordable hardware on the market such as an Akai LPD8 or a Korg nanoPAD2. As you’ll see in the article, this is optional as it can be emulated within the software.
A case to carry it all around in.
Step two: The software
The projected visuals, I imagined, could be anything you can create within a browser, whether that be simple HTML and CSS, images, videos, SVG or canvas. The only requirement I have is that they move or change with sound and that I can mix any one visual into another.
You may remember a couple of years ago I created a demo on this very site, allowing audio-triggered visuals from the ambient sounds your device mic was picking up. That was a great starting point – I used that exact method to pick up the audio and thus the first requirement was complete. If you want to see some more examples of visuals I’ve put together for this, there’s a showcase on CodePen.
The second requirement took a little more thought. I needed two screens, which could at any point show any of the visuals I had coded, but could be mixed from one into the other and back again. So let’s start with two divs, both absolutely positioned so they’re on top of each other, but at the start the second screen’s opacity is set to zero.
Now all we need is a slider, which when moved from one side to the other slowly sets the second screen’s opacity to 1, thereby fading it in.
See the Pen Mixing Screens (Software Version) by Rumyra (@Rumyra) on CodePen.
Mixing Screens (CodePen)
As you saw above, I have a MIDI controller and although the software method works great, I’d quite like to make use of this nifty piece of kit. That’s easily done with the Web MIDI API. All I need to do is call it, and when I move one of the sliders on the controller (I’ve allocated the big cross fader in the middle for this), pick up on the change of value and use that to control the opacity instead.
var midi, data;
// start talking to MIDI controller
if (navigator.requestMIDIAccess) {
navigator.requestMIDIAccess({
sysex: false
}).then(onMIDISuccess, onMIDIFailure);
} else {
alert(“No MIDI support in your browser.”);
}
// on success
function onMIDISuccess(midiData) {
// this is all our MIDI data
midi = midiData;
var allInputs = midi.allInputs.values();
// loop over all available inputs and listen for any MIDI input
for (var input = allInputs.next(); input && !input.done; input = allInputs.next()) {
// when a MIDI value is received call the onMIDIMessage function
input.value.onmidimessage = onMIDIMessage;
}
}
function onMIDIMessage(message) {
// data comes in the form [command/channel, note, velocity]
data = message.data;
// Opacity change for screen. The cross fader values are [176, 8, {0-127}]
if ( (data[0] === 176) && (data[1] === 8) ) {
// this value will change as the fader is moved
var opacity = data[2]/127;
screenTwo.style.opacity = opacity;
}
}
The final code was slightly more complicated than this, as I decided to switch the two screens based on the frequencies of the sound that was playing, and use the cross fader to depict the frequency threshold value. This meant they flickered in and out of each other, rather than just faded. There’s a very rough-and-ready first version of the software on GitHub.
Phew, Great! Now we need to get all this to the streets!
Step three: Portable kit
Did you notice how I mentioned a case to carry it all around in? I wanted the case to be morphable, so I could use the equipment from it too, a sort of bag-to-usherette-tray-type affair. Well, I had an unused laptop bag…
I strengthened it with some MDF, so when I opened the bag it would hold like a tray where the laptop and MIDI controller would sit. The projector was Velcroed to the external pocket of the bag, so when it was a tray it would project from underneath. I added two durable straps, one for my shoulders and one round my waist, both attached to the bag itself. There was a lot of cutting and trimming. As it was a laptop bag it was pretty thick to start and sewing was tricky. However, I only broke one sewing machine needle; I’ve been known to break more working with leather, so I figured I was doing well. By the way, you can actually buy usherette trays, but I just couldn’t resist hacking my own :)
Step four: Take to the streets
First, make sure everything is charged – everything – a lot! The laptop has to power both the MIDI controller and the projector, and although I have a mobile phone battery booster pack, that’ll only charge the projector should it run out. I estimated I could get a good hour of visual artistry before I needed to worry, though.
I had a couple of ideas about time of day and location. Here in the UK at this time of year, it gets dark around half past four, so I could easily head out in a city around 5pm and it would be dark enough for the projections to be seen pretty well. I chose Bristol, around the waterfront, as there were some interesting locations to try it out in. The best was Millennium Square: busy but not crowded and plenty of surfaces to try projecting on to.
My first time out with the portable audio/visual pack (PAVP as it will now be named) was brilliant. I played music and projected visuals, like a one-woman band of A/V!
You might be thinking what the point of this was, besides, of course, it being a bit of fun. Well, this project got me to look at canvas and SVG more closely. The Web MIDI API was really interesting; MIDI as a data format has some great practical uses. I think without our side projects we may not have all these wonderful uses for our everyday code. Not only do they remind us coding can, and should, be fun, they also help us learn and grow as makers.
My favourite part? When I was projecting into a water feature in Millennium Square. For those who are familiar, you’ll know it’s like a wall of water so it produced a superb effect. I drew quite a crowd and a kid came to stand next to me and all I could hear him say with enthusiasm was, ‘Oh wow! That’s so cool!’
Yes… yes, kid, it was cool. Making things with code is cool.
Massive thanks to the lovely Drew McLellan for his incredibly well-directed photography, and also Simon Johnson who took a great hand in perfecting the kit while it was attached.",2015,Ruth John,ruthjohn,2015-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/bringing-your-code-to-the-streets/,code
49,Universal React,"One of the libraries to receive a huge amount of focus in 2015 has been ReactJS, a library created by Facebook for building user interfaces and web applications.
More generally we’ve seen an even greater rise in the number of applications built primarily on the client side with most of the logic implemented in JavaScript. One of the main issues with building an app in this way is that you immediately forgo any customers who might browse with JavaScript turned off, and you can also miss out on any robots that might visit your site to crawl it (such as Google’s search bots). Additionally, we gain a performance improvement by being able to render from the server rather than having to wait for all the JavaScript to be loaded and executed.
The good news is that this problem has been recognised and it is possible to build a fully featured client-side application that can be rendered on the server. The way in which these apps work is as follows:
The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page.
In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page.
The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control.
If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again.
This means you can still provide a very quick and snappy experience for JavaScript users without having to abandon your non-JS users. We achieve this by writing JavaScript that can be executed on the server or on the client (you might have heard this referred to as isomorphic) and using a JavaScript framework that’s clever enough handle server- or client-side execution. Currently, ReactJS is leading the way here, although Ember and Angular are both working on solutions to this problem.
It’s worth noting that this tutorial assumes some familiarity with React in general, its syntax and concepts. If you’d like a refresher, the ReactJS docs are a good place to start.
Getting started
We’re going to create a tiny ReactJS application that will work on the server and the client. First we’ll need to create a new project and install some dependencies. In a new, blank directory, run:
npm init -y
npm install --save ejs express react react-router react-dom
That will create a new project and install our dependencies:
ejs is a templating engine that we’ll use to render our HTML on the server.
express is a small web framework we’ll run our server on.
react-router is a popular routing solution for React so our app can fully support and respect URLs.
react-dom is a small React library used for rendering React components.
We’re also going to write all our code in ECMAScript 6, and therefore need to install BabelJS and configure that too.
npm install --save-dev babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-react
Then, create a .babelrc file that contains the following:
{
""presets"": [""es2015"", ""react""]
}
What we’ve done here is install Babel’s command line interface (CLI) tool and configured it to transform our code from ECMAScript 6 (or ES2015) to ECMAScript 5, which is more widely supported. We’ll need the React transforms when we start writing JSX when working with React.
Creating a server
For now, our ExpressJS server is pretty straightforward. All we’ll do is render a view that says ‘Hello World’. Here’s our server code:
import express from 'express';
import http from 'http';
const app = express();
app.use(express.static('public'));
app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
res.render('index');
});
const server = http.createServer(app);
server.listen(3003);
server.on('listening', () => {
console.log('Listening on 3003');
});
Here we’re using ES6 modules, which I wrote about on 24 ways last year, if you’d like a reminder. We tell the app to render the index view on any GET request (that’s what app.get('*') means, the wildcard matches any route).
We now need to create the index view file, which Express expects to be defined in views/index.ejs:
My App
Hello World
Finally, we’re ready to run the server. Because we installed babel-cli earlier we have access to the babel-node executable, which will transform all your code before running it through node. Run this command:
./node_modules/.bin/babel-node server.js
And you should now be able to visit http://localhost:3003 and see ‘Hello World’ right there:
Building the React app
Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end. Our app will have two routes, / and /about which will both show a small amount of content. This will demonstrate how to use React Router on the server side to make sure our React app plays nicely with URLs.
Firstly, let’s update views/index.ejs. Our server will figure out what HTML it needs to render, and pass that into the view. We can pass a value into our view when we render it, and then use EJS syntax to tell it to output that data. Update the template file so the body looks like so:
<%- markup %>
Next, we’ll define the routes we want our app to have using React Router. For now we’ll just define the index route, and not worry about the /about route quite yet. We could define our routes in JSX, but I think for server-side rendering it’s clearer to define them as an object. Here’s what we’re starting with:
const routes = {
path: '',
component: AppComponent,
childRoutes: [
{
path: '/',
component: IndexComponent
}
]
}
These are just placed at the top of server.js, after the import statements. Later we’ll move these into a separate file, but for now they are fine where they are.
Notice how I define first that the AppComponent should be used at the '' path, which effectively means it matches every single route and becomes a container for all our other components. Then I give it a child route of /, which will match the IndexComponent. Before we hook these routes up with our server, let’s quickly define components/app.js and components/index.js. app.js looks like so:
import React from 'react';
export default class AppComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
Welcome to my App
{ this.props.children }
);
}
}
When a React Router route has child components, they are given to us in the props under the children key, so we need to include them in the code we want to render for this component. The index.js component is pretty bland:
import React from 'react';
export default class IndexComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
);
}
}
Server-side routing with React Router
Head back into server.js, and firstly we’ll need to add some new imports:
import React from 'react';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { match, RoutingContext } from 'react-router';
import AppComponent from './components/app';
import IndexComponent from './components/index';
The ReactDOM package provides react-dom/server which includes a renderToString method that takes a React component and produces the HTML string output of the component. It’s this method that we’ll use to render the HTML from the server, generated by React. From the React Router package we use match, a function used to find a matching route for a URL; and RoutingContext, a React component provided by React Router that we’ll need to render. This wraps up our components and provides some functionality that ties React Router together with our app. Generally you don’t need to concern yourself about how this component works, so don’t worry too much.
Now for the good bit: we can update our app.get('*') route with the code that matches the URL against the React routes:
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
// routes is our object of React routes defined above
match({ routes, location: req.url }, (err, redirectLocation, props) => {
if (err) {
// something went badly wrong, so 500 with a message
res.status(500).send(err.message);
} else if (redirectLocation) {
// we matched a ReactRouter redirect, so redirect from the server
res.redirect(302, redirectLocation.pathname + redirectLocation.search);
} else if (props) {
// if we got props, that means we found a valid component to render
// for the given route
const markup = renderToString();
// render `index.ejs`, but pass in the markup we want it to display
res.render('index', { markup })
} else {
// no route match, so 404. In a real app you might render a custom
// 404 view here
res.sendStatus(404);
}
});
});
We call match, giving it the routes object we defined earlier and req.url, which contains the URL of the request. It calls a callback function we give it, with err, redirectLocation and props as the arguments. The first two conditionals in the callback function just deal with an error occuring or a redirect (React Router has built in redirect support). The most interesting bit is the third conditional, else if (props). If we got given props and we’ve made it this far it means we found a matching component to render and we can use this code to render it:
...
} else if (props) {
// if we got props, that means we found a valid component to render
// for the given route
const markup = renderToString();
// render `index.ejs`, but pass in the markup we want it to display
res.render('index', { markup })
} else {
...
}
The renderToString method from ReactDOM takes that RoutingContext component we mentioned earlier and renders it with the properties required. Again, you need not concern yourself with what this specific component does or what the props are. Most of this is data that React Router provides for us on top of our components.
Note the {...props}, which is a neat bit of JSX syntax that spreads out our object into key value properties. To see this better, note the two pieces of JSX code below, both of which are equivalent:
// OR:
const props = { a: ""foo"", b: ""bar"" };
Running the server again
I know that felt like a lot of work, but the good news is that once you’ve set this up you are free to focus on building your React components, safe in the knowledge that your server-side rendering is working. To check, restart the server and head to http://localhost:3003 once more. You should see it all working!
Refactoring and one more route
Before we move on to getting this code running on the client, let’s add one more route and do some tidying up. First, move our routes object out into routes.js:
import AppComponent from './components/app';
import IndexComponent from './components/index';
const routes = {
path: '',
component: AppComponent,
childRoutes: [
{
path: '/',
component: IndexComponent
}
]
}
export { routes };
And then update server.js. You can remove the two component imports and replace them with:
import { routes } from './routes';
Finally, let’s add one more route for ./about and links between them. Create components/about.js:
import React from 'react';
export default class AboutComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
);
}
}
And then you can add it to routes.js too:
import AppComponent from './components/app';
import IndexComponent from './components/index';
import AboutComponent from './components/about';
const routes = {
path: '',
component: AppComponent,
childRoutes: [
{
path: '/',
component: IndexComponent
},
{
path: '/about',
component: AboutComponent
}
]
}
export { routes };
If you now restart the server and head to http://localhost:3003/about` you’ll see the about page!
For the finishing touch we’ll use the React Router link component to add some links between the pages. Edit components/app.js to look like so:
import React from 'react';
import { Link } from 'react-router';
export default class AppComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
Welcome to my App
{ this.props.children }
);
}
}
You can now click between the pages to navigate. However, everytime we do so the requests hit the server. Now we’re going to make our final change, such that after the app has been rendered on the server once, it gets rendered and managed in the client, providing that snappy client-side app experience.
Client-side rendering
First, we’re going to make a small change to views/index.ejs. React doesn’t like rendering directly into the body and will give a warning when you do so. To prevent this we’ll wrap our app in a div:
<%- markup %>
I’ve also added in a script tag to build.js, which is the file we’ll generate containing all our client-side code.
Next, create client-render.js. This is going to be the only bit of JavaScript that’s exclusive to the client side. In it we need to pull in our routes and render them to the DOM.
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { Router } from 'react-router';
import { routes } from './routes';
import createBrowserHistory from 'history/lib/createBrowserHistory';
ReactDOM.render(
,
document.getElementById('app')
)
The first thing you might notice is the mention of createBrowserHistory. React Router is built on top of the history module, a module that listens to the browser’s address bar and parses the new location. It has many modes of operation: it can keep track using a hashbang, such as http://localhost/#!/about (this is the default), or you can tell it to use the HTML5 history API by calling createBrowserHistory, which is what we’ve done. This will keep the URLs nice and neat and make sure the client and the server are using the same URL structure. You can read more about React Router and histories in the React Router documentation.
Finally we use ReactDOM.render and give it the Router component, telling it about all our routes, and also tell ReactDOM where to render, the #app element.
Generating build.js
We’re actually almost there! The final thing we need to do is generate our client side bundle. For this we’re going to use webpack, a module bundler that can take our application, follow all the imports and generate one large bundle from them. We’ll install it and babel-loader, a webpack plugin for transforming code through Babel.
npm install --save-dev webpack babel-loader
To run webpack we just need to create a configuration file, called webpack.config.js. Create the file in the root of our application and add the following code:
var path = require('path');
module.exports = {
entry: path.join(process.cwd(), 'client-render.js'),
output: {
path: './public/',
filename: 'build.js'
},
module: {
loaders: [
{
test: /.js$/,
loader: 'babel'
}
]
}
}
Note first that this file can’t be written in ES6 as it doesn’t get transformed. The first thing we do is tell webpack the main entry point for our application, which is client-render.js. We use process.cwd() because webpack expects an exact location – if we just gave it the string ‘client-render.js’, webpack wouldn’t be able to find it.
Next, we tell webpack where to output our file, and here I’m telling it to place the file in public/build.js. Finally we tell webpack that every time it hits a file that ends in .js, it should use the babel-loader plugin to transform the code first.
Now we’re ready to generate the bundle!
./node_modules/.bin/webpack
This will take a fair few seconds to run (on my machine it’s about seven or eight), but once it has it will have created public/build.js, a client-side bundle of our application. If you restart your server once more you’ll see that we can now navigate around our application without hitting the server, because React on the client takes over. Perfect!
The first bundle that webpack generates is pretty slow, but if you run webpack -w it will go into watch mode, where it watches files for changes and regenerates the bundle. The key thing is that it only regenerates the small pieces of the bundle it needs, so while the first bundle is very slow, the rest are lightning fast. I recommend leaving webpack constantly running in watch mode when you’re developing.
Conclusions
First, if you’d like to look through this code yourself you can find it all on GitHub. Feel free to raise an issue there or tweet me if you have any problems or would like to ask further questions.
Next, I want to stress that you shouldn’t use this as an excuse to build all your apps in this way. Some of you might be wondering whether a static site like the one we built today is worth its complexity, and you’d be right. I used it as it’s an easy example to work with but in the future you should carefully consider your reasons for wanting to build a universal React application and make sure it’s a suitable infrastructure for you.
With that, all that’s left for me to do is wish you a very merry Christmas and best of luck with your React applications!",2015,Jack Franklin,jackfranklin,2015-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/universal-react/,code
53,Get Expressive with Your Typography,"In 1955 Beatrice Warde, an American communicator on typography, published a series of essays entitled The Crystal Goblet in which she wrote, “People who love ideas must have a love of words. They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear.” And with that proposition Warde introduced the idea that just as we judge someone based on the clothes they are wearing, so we make judgements about text based on the typefaces in which it is set.
Beatrice Warde. ©1970 Monotype Imaging Inc.
Choosing the same typeface as everyone else, especially if you’re trying to make a statement, is like turning up to a party in the same dress; to a meeting in the same suit, shirt and tie; or to a craft ale dispensary in the same plaid shirt and turned-up skinny jeans.
But there’s more to your choice of typeface than simply making an impression. In 2012 Jon Tan wrote on 24 ways about a scientific study called “The Aesthetics of Reading” which concluded that “good quality typography is responsible for greater engagement during reading and thus induces a good mood.”
Furthermore, at this year’s Ampersand conference Sarah Hyndman, an expert in multisensory typography, discussed how typefaces can communicate with our subconscious. Sarah showed that different fonts could have an effect on how food tasted. A rounded font placed near a bowl of jellybeans would make them taste sweeter, and a jagged angular font would make them taste more sour.
The quality of your typography can therefore affect the mood of your reader, and your font choice directly affect the senses. This means you can manipulate the way people feel. You can change their emotional state through type alone. Now that’s a real superpower!
The effects of your body text design choices are measurable but subtle. If you really want to have an impact you need to think big. Literally. Display text and headings are your attention grabbers. They are your chance to interrupt, introduce and seduce.
Display text and headings set the scene and draw people in. Text set large creates an image that visitors see before they read, and that’s your chance to choose a typeface that immediately expresses what the text, and indeed the entire website, stands for. What expectations of the text do you want to set up? Youthful enthusiasm? Businesslike? Cutting-edge? Hipster? Sensible and secure? Fun and informal? Authoritarian?
Typography conveys much more than just information. It imparts feeling, emotion and sentiment, and arouses preconceived ideas of trust, tone and content. Think about taking advantage of this by introducing impactful, expressive typography to your designs on the web. You can alter the way your reader feels, so what emotion do you want to provoke?
Maybe you want them to feel inspired like this stop smoking campaign:
helsenorge.no
Perhaps they should be moved and intrigued, as with Makeshift magazine:
mkshft.org
Or calmly reassured:
www.cleopatra-marina.gr
Fonts also tap into the complex library of associations that we’ve been accumulating in our brains all of our lives. You build up these associations every time you see a font from the context that you see it in. All of us associate certain letterforms with topics, times and places.
Retiro is obviously Spanish:
Retiro by Typofonderie
Bodoni and Eurostile used in this menu couldn’t be much more Italian:
Bodoni and Eurostile, both designed in Italy
To me, Clarendon gives a sense of the 1960s and 1970s. I’m not sure if that’s what Costa was going for, but that’s what it means to me:
Costa coffee flier
And Knockout and Gotham really couldn’t be much more American:
Knockout and Gotham by Hoefler & Co
When it comes to choosing your display typeface, the type designer Christian Schwartz says there are two kinds. First are the workhorse typefaces that will do whatever you want them to do. Helvetica, Proxima Nova and Futura are good examples. These fonts can be shaped in many different ways, but this also means they are found everywhere and take great skill and practice to work with in a unique and striking manner.
The second kind of typeface is one that does most of the work for you. Like finely tailored clothing, it’s the detail in the design that adds interest.
Setting headings in Bree rather than Helvetica makes a big difference to the tone of the article
Such typefaces carry much more inherent character, but are also less malleable and harder to adapt to different contexts. Good examples are Marr Sans, FS Clerkenwell, Strangelove and Bree.
Push the boat out
Remember, all type can have an effect on the reader. Take advantage of that and allow your type to have its own vernacular and impact. Be expressive with your type. Don’t be too reverential, dogmatic – or ordinary. Be brave and push a few boundaries.
Adapted from Web Typography a book in progress by Richard Rutter.",2015,Richard Rutter,richardrutter,2015-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/get-expressive-with-your-typography/,design
69,How to Do a UX Review,"A UX review is where an expert goes through a website looking for usability and experience problems and makes recommendations on how to fix them.
I’ve completed a number of UX reviews over my twelve years working as a user experience consultant and I thought I’d share my approach.
I’ll be talking about reviewing websites here; you can adapt the approach for web apps, or mobile or desktop apps.
Why conduct a review
Typically, a client asks for a review to be undertaken by a trusted and, ideally, detached third party who either works for an agency or is a freelancer. Often they may ask a new member of the UX team to complete one, or even set it as a task for a job interview. This indicates the client is looking for an objective view, seen from the outside as a user would see the website.
I always suggest conducting some user research rather than a review. Users know their goals and watching them make (what you might think of as) mistakes on the website is invaluable. Conducting research with six users can give you six hours’ worth of review material from six viewpoints. In short, user research can identify more problems and show how common those problems might be.
There are three reasons, though, why a review might better suit client needs than user research:
Quick results: user research and analysis takes at least three weeks.
Limited budget: the £6–10,000 cost to run user research is about twice the cost of a UX review.
Users are hard to reach: in the business-to-business world, reaching users is difficult, especially if your users hold senior positions in their organisations. Working with consumers is much easier as there are often more of them.
There is some debate about the benefits of user research over UX review. In my experience you learn far more from research, but opinions differ.
Be objective
The number one mistake many UX reviewers make is reporting back the issues they identify as their opinion. This can cause credibility problems because you have to keep justifying why your opinion is correct.
I’ve had the most success when giving bad news in a UX review and then finally getting things fixed when I have been as objective as possible, offering evidence for why something may be a problem.
To be objective we need two sources of data: numbers from analytics to appeal to reason; and stories from users in the form of personas to speak to emotions. Highlighting issues with dispassionate numerical data helps show the extent of the problem. Making the problems more human using personas can make the problem feel more real.
Numbers from analytics
The majority of clients I work with use Google Analytics, but if you use a different analytics package the same concepts apply. I use analytics to find two sets of things.
1. Landing pages and search terms
Landing pages are the pages users see first when they visit a website – more often than not via a Google search. Landing pages reveal user goals. If a user landed on a page called ‘Yellow shoes’ their goal may well be to find out about or buy some yellow shoes.
It would be great to see all the search terms bringing people to the website but in 2011 Google stopped providing search term data to (rightly!) protect users’ privacy. You can get some search term data from Google Webmaster tools, but we must rely on landing pages as a clue to our users’ goals.
The thing to look for is high-traffic landing pages with a high bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate (over 50%) isn’t good; above 70% is bad.
To get a list of high-traffic landing pages with a high bounce rate install this bespoke report.
Google Analytics showing landing pages ordered by popularity and the bounce rate for each.
This is the list of pages with high demand and that have real problems as the bounce rate is high. This is the main focus of the UX review.
2. User flows
We have the beginnings of the user journey: search terms and initial landing pages. Now we can tap into the really useful bit of Google Analytics. Called behaviour flows, they show the most common order of pages visited.
Behaviour flows from Google Analytics, showing the routes users took through the website.
Here we can see the second and third (and so on) pages users visited. Importantly, we can also see the drop-outs at each step.
If your client has it set up, you can also set goal pages (for example, a post-checkout contact us and thank you page). You can then see a similar view that tracks back from the goal pages. If your client doesn’t have this, suggest they set up goal tracking. It’s easy to do.
We now have the remainder of the user journey.
A user journey
Expect the work in analytics to take up to a day.
We may well identify more than one user journey, starting from different landing pages and going to different second- and third-level pages. That’s a good thing and shows we have different user types. Talking of user types, we need to define who our users are.
Personas
We have some user journeys and now we need to understand more about our users’ motivations and goals.
I have a love-hate relationship with personas, but used properly these portraits of users can help bring a human touch to our UX review.
I suggest using a very cut-down view of a persona. My old friends Steve Cable and Richard Caddick at cxpartners have a great free template for personas from their book Communicating the User Experience.
The first thing to do is find a picture that represents that persona. Don’t use crappy stock photography – it’s sometimes hard to relate to perfect-looking people) – use authentic-looking people. Here’s a good collection of persona photos.
An example persona.
The personas have three basic attributes:
Goals: we can complete these drawing on the analytics data we have (see example).
Musts: things we have to do to meet the persona’s needs.
Must nots: a list of things we really shouldn’t do.
Completing points 2 and 3 can often be done during the writing of the report.
Let’s take an example. We know that the search term ‘yellow shoes’ takes the user to the landing page for yellow shoes. We also know this page has a high bounce rate, meaning it doesn’t provide a good experience.
With our expert hat on we can review the page. We will find two types of problem:
Usability issues: ineffective button placement or incorrect wording, links not looking like links, and so on.
Experience issues: for example, if a product is out of stock we have to contact the business to ask them to restock.
That link is very small and hard to see.
We could identify that the contact button isn’t easy to find (a usability issue) but that’s not the real problem here. That the user has to ask the business to restock the item is a bad user experience. We add this to our personas’ must nots. The big experience problems with the site form the musts and must nots for our personas.
We now have a story around our user journey that highlights what is going wrong.
If we’ve identified a number of user journeys, multiple landing pages and differing second and third pages visited, we can create more personas to match. A good rule of thumb is no more than three personas. Any more and they lose impact, watering down your results.
Expect persona creation to take up to a day to complete.
Let’s start the review
We take the user journeys and we follow them step by step, working through the website looking for the reasons why users drop out at each step. Using Keynote or PowerPoint, I structure the final report around the user journey with separate sections for each step.
For each step we’ll find both usability and experience problems. Split the results into those two groups.
Usability problems are fairly easy to fix as they’re often quick design changes. As you go along, note the usability problems in one place: we’ll call this ‘quick wins’. Simple quick fixes are a reassuring thing for a client to see and mean they can get started on stuff right away. You can mark the severity of usability issues. Use a scale from 1 to 3 (if you use 1 to 5 everything ends up being a 3!) where 1 is minor and 3 is serious.
Review the website on the device you’d expect your persona to use. Are they using the site on a smartphone? Review it on a smartphone.
I allow one page or slide per problem, which allows me to explain what is going wrong. For a usability problem I’ll often make a quick wireframe or sketch to explain how to address it.
A UX review slide displaying all the elements to be addressed. These slides may be viewed from across the room on a screen so zoom into areas of discussion.
(Quick tip: if you use Google Chrome, try Awesome Screenshot to capture screens.)
When it comes to the more severe experience problems – things like an online shop not offering next day delivery, or a business that needs to promise to get back to new customers within a few hours – these will take more than a tweak to the UI to fix.
Call these something different. I use the terms like business challenges and customer experience issues as they show that it will take changes to the organisation and its processes to address them. It’s often beyond the remit of a humble UX consultant to recommend how to fix organisational issues, so don’t try.
Again, create a page within your document to collect all of the business challenges together.
Expect the review to take between one and three days to complete.
The final report should follow this structure:
The approach
Overview of usability quick wins
Overview of experience issues
Overview of Google Analytics findings
The user journeys
The personas
Detailed page-by-page review (broken down by steps on the user journey)
There are two academic theories to help with the review.
Heuristic evaluation is a set of criteria to organise the issues you find. They’re great for categorising the usability issues you identify but in practice they can be quite cumbersome to apply.
I prefer the more scientific and much simpler cognitive walkthrough that is focused on goals and actions.
A workshop to go through the findings
The most important part of the UX review process is to talk through the issues with your client and their team.
A document can only communicate a certain amount. Conversations about the findings will help the team understand the severity of the issues you’ve uncovered and give them a chance to discuss what to do about them.
Expect the workshop to last around three hours.
When presenting the report, explain the method you used to conduct the review, the data sources, personas and the reasoning behind the issues you found. Start by going through the usability issues. Often these won’t be contentious and you can build trust and improve your credibility by making simple, easy to implement changes.
The most valuable part of the workshop is conversation around each issue, especially the experience problems. The workshop should include time to talk through each experience issue and how the team will address it.
I collect actions on index cards throughout the workshop and make a note of who will take what action with each problem.
Index cards showing the problem and who is responsible.
When talking through the issues, the person who designed the site is probably in the room – they may well feel threatened. So be nice.
When I talk through the report I try to have strong ideas, weakly held.
At the end of the workshop you’ll have talked through each of the issues and identified who is responsible for addressing them. To close the workshop I hand out the cards to the relevant people, giving them a physical reminder of the next steps they have to take.
That’s my process for conducting a review. I’d love to hear any tips you have in the comments.",2015,Joe Leech,joeleech,2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/how-to-do-a-ux-review/,ux
62,Being Customer Supportive,"Every day in customer support is an inbox, a Twitter feed, or a software forum full of new questions. Each is brimming with your customers looking for advice, reassurance, or fixes for their software problems. Each one is an opportunity to take a break from wrestling with your own troublesome tasks and assist someone else in solving theirs.
Sometimes the questions are straightforward and can be answered in a few minutes with a short greeting, a link to a help page, or a prewritten bit of text you use regularly: how to print a receipt, reset a password, or even, sadly, close your account.
More often, a support email requires you to spend some time unpacking the question, asking for more information, and writing a detailed personal response, tailored to help that particular user on this particular day.
Here I offer a few of my own guidelines on how to make today’s email the best support experience for both me and my customer. And even if you don’t consider what you do to be customer support, you might still find the suggestions useful for the next time you need to communicate with a client, to solve a software problem with teammates, or even reach out and ask for help yourself.
(All the examples appearing in this article are fictional. Any resemblance to quotes from real, software-using persons is entirely coincidental. Except for the bit about Star Wars. That happened.)
Who’s TAHT girl
I’ll be honest: I briefly tried making these recommendations into a clever mnemonic like FAST (facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties, time) or PAD (pressure, antiseptic, dressing). But instead, you get TAHT: tone, ask, help, thank. Ah, well.
As I work through each message in my support queue, I
listen to the tone of the email
ask clarifying questions
bring in extra help as needed
and thank the customer when the problem is solved.
Let’s open an email and get started!
Leave your message at the sound of the tone
With our enthusiasm for emoji, it can be very hard to infer someone’s tone from plain text. How much time have you spent pondering why your friend responded with “Thanks.” instead of “Thanks!”? I mean, why didn’t she :grin: or :wink: too?
Our support customers, however, are often direct about how they’re feeling:
I’m working against a deadline. Need this fixed ASAP!!!!
This hasn’t worked in a week and I am getting really frustrated.
I’ve done this ten times before and it’s always worked. I must be missing something simple.
They want us to understand the urgency of this from their point of view, just as much as we want to help them in a timely manner. How this information is conveyed gives us an instant sense of whether they are frustrated, angry, or confused—and, just as importantly, how frustrated-angry-confused they are.
Listen to this tone before you start writing your reply. Here are two ways I might open an email:
“I’m sorry that you ran into trouble with this.”
“Sorry you ran into trouble with this!”
The content is largely the same, but the tone is markedly different. The first version is a serious, staid reaction to the problem the customer is having; the second version is more relaxed, but no less sincere.
Matching the tone to the sender’s is an important first step. Overusing exclamation points or dropping in too-casual language may further upset someone who is already having a crummy time with your product. But to a cheerful user, a formal reply or an impersonal form response can be off-putting, and damage a good relationship.
When in doubt, I err on the side of being too formal, rather than sending a reply that may be read as flip or insincere. But whichever you choose, matching your correspondent’s tone will make for a more comfortable conversation.
Catch the ball and throw it back
Once you’ve got that tone on lock, it’s time to tackle the question at hand. Let’s see what our customer needs help with today:
I tried everything in the troubleshooting page but I can’t get it to work again. I am on a Mac. Please help.
Hmm, not much information here. Now, if I got this short email after helping five other people with the same problem on Mac OS X, I would be sorely tempted to send this customer that common solution in my first reply. I’ve found it’s important to resist the urge to assume this sixth person needs the same answer as the other five, though: there isn’t enough to connect this email to the ones that came before hers.
Instead, ask a few questions to start. Invest some time to see if there are other symptoms in common, like so:
I’m sorry that you ran into trouble with this! I’ll need a little more information to see what’s happening here.
[questions]
Thank you for your help.
Those questions are customized for the customer’s issue as much as possible, and can be fairly wide-ranging. They may include asking for log files, getting some screenshots, or simply checking the browser and operating system version she’s using. I’ll ask anything that might make a connection to the previous cases I’ve answered—or, just as importantly, confirm that there isn’t a connection. What’s more, a few well-placed questions may save us both from pursuing the wrong path and building additional frustration.
(A note on that closing: “Thank you for your help”–I often end an email this way when I’ve asked for a significant amount of follow up information. After all, I’m imposing on my customer’s time to run any number of tests. It’s a necessary step, but I feel that thanking them is a nice acknowledgment we’re in this together.)
Having said that, though, let’s bring tone back into the mix:
I tried everything in the troubleshooting but I can’t get it to work again. I am on a Mac. I’m working against a deadline. Need this fixed ASAP!!!!
This customer wants answers now. I’ll still ask for more details, but would consider including the solution to the previous problem in my initial reply as well. (But only if doing so can’t make the situation worse!)
I’m sorry that you ran into trouble with this! I’ll need a little more information to see what’s happening here.
[questions]
If you’d like to try something in the meantime, delete the file named xyz.txt. (If this isn’t the cause of the problem, deleting the file won’t hurt anything.) Here’s how to find that file on your computer:
[steps]
Let me know how it goes!
In the best case, the suggestion works and the customer is on her way. If it doesn’t solve the problem, you will get more information in answer to your questions and can explore other options. And you’ve given the customer an opportunity to be involved in fixing the issue, and some new tools which might come in handy again in the future.
Bring in help
The support software I use counts how many emails the customer and I have exchanged, and reports it in a summary line in my inbox. It’s an easy, passive reminder of how long the customer and I have been working together on a problem, especially first thing in the morning when I’m reacquainting myself with my open support cases.
Three is the smallest number I’ll see there: the customer sends the initial question (1 email); I reply with an answer (2 emails); the customer confirms the problem is solved (3 emails). But the most complicated, stickiest tickets climb into double-digit replies, and anything that stretches beyond a dozen is worthy of a cheer in Slack when we finally get to the root of the problem and get it fixed.
While an extra round of questions and answers will nudge that number higher, it gives me the chance to feel out the technical comfort level of the person I’m helping. If I ask the customer to send some screenshots or log files and he isn’t sure how to do that, I will use that information to adjust my instructions on next steps. I may still ask him to try running a traceroute on his computer, but I’ll break down the steps into a concise, numbered list, and attach screenshots of each step to illustrate it.
If the issue at hand is getting complicated, take note if the customer starts to feel out of their depth technically—either because they tell you so directly or because you sense a shift in tone. If that happens, propose bringing some outside help into the conversation:
Do you have a network firewall or do you use any antivirus software? One of those might be blocking a connection that the software needs to work properly; here’s a list of the required connections [link]. If you have an IT department in-house, they should be able to help confirm that none of those are being blocked.
or:
This error message means you don’t have permission to install the software on your own computer. Is there a systems administrator in the office that may be able to help with this?
For email-based support cases, I’ll even offer to add someone from their IT department to the thread, so we can discuss the problem together rather than have the customer relay questions and answers back and forth.
Similarly, there are occasionally times when my way of describing things doesn’t fit how the customer understands them. Rather than bang our heads against our keyboards, I will ask one of my support colleagues to join the conversation from our side, and see if he can explain things more clearly than I’ve been able to do.
We appreciate your business. Please call again
And then, o frabjous day, you get your reward: the reply which says the problem has been solved.
That worked!! Thank you so much for saving my day!
I wish I could send you some cookies!
If you were here, I would give you my tickets to Star Wars.
[Reply is an animated gif.]
Sometimes the reply is a bit more understated:
That fixed it. Thanks.
Whether the customer is elated, satisfied, or frankly happy to be done with emailing support, I like to close longer email threads or short, complicated issues with a final thanks and reminder that we’re here to help:
Thank you for the update; I’m glad to hear that solved the problem for you! I hope everything goes smoothly for you now, but feel free to email us again if you run into any other questions or problems. Best,
Then mark that support case closed, and move on to the next question. Because even with the most thoughtfully designed software product, there will always be customers with questions for your capable support team to answer.
Tone, ask, help, thank
So there you have it: TAHT. Pay attention to tone; ask questions; bring in help; thank your customer.
(Lack of) catchy mnemonics aside, good customer support is about listening, paying attention, and taking care in your replies. I think it can be summed up beautifully by this quote from Pamela Marie (as tweeted by Chris Coyier):
Golden rule asking a question: imagine trying to answer it
Golden rule in answering: imagine getting your answer
You and your teammates are applying a variation of this golden rule in every email you write. You’re the software ambassadors to your customers and clients. You get the brunt of the problems and complaints, but you also get to help fix them. You write the apologies, but you also have the chance to make each person’s experience with your company or product a little bit better for next time.
I hope that your holidays are merry and bright, and may all your support inboxes be light.",2015,Elizabeth Galle,elizabethgalle,2015-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/being-customer-supportive/,process
59,Animating Your Brand,"Let’s talk about how we add animation to our designs, in a way that’s consistent with other aspects of our brand, such as fonts, colours, layouts and everything else.
Animating is fun. Adding animation to our designs can bring them to life and make our designs stand out. Animations can show how the pieces of our designs fit together. They provide context and help people use our products.
All too often animation is something we tack on at the end. We put a transition on a modal window or sliding menu and we often don’t think about whether that animation is consistent with our overall design.
Style guides to the rescue
A style guide is a document that establishes and enforces style to improve communication. It can cover anything from typography and writing style to ethics and other, broader goals. It might be a static visual document showing every kind of UI, like in the Codecademy.com redesign shown below.
UI toolkit from “Reimagining Codecademy.com” by @mslima
It might be a technical reference with code examples. CodePen’s new design patterns and style guide is a great example of this, showing all the components used throughout the website as live code.
CodePen’s design patterns and style guide
A style guide gives a wide view of your project, it maintains consistency when adding new content, and we can use our style guide to present animations.
Living documents
Style guides don’t need to be static. We can use them to show movement. We can share CSS keyframe animations or transitions that can then go into production. We can also explain why animation is there in the first place.
Just as a style guide might explain why we chose a certain font or layout, we can use style guides to explain the intent behind animation. This means that if someone else wants to create a new component, they will know why animation applies.
If you haven’t yet set up a style guide, you might want to take a look at Pattern Lab. It’s a great tool for setting up your own style guide and includes loads of design patterns to get started.
There are many style guide articles linked from the excellent, open sourced, Website Style Guide Resources. Anna Debenham also has an excellent pocket book on the subject.
Adding animation
Before you begin throwing animation at all the things, establish the character you want to convey.
Andrex Puppy (British TV ad from 1994)
List some words that describe the character you’re aiming for. If it was the Andrex brand, they might have gone for: fun, playful, soft, comforting.
Perhaps you’re aiming for something more serious, credible and authoritative. Or maybe exciting and intense, or relaxing and meditative. For each scenario, the animations that best represent these words will be different.
In the example below, two animations both take the same length of time, but use different timing functions. One eases, and the other bounces around. Either might be good, depending on your needs.
Timing functions (CodePen)
Example: Kitman Labs
Working with Kitman Labs, we spent a little time working out what words best reflected the brand and came up with the following:
Scientific
Precise
Fast
Solid
Dependable
Helpful
Consistent
Clear
With such a list of words in hand, we design animation that fits. We might prefer a tween that moves quickly to its destination over one that drifts slowly or bounces.
We can use the list when justifying our use of animation, such as when it helps our customers understand the context of data on the page. Or we may even choose not to animate, when that might make the message inconsistent.
Create guidelines
If you already have a style guide, adding animation could begin with creating an overview section.
One approach is to create a local website and share it within your organisation. We recently set up a local site for this purpose.
A recent project’s introduction to the topic of animation
This document becomes a reference when adding animation to components. Include links to related resources or examples of animation to help demonstrate the animation style you want.
Prototyping
You can explain the intent of your animation style guide with live animations. This doesn’t just mean waving our hands around. We can show animation through prototypes.
There are so many prototype tools right now. You could use Invision, Principle, Floid, or even HTML and CSS as embedded CodePens.
A login flow prototype created in Principle
These tools help when trying out ideas and working through several approaches. Create videos, animated GIFs or online demos to share with others. Experiment. Find what works for you and work with whatever lets you get the most ideas out of your head fastest. Iterate and refine an animation before it gets anywhere near production.
Build up a collection
Build up your guide, one animation at a time.
Some people prefer to loosely structure a guide with places to put things as they are discovered or invented; others might build it one page at a time – it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you collect animations like you would trading cards. Or Pokemon. Keep them ready to play and deliver that explosive result.
You could include animated GIFs, or link to videos or even live webpages as examples of animation. The use of animation to help user experience is also covered nicely in Val Head’s UI animation and UX article on A List Apart.
What matters is that you create an organised place for them to be found. Here are some ideas to get started.
Logos and brandmarks
Many sites include some subtle form of animation in their logos. This can draw the eye, add some character, or bring a little liveliness to an otherwise static page. Yahoo and Google have been experimenting with animation on their logos. Even a simple bouncing animation, such as the logo on Hop.ie, can add character.
The CSS-animated bouncer from Hop.ie
Content transitions
Adding content, removing content, showing and hiding messages are all opportunities to use animation. Careful and deliberate use of animation helps convey what’s changing on screen.
Animating list items with CSS (CSSAnimation.rocks)
For more detail on this, I also recommend “Transitional Interfaces” by Pasquale D’Silva.
Page transitions
On a larger scale than the changes to content, full-page transitions can smooth the flow between sections of a site. Medium’s article transitions are a good example of this.
Medium-style page transition (Tympanus.net)
Preparing a layout before the content arrives
We can use animation to draw a page before the content is ready, such as when a page calls a server for data before showing it.
Optimistic loading grid (CodePen)
Sometimes it’s good to show something to let the user know that everything’s going well. A short animation could cover just enough time to load the initial content and make the loading transition feel seamless.
Interactions
Hover effects, dropdown menus, slide-in menus and active states on buttons and forms are all opportunities. Look for ways you can remove the sudden changes and help make the experience of using your UI feel smoother.
Form placeholder animation (Studio MDS)
Keep animation visible
It takes continuous effort to maintain a style guide and keep it up to date, but it’s worth it. Make it easy to include animation and related design decisions in your documentation and you’ll be more likely to do so. If you can make it fun, and be proud of the result, better still.
When updating your style guide, be sure to show the animations at the same time. This might mean animated GIFs, videos or live embedded examples of your components.
By doing this you can make animation integral to your design process and make sure it stays relevant.
Inspiration and resources
There are loads of great resources online to help you get started. One of my favourites is IBM’s design language site.
IBM’s design language: animation design guidelines
IBM describes how animation principles apply to its UI work and components. They break down the animations into five categories of animations and explain how they apply to each example.
The site also includes an animation library with example videos of animations and links to source code.
Example component from IBM’s component library
The way IBM sets out its aims and methods is helpful not only for their existing designers and developers, but also helps new hires. Furthermore, it’s a good way to show the world that IBM cares about these details.
Another popular animation resource is Google’s material design.
Google’s material design documentation
Google’s guidelines cover everything from understanding easing through to creating engaging and useful mobile UI.
This approach is visible across many of Google’s apps and software, and has influenced design across much of the web. The site is helpful both for learning about animation and as an showcase of how to illustrate examples.
Frameworks
If you don’t want to create everything from scratch, there are resources you can use to start using animation in your UI. One such resource is Salesforce’s Lightning design system.
The system goes further than most guides. It includes a downloadable framework for adding animation to your projects. It has some interesting concepts, such as elevation settings to handle positioning on the z-axis.
Example of elevation from Salesforce’s Lightning design system
You should also check out Animate.css.
“Just add water” — Animate.css
Animate.css gives you a set of predesigned animations you can apply to page elements using classes. If you use JavaScript to add or remove classes, you can then trigger complex animations. It also plays well with scroll-triggering, and tools such as WOW.js.
Learn, evolve and make it your own
There’s a wealth online of information and guides we can use to better understand animation. They can inspire and kick-start our own visual and animation styles. So let’s think of the design of animations just as we do fonts, colours and layouts. Let’s choose animation deliberately, making it part of our style guides.
Many thanks to Val Head for taking the time to proofread and offer great suggestions for this article.",2015,Donovan Hutchinson,donovanhutchinson,2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/animating-your-brand/,design