5-Card Friday
A Bi-Weekly Update from the ITS UX Team
The cognitive overload happening on your screen right now
How app icons are fighting for our lower attention spans.
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The cognitive overload happening on your screen right now
The most recent, controversial Google app icon redesign sparked a discussion around the direction in which digital product icons are moving in general.
App icons have to be brighter, more colorful, and as vibrant as humanly possible. They practically jump out at you. Companies simply cannot afford their products being “missed”, or used rarely because the competition is screaming for attention much louder.
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2020: UI and UX Trends You Can’t Miss
Do you remember when trends such as "flat design" and "skeumorphism" used to be popular? Well, a lot has changed over the past year with regards to what's trendy with UX and UI design.
This article from Loop11 explores some of the most important UI and UX trends of 2020.
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UX & UI Trends of 2020
2020 is an interesting year for UI and UX designers. All the trends are clearly pointing at the use of older design tendencies such as photography and modern things 3D interfaces.
Learn about some of the UX/UI trends of 2020 in this article, including:
- Dark mode
- Subtle motion
- Breathtaking 3D elements
- Element layering
- Neomorphism
- Large images
- Quality photography with textures
- A blend of photos and graphics
- Data visualization
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From tasks to tricks: The UX of Among Us
Delving deeper into the design behind the “who-did-it?” mystery game in space.
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From tasks to tricks: the UX of Among Us
The video game has taken off over the past few months. Many popular video game influencers are posting gameplay live streams and videos. YouTube reports that videos about Among Us have accumulated over four billion views in September. Videos on TikTok that used #AmongUs accumulated over 13 billion views to this day. Currently, the video game has 60 million active users. Success was not made overnight, however. The average amount of active users in 2018 was about 30–50 users on average.
The fun of being a crewmate or impostor comes from the game’s interactivity, simplicity, and fast-paced conversations with other players. Let’s analyze the pros and cons of the game design.
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New Custom Dimensions & Data Studio Report
Custom dimensions in Google Analytics (GA) can be used to collect and analyze data that GA doesn't automatically track.
We've had custom dimension set up for the MyAPA pages for years now, tracking whether users are logged in or not on each page, Member Type, and Member Entitlements. Having this data for each page allows us to understand the users better (e.g., who exactly is engaging on the MyAPA Home Portal?).
Learn more about our newest custom dimensions and details about the Data Studio report on the back of this card.
New Custom Dimensions & Data Studio Report
As part of the "Monthly GA/GSC Report" in Data Studio, a new report has been made to show the basic page metrics for some new custom dimensions that were set up in Google Tag Manager (GTM): Topics, Content Type, Content Year, Content Month, and Content Day.
Basically, setting up custom dimensions in GA/GTM involves printing JSON to each page in a "datalayer," and then custom variables set up in GTM along with custom settings for the GA tag which correspond to "indexes" set up at the GA property level. The custom dimension data is sent to the GA reporting for each page that has it.
The stress topics page is an example of a page on www.apa.org that has custom dimensions, and on this page you can see the datalayer showing the Custom Dimensions.
If you want to learn more about custom dimensions, read more about them in GA's documentation.
In the new Data Studio report, you can drill down from a custom dimension the pages which have the custom dimension by right-clicking on a row (note: it's best to use Google Chrome for the Data Studio reports). You will find filters for each of the custom dimensions (along with filters for session metrics) at the top of the report. Also, for the Topics custom dimension, you can do a "contains" search to find any pages with a specific topic (this specific custom dimension is returned as an array in the reports).
View the Report
10 Best Web Design Books Ever Written
2020 is coming to a close, so it's always fun to see the "best of" articles that come out at the end of the year.
If you ever need web design inspiration or tips on designing a website, any one of the 10 books described in this article are guaranteed to get you off to a great start.
Some of the topics explored in this collection of web design books include responsive web design, mobile design, HTML and CSS, and the basics of user experience.
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10 Best Web Design Books Ever Written
Author James Baxter on the Loop11 site put together an awesome list of his 10 favorite web design books, several of them focusing on user experience.
These books include:
- Web Design All-in-one for Dummies
- Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3
- Visual Quickstart Guide
- UX for Beginners: A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons
- Mobile Design Book
- Designing with the Mind in Mind
- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common-sense Approach to Web Usability
- Web Development and Design Foundations
- HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites
- Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide
This list really has some web design and UX classics in it.
"Even the sharpest knives need to be filed every now and then. Whether you’re a newbie or an expert at web design, you have to keep up with the latest hacks and technology."
- James Baxter
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