Intro to design, UX & Fonts

Introduction

Design and user experience (UX) play essential role in a website if you want to attract users. As a front end developer you don’t have to be an artist, however you need to use your design brain a little bit. Design doesn’t mean just having beautiful and fancy graphics.

Learning Objectives

  • What design is
  • What user experience is
  • The difference between UX and UI
  • The three things UX is meant to focus on
  • What visual hierarchy is and why it is important for websites
  • The primary ways to achieve visual hierarchy
  • The design hierarchy pyramid
  • The CRAP factors of effective layout
  • What A/B Testing is
  • What Web Accessibility (A11y) is and why we should care

Study

Let’s see what user experience is? UX is focusing on three things:

  • effectiveness
  • efficiency
  • and satisfaction.

In other words, when a user visits you website he/she must be able to do what he/she is trying to effectively, efficiently, and with satisfaction. So on one hand you should have the mindset of trying to optimize those three things by talking to your users and on the other hand you need to actually build and measure those things.

Now let’s see what web design is?

Web design is certain more than just building pretty things. It is more about crafting useful and effective experiences for your users.

So you need to focus on these steps:

  1. Make your site fast and reliable
  2. Set up properly the structure and information architecture of the page
  3. Build your user interfaces for optimal user experience
  4. Worry about aesthetics

For the reasons already mentioned it’s probably worth spending a little time to absorb the high level stuff. Don’t go to crazy though. Remember that the goal is to absorb the most important concepts and move on.

And let’s start by watching this recorded live session:

Web Accessibility

Web Accessibility is crucial to the success of all web products and services. Watch the following video about web accessibility, take notes and make sure to keep these rules in mind when developing websites and web applications from now on.

Duration: 35 minutes

User Experience

You are probably familiar with the successful products and services of companies such as Google, IBM and Amazon, but what you might not know is that these companies have based their success and increased their profitability by investing heavily in the UX (User Experience) of their products.

Let’s see how UX can either break a website or make it successful by looking at the following Infographic: UX 101: What is User Experience?

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