UI / UX (Web apps)

Examples of sites with no-frills UIs

• http://www.azlyrics.com/
• https://www.craigslist.org

Require as little input from the user as possible to provide the user with the desired output

• Rather than requiring a user to create an account, you could just track their browser.
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3940179/detecting-a-unique-anonymous-user
  • http://samy.pl/evercookie/
• WhatsApp creates accounts solely based on the phone number of a user.

Using solid, strong colors to draw the user's attention

• Gmail → 
  • Notice how there are only two areas on the page where they use strong colors as the background: the 'Compose' button and the 'Search' button. And those are really the two most-common actions that a person would be expected to take (aside from reading the list of emails and clicking into one of them). It reminds me of how I would underline the key phrases in my resume to draw the reader's attention to them more quickly.
  • Contrast that with this: , where there are three elements with strong solid-color backgrounds. The selected-template doesn't even correspond to an action that the user would take from this screen, so it seems to go totally against what Gmail did. And I don't think users will be clicking 'Delete' so much that they'll benefit from having such a strong visual guide to that element. I think the 'Save' button makes sense; that seems like a button the users will be clicking a lot from this screen. I think it might also make sense to just have a single 'Add Template' button instead of several of them, and to make that element have a strong solid background.

Show how the user compares to other users as a gentle push

• LastPass → 
  • I like how it tells me how I stack up against other users.

How to make your website not look like crap

• You may have too many colors on your website.
  • Look for every possible source of color and try to get rid of colors until you only have like 3 or 4.
    • Even small things like the borders on textareas and inputs, and the colors of buttons, will contribute to a general sense of "this doesn't look good" if they don't match the 3 or 4 colors you want to use.

Examples of bad UI

• Needing to scroll down to find the main content of interest on a page.
  • Examples:
    • Yahoo Answers: 
      • I need to scroll down to find the answer on a particular page.