Popular Design News of the Week: April 1, 2019 – April 7, 2019

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Apple’s New System Fonts Page

 

Why Cancel Buttons Should Never Have a Color

 

What’s Wrong with Landing Pages

 

Awesome Design Tools

 

Most In-demand Tech Jobs in 2019

 

3 Routines that Made Me a Better UX Designer

 

6 Predictions for Creatives in 2019

 

New Design Tools, Spring 2019

 

Google Doc-based Personal Website

 

A New Religion for Designers

 

DeviantArt Rolls Out Sleek New Look

 

The Matrix Code Came from Sushi Recipes

 

Form Validation in Under an Hour with Vuelidate

 

The Truth About UX/UI Designers

 

Am I the Only One Seeing the ’90s Retro Theme, with the Unicorns and Sparkles?

 

Load Google Fonts Faster in WordPress

 

You Probably Don’t Need that Hip Web Framework

 

Building Spotify’s New Web Player

 

How to Create a Culture of Open Design

 

10 Heuristic Principles for Mobile Interfaces

 

What is Cognitive Overhead in Design and How to Reduce It?

 

The Feedback You Choose not to Give is as Important as the One You do

 

Google Maps Revives Snake for an April Fools Game

 

How ‘Good Design’ Failed Us

 

Orange You Accessible?

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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from Webdesigner Depot https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2019/04/popular-design-news-of-the-week-april-1-2019-april-7-2019/

The Best Payment Gateway for Your ECommerce Site

There are so many decisions you have to make as a web designer and it can sometimes be a tricky balance trying to put all the right elements into place. When you add the ecommerce piece, it gets even more complicated.

According to this infographic by Subscriptionly.net, consumers have very high expectations for ecommerce websites. But if you design it right, there’s a lot of up money up for grabs:

We’re talking trillions of dollars in sales that ecommerce brings in every year. That’s why the decisions you make for your clients’ websites are so important.

Even as the future of ecommerce platforms introduces more advanced and intelligent ways to sell online, one thing will always remain the same:

The need for a strong, secure, and fast ecommerce payment gateway.

The following isn’t going to be your typical guide to learning about leading ecommerce payment gateways. You know which ones I’m talking about:

• Stripe
• PayPal
• Amazon Pay
• Braintree
• Authorize.net

For the most part, they all do the same thing and provide just as secure and stable payment processing as one another.

Instead, this guide will show you what kinds of options you have to work with based on the ecommerce platforms you use to build websites.

The Best Payment Gateway for Your eCommerce Platform

Depending on which website builder solution you use, your choice of payment gateway may differ. So, in order to help you find the best ecommerce payment processing solution, I’m going to break this down based on ecommerce platforms and the options you have to choose from within each.

Let’s start by defining which are the leading ecommerce platforms. Based on market share data from BuiltWith, these are the most popular:

Let’s explore the payment gateway options for the three most common ecommerce platforms:

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is not a standalone solution like the others as it requires WordPress to function. Because of this, you’re going to have a vast number of third-party payment processor integrations to choose from.

WooCommerce, a plugin integration for WordPress itself, comes with a number of payment options upon setup:

As you can see, there are a number of in-person payment methods WooCommerce allows you to use as well as PayPal.

While PayPal is a reputable payment processing resource, this option doesn’t actually allow you to accept payments on your website. Instead, shoppers will be shuttled over to PayPal to make their payments. That might not be a bad thing, for a couple of reasons.

For one, if your client’s business is new, it would be beneficial to leverage the name of a company like PayPal. Rather than leave customers wondering whether it’s safe to shop there, PayPal’s recognizability can help instill trust at checkout.

Secondly, there’s server processing to consider, too. An ecommerce store is already quite sizable and will consume a bunch of bandwidth from your client’s web server. If you try to add a different payment gateway through a plugin to WooCommerce, you could potentially slow down the loading times of your site even further (which can be problematic in WordPress).

Plus, PayPal is a great option regardless of which ecommerce platform you use. Processing fees are low. You can accept credit cards and PayPal payments. It’s super fortified and comes with fraud protection. Plus, it accepts payments from dozens of countries and currencies.

Best Payment Gateway for WooCommerce: PayPal

If your clients are okay with payments being handled on PayPal’s site and servers, then your best bet is to go with the built-in option.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted store builder solution that’s not only easy to use, but helps users build very impressive ecommerce websites in little time. If all your client needs is a store — and they’re not thinking about adding extra website features (like a daily blog, social media feeds, email marketing automation, etc.) — Shopify is a solid choice.

While you can add more “stuff” to a Shopify store, it’ll cost you. And the same goes for its payment gateway options.

When you first install Shopify, you’ll notice that your store is automatically equipped with the Shopify Payments payment gateway. Although it’s labeled as “Shopify”, this payment gateway is powered by Stripe, a leading payment gateway solution in its own right.

If your client is insistent on using a different payment gateway other than Shopify Payments, point this out to them:

In addition to paying the processing fees from the gateway of their choice, they’ll also get hit with an additional fee from Shopify. In some cases, this can effectively double what they have to pay just to accept orders through their Shopify store.

But there’s a lot of good that comes from using Shopify Payments. For instance:

• Lower processing fees
• Fraud protection
• Automatic payment processing integration
• Quick deposit of funds into your account (generally, a couple days)
• A Stripe partnership backing the platform

Best Payment Gateway for Shopify: Shopify Payments / Stripe

Your best bet with Shopify is to use Shopify Payments. In all honesty, there’s no reason not to, unless your client is conducting business from a country the payment gateway doesn’t support.

You can find that information here.

Magento

Magento is the third most popular ecommerce platform. It also happens to be part of the Adobe Commerce and Experience Clouds, which makes it much more than an ecommerce platform. It’s an all-in-one ecommerce business solution where things like design, marketing, business management, CRM, analytics, and more collide.

For larger ecommerce clients, this is a great solution.

Now, because you’re going to be designing a premium shopping experience for a premium client, you really have to make sure you get the payment processing element right.

Out of the box, Magento gives you three payment processing options:

• PayPal
• Braintree
• Authorize.Net

Unless your client’s customers are all in North America, you won’t want to use Braintree. It just doesn’t provide a global reach like the other two options do.

Here’s what it might look like if you were to use Magento’s PayPal integration:

PayPal may seem like the logical solution. It’s a recognizable payment processor. It gives you a number of options for accepting payments — on site or through the Payflow payment gateway on PayPal’s site. And processing fees are reasonable. In all honesty, though, it’s not really built for larger ecommerce shops.

According to this Fundera comparison between PayPal and Authorize.net, Authorize.net is clearly the best choice for clients that sell over $500,000 in goods.

Just keep in mind that your client’s business must be based in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, or Europe. Customers can pay for goods from all around the world, though, and use a large assortment of payment types — credit cards, digital payments like Apple Pay, e-checks, and more.

In addition, you get much more control over payment processing and security than you would with other payment gateways.

Best Payment Gateway for Magento: Authorize.net

Because of the nature of the Magento ecommerce platform, Authorize.net is the clear choice for thriving ecommerce businesses.

Wrap-Up

It might seem odd that I’m recommending you use the payment gateways that your ecommerce platform comes with out of the box when there are so many other options to choose from.

However, there’s a good reason why those gateways were hand-picked and integrated into your ecommerce platform. In addition to having the right kind of features, security, and performance, the deep integration with your store-building software will speed up your workflow.

 

Featured image via Unsplash

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from Webdesigner Depot https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2019/04/the-best-payment-gateway-for-your-ecommerce-site/

DeviantArt Has a Redesign in Beta

Wow. DeviantArt; there’s a blast from the past, where I’m concerned. I used to have an account where I posted my amateur web design, photography, and photomanipulation-based art.

I actually remember making art and website mockups on my PC at home, writing the files to a rewritable CD, and taking them to the local Internet café to post them on DA for feedback. It was the site for all artists and designers, at every skill level. And now, it’s getting redesigned.

Finally.

The site has been pretty much the same for years, with updates generally tweaking the design rather than completely redefining it. But Wix bought the site for $36million back in 2017, and it seems they’ve been working on something very different.

The new redesign has been named “Eclipse”, and the opinion of the community is mixed. It’s intended to be dark, sleek, and aimed at professional creators who’d like to sell their work. While that is certainly one subset of the userbase, a very large and vocal portion of the community is made up of amateurs, hobbyists, and fan artists. These users seem to be less happy.

I’ve listed some of the major changes to the site below, and you can find all the changes on the Eclipse Preview Site.

New Aesthetic

Obviously, there’s the brand new aesthetic for the site. It’s dark, it’s clean, it’s hyper-modern. While it still has hints of green, green will no longer be the dominant color all over the experience.

The current DA home page

I personally like it well enough, but it’s the sort of design I like. Objections raised by the community include the fact that the new design seems to be breaking a lot of the old customization options. Another seems to be the apparent similarity to the design of DeviantArt competitor ArtStation.

I’d include more screenshots of the actual UI, but I don’t have access to the redesign yet (it’s still in Beta), and actual detailed screenshots are almost non-existent. It’s a little weird, actually…

No 3rd Party Ads

DeviantArt has decided that with some forty-million users, they don’t need 3rd party ads. They’re going to advertise their own products and services, and run ads for a few “trusted partners” in their own ad program. For a site this big, that’s not a bad idea. It could seriously cut down on malware.

User Profiles

The big changes here are the introduction of header images (because every site has them now), and masonry layouts for the actually galleries. The header image is a nice touch, I guess, but current users don’t seem to think that’s enough, considering all the other custom profile features that are currently broken.

Deviations

Individual art pieces (known as Deviations) will now have the option of using a background image or pattern to present them. It’s a little hard on the bandwidth, I think, but then again you get to present your art piece much like you would in an actual gallery. It’s an interesting concept.

A small but very important change is that photographers can now “tag” the models in their work (if they have accounts on DeviantArt as well). People usually just linked to their profiles in the image description before, so making this bit of professional behavior a bit easier is actually pretty great.

General Browsing Changes

This redesign seems to be bringing in an algorithm to help people find more art they like. Each individual art piece will be judged by the user’s pre-established tastes, and a private “love meter” will be shown to each user based on how well the art aligns with the algorithm’s idea of the user, which I think is perhaps a bit silly.

I already know when I love something.

You can also now browse several post types separately, including commissions, polls, and status updates from your favorite creators.

Journal and Literature Updates

DeviantArt has supported literature as an art form for a while now, and you can post writing to your gallery. There’s also the Journal, which is basically a profile-specific blog available to each user. Interestingly, Eclipse now provides both of these writing features with a Medium-style WYSIWYG editor. As long as they still allow for custom CSS, I’m calling this a positive change.

Premium Digital Content

DeviantArt has allowed people to buy prints and commission art from other artists for a long time, but now, you can also sell digital content online. You can sell stock photos, Photoshop brushes, basically anything you can think of.

My Opinion

DeviantArt is a community-based site, first and foremost. While I generally like the aesthetic of the redesign, the success of it is going to come down to the people who use it (or not) every day. Right now it seems that a significant portion of the community is unhappy with the upcoming changes as they are.

Now, negative feedback can be loud on the Internet, we all know this. But it seems that, at present, I don’t think this redesign does enough to cater to the millions of people who use the platform as a place for self-expression, rather than to build professional careers in art.

But it’s not hit a full release yet, so that may change. I hope it does.

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from Webdesigner Depot https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2019/04/deviantart-has-a-redesign-in-beta/

3 Essential Design Trends, April 2019

Sometimes design trends take a little while to emerge and sneak up on you, others seem to pop out of the blue all at once. The latter is true of each of our web design trends this month.

Animated image frames, gold metallics and obvious grids seem to be everywhere (and we are guessing you might be taking notice). Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

Animated Image Frame Distortion

The verdict on this trend is still out. Do you love it or hate it?

For a lack of better description, we’ll call this one animated image frame distortion. You’ll know it when you see it for sure. Image frames shift and shape when the mouse gets close to the element.

Some images maintain their positions in the frame with no distortion to the original image while other tend to shape shift with the frame.

The shape movements are pretty cool and the animation is attention grabbing. But are you weirded out when the image in the frame gets distorted? (Personally, I have always been a fan of maintaining the integrity of a photo and tend to like the frame distortion but not on the image.)

Faze Models uses this technique as a focal point with little else on the homepage. The image frame and image distort with hover action, moving from left to right and back. The movement also changes the color of the background, which is pretty nifty.

Jorik, another fashion-based site, uses animation on the image frame from every angle. The photo inside does not change and it almost looks like a 3D layer on top of the background. The best parts of this animation is that it works anywhere on the screen and when your mouse leaves the browser, everything snaps back to the original position.

Baunfire uses animation to tilt image frames as a cue that there’s a click action therein. The technique is more than something designed to grab user attention; it’s designed to help users better understand the functionality of the website and interact with it.

Gold Metallics

You can never go wrong with gold.

It’s classic and strong and creates a sense of importance and luxury.

Maybe that’s why gold is one of the most popular colors in design right now. (Even though it can be exceptionally difficult to use.)

Each of the examples below has mastered how to use gold elements and accents in projects to represent their brands in entirely different ways.

Chateau Margaux matches its gold-branded wine labels to the website design with a simple gold logo, lettering and hints of gold in the images. Using muted backgrounds helps gold emerge from the color palette to create just the sense of luxury that a wine brand emanates.

Crystal Brook Advisers uses gold imagery in the main photo to create a sense of wealth. (Seems like a great option for financial planners.) The palette is striking thanks to so many visual elements with gold or metallic coloring – from the wallet to the keys to money with a golden hue. This is a nice change from the more bland financial websites we often see; it’s a risky color choice that pays off. Not only does the brand create a sense of wealth, it also creates warmth with potential clients.

Hatched uses a gold and bright green color palette with a minimal design scheme. That combination is what makes a color that could otherwise feel dingy, seem metallic. (It’s amazing what the right color combinations and space can do for a design.)

Obvious Grids

Use of grids is at the root of design theory. Every web designer knows that the grid is at the foundation of a solid design.

These trending website designs feature grids that are obvious to even the casual user. And they are stunning.

What’s great about obvious grids is that they can take on so many different shapes and styles. The three featured styles here include a masonry grid, block grid and asymmetrical grid.

The great thing about using grids is that they provide a way to organize complex content in a manageable way. Grid-based styles have been a popular choice for portfolios for that very reason.

What sets these designs apart is that they use grids – not only in an obvious way, but also in a smart way.

Juco Photo uses a masonry grid with photos of all different heights. While the vertical grid is the same, it’s a modern spin on the technique with photos of varying depths. What’s exceptional about it is that the grid never gets messy, partially due to the rainbow style-placement of photos. There’s a lot going on here visually and all of it is good.

We are Yellow uses a traditional grid to showcase projects (yes, another portfolio). The best parts of this grid are the “empty” top left square which give the grid an asymmetrical feel (even though it isn’t) and the hover states for each project image. The simple animations work well and with each other to keep the design interesting.

Marcus Eriksson uses an asymmetrical grid to display varying image elements with a similar style. This design works well because of the minimal nature of the background with the striking nature of each image on display. Even as the viewport changes, the responsiveness of this website design and grid, maintains perfect spacing between elements – a factor that makes you want to keep scrolling to explore more of the design and his work. (You’ll want to scroll, too, to really see how this grid comes together.)

Conclusion

I love it when trends just jump out of new designs, such as the collection this month. And what’s nice is that these are pretty usable techniques. Personally, I am a huge fan of the gridwork featured in the designs above, but the gold color palettes caught my eye in a way that was somewhat unexpected. Animated image frames are interesting; we’ll see if designers respond favorably to them.

What trends are you loving (or hating) right now? I’d love to see some of the websites that you are fascinated with. Drop me a link on Twitter; I’d love to hear from you.

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from Webdesigner Depot https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2019/04/3-essential-design-trends-april-2019/

Firefox Mobile Introduces Left-Handed Browsing

Firefox’s mobile browser’s nightly release has become the first browser to implement a left-handed option in its preferences.

First proposed at the then bi-annual web conference, way back in 1998, the left-handed web protocol was initially envisaged as a way to enable left-handed browsing online. The protocol was never officially adopted, thanks to ambidextrous hardware.

However, the rise of the touch screens has lead to an unexpected revival of the idea, and although still not officially adopted by the W3C, browser manufacturers are beginning to implement it, with Firefox being the first, and Opera expected to follow shortly.

Championed by usability experts like Caitlin Fring, the original left-handed browsing protocol is being reinterpreted for touchscreens:

Back when the web was controlled by a trackpad, or a mouse, there was no use case for a left-handed web, but with the exponential growth of touchscreens across mobile, and desktop devices, we’re finding that it’s increasingly essential for many of our customers.

~Jason Sommer, Senior Usability Designer, Mozilla

What is the Left-Handed Web?

When users browse the web on a touchscreen phone, especially on a larger device, certain areas are easier to tap than others, due to the reach of the user’s thumb. When held in the other hand, the available hit area is mirrored.

Globally, around one in ten people are left-handed, which means that for around 10% of any site’s users, the navigation and CTAs (Calls to Action) are inaccessible.

The LHW (Left-Handed Web) protocol is an option in the browser preferences that enables users to set their browser to invert the horizontal rendering of the page so that elements that appear on the right move to the left, and vice versa. (Elements such as text remain left aligned, and images aren’t flipped.) By repositioning elements based on this preference, hit areas become more accessible.

Webdesignerdepot.com rendered normally in Firefox mobile (left) and with the Left-Handed option enabled (right).

In simple terms, the LHW option—it’s important to note that the LHW is an opt-in preference; only those users that want to enable it will do so—simply flips the layout order of a site; if your logo is in the top left and your hamburger menu the top right, then with the LHW option enabled, your logo will move to the top right, and your hamburger menu to the top left.

Firefox’s implementation has come to market so quickly because it is piggy-backing on the CSS Flexbox’s ability to reverse the horizontal order of items laid out on screen.

What Does the LHW Mean for UX?

One of the biggest issues with the LHW is how different browser manufacturers choose to interpret the recommendations; as no formal recommendation has yet been made, those interpretations are likely to be wildly different.

When CSS Flexbox was introduced, there were radically different interpretations made by browser manufacturers, resulting in the need for numerous browser prefixes. Microsoft in particular implemented a very different set of rules to anyone else. Implementations of the LHW are likely to be even worse.

The most contentious issue is whether navigation should be reversed. Firefox’s implementation does not reverse navigation, so if your site’s header is structured as ‘logo > home > services > about > contact’ then it will be rendered as ‘home > services > about > contact > logo’ (assuming that the logo is a separate element, and the navigation is correctly marked up with a <nav> element).

However, Opera has hinted that its future implementation will reverse navigation, so that a site with a header that reads ‘logo > home > services > about > contact’ will be rendered as ‘contact > about > services > home > logo’. The argument put forward for this approach is that changing the order of elements should not change their context.

At present, we don’t know which way the big browsers—Chrome, Edge, and Safari—will go (or even if they will implement the LHW at all).

We know from numerous user tests that the most effective position for a logo is the top left of the screen. Moving that logo to the top right of the screen for the LHW is likely to impact readability. Advocates of the LHW believe that users will adapt, not least because the only users who will see the web in this way are left-handed users who opt-in, and will see the whole web this way.

What Should Designers Do?

Ultimately, designing for left-handed users is about accessibility, it’s about inclusive design, and it’s just one more way in which we need to design responsively.

At last year’s X Conf in Budapest, Matt Ritchie presented a proposal for a new media query to handle LHW browsing. The idea was to permit fine-tuning of LHW presentation, allowing designers to override critical placement issues, like logo position. However the idea has been widely dismissed as being too easy to override user preferences:

Ultimately, this is about empowering users to interact in a way that is natural to them…providing front-end developers with a tool to overrule those stated preferences borders on the unethical.

~ Caitlin Fring, human-centered designer

In time, workarounds will inevitably be found. Logos for example could be coded into a <nav> element to prevent their reversal, although that would only work with Firefox’s implementation, and not Opera’s version.

One important thing to note is that LHW only impacts rendering in the browser, it does not affect source code. So there will be little to no impact on search engine ranking, and links will continue to be crawled by bots in the same order. However, it may affect a user’s route through a site, and that in turn may impact rankings.

Designers and developers need to work together to ensure they are fully prepped for this change as it begins to be adopted. Consider centralizing logos on mobile devices, so that the logo’s position isn’t changed. Consider switching from horizontal menus to vertical menus so that the order of items isn’t reversed. Finally, ensure that any navigation is correctly marked up in a <nav> element.

The LHW is likely to affect a small percentage of site visits: only 10% of users will benefit from it; it is currently only available in the Firefox mobile nightly; it is an opt-in preference.

Good design is about creating sites that adapt to user needs, not imposing a designer’s preferences on users. It cannot be long until designing for the left-handed is not only a best practice, but is written into inclusivity laws.

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from Webdesigner Depot https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2019/04/firefox-mobile-introduces-left-handed-browsing/