The UI & UX Tips Collection [mrcndrw.]
Creating beautiful, but also practical UIs takes time, with a lengthy amount of design revisions along the way.
But by making just a few simple, and quick adjustments to your designs you can improve the end-result massively.
This article lists a collection of popular UI & UX tips that can, with little effort, help improve both your designs, and the overall user experience.
Each tip succinctly described and clearly illustrated. All 33 of them.
Example: Tip #15. Darken up your text on light backgrounds. Ignore the ‘cool kids’.
Site Redesign as a Continuous Process [Kraken Data]
Every 3-5 years we hear “The site needs a refresh, a redesign – something!”. You come up with some fantastic new looks, shiny new buttons, fancy form animation. Everyone agrees — it looks fantastic. The site is launched, the first analytics data starts to come through and… the key metrics are down.
What has caused it? Is it just a “settling in period”? Is something broken? Is it the redesign? That’s when the problems inherent in a site redesign become apparent.
If you don’t carry forward the site features that currently work well you are basically throwing money down the drain and given that many sites opt for a redesign every 3-4 years, that’s a lot of potential for feature/revenue loss.
Instead, do it step by step, measuring everything along the way. You’ll save a lot of money and frustration this way.
The Mind Of a Brilliant Trend Seeker – Rob Sullivan [In Bed With Social]
The world keeps evolving, and we keep having trends all year, decade, and century round. We love to see people who can actually spot trends before they happen.
This is an interview with Rob Sullivan, CEO of Profecia, a research firm specializing in detecting emerging trends. He talks about his passion for trends and explains his “unconventional tricks” to spot emerging, not-so-obvious trends.
Tips for detecting trends?
There’s a ton mentioned in the interview, some are very obvious but not something you consciously think about, so it’s sometimes good to remind yourself. Here are just a few.
- To test demand for something I post in a place where I know my target audience is but make it non-salesy, for example if I want to start a supplement brand for drummers (expand out to more musician types over time), I’ll post product mockups/sketches on the drumming sub-reddit or a drumming Facebook group, if I post a bunch of times and get barely any attention on it I’ll know it’s a dud or just not connecting from an emotional or needs-based POV with who I’m going after. If it does get attention, DMs, comments showing desire to buy, I can start getting initial customers from there.
- Unicornads.com is a great resource for spying on ad strategies of big and up and coming brands in lots of consumer verticals.
- From more of an investing and big CPG brand POV, one really cool trick I’ve seen used is tracking order numbers. If you’re MyProtein for example, you might have been able to see how Huel was progressing by looking at the difference between order numbers. E.g. Month 1 – your order is #1000, month 2 – your order is #1,500, month 3 it is #2,400. If the difference is increasing all the time you know you have a brand that is moving quickly. I’ve proposed to a couple of big CPG brands, to ‘test’ a basket of 100 challenger brands or something, order minimally priced things 1x per month and see if there are order #s, if there are you can track it over time. This is one way how you spot those disruptors in the long-tail.
- Looking at trending words on Urban Dictionary and then cross-referencing them in Google Trends or IG/TikTok tags is useful. This can help you spot the next ‘simp’ , ‘karen’ or ‘ok boomer’ and other things to stay on top of how language is changing or being used.
There’s much more in the full article, including some not-so-obvious emerging trends or where to draw inspiration from.
How To Write Effective Email Preheaders [Email Mastery]
The preheader is one of the most underrated parts of an email. Everyone focuses on the subject line, and it is critical, but another critical element is the preheader. The truth is, if you’re not crafting your preheader before you send an email, it’s actively working against you.
How to consistently craft effective preheaders?
- Build anticipation
- Keep it under 55 characters
- Support the subject line
- Don’t repeat the subject line
- Personalize it (when appropriate)
Clarity by Microsoft
Did you know that Microsoft offers a 100% free alternative to Hotjar? Meet Clarity.
Session playbacks, heatmaps, insights (e.g., sessions with clicks that go nowhere, rage clicks, and excessive scrolling).
Free and GDPR compliant, too. No reason to not try it out.
And no, it’s not a sponsored placement, I’m just sharing a useful tool. But if someone at Microsoft wants to pay for it, let me know 🙂
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Until next Thursday!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. Investigating sessions with rage clicks is very useful. These sessions can uncover what heatmaps or analytics won’t tell you.
