30: A stark difference in design
Happy Weekend! Last week’s read had a 45% open rate. The most popular link was The Slippery Slope of In-app Messaging. 💌
Tidbits
1. How to design goal-oriented user onboarding in 4 steps
Love articles that debunk the latest fad or trends in design simply because they make it okay to say “Following trends doesn’t always convert.” and forces designers to reassess the people using their product and how it’s being used.
A few takeaways from this article…
The average app loses up to 71% of its users in the 90 days.
Focusing on helping your users achieve their goals can help you identify which in-product actions to build your onboarding around to drive users to your core value as efficiently as possible.
If users are not engaging with your content and just swiping through your onboarding screens, you are actually adding friction and risk undermining your product’s true value in the process.
2. Video: How to Design a Better Form
Plain and simple: There are a lot of forms in government, and many of them would benefit from better design. In this video, Caroline Jarrett actually explores a curriculum she’s working on about how to design a form. And she asks for feedback about whether the curriculum contains the right topics and whether it might be useful in U.S. government.
3. Helvetica, re-designed.
Consisting of 48 fonts and three optical sizes, the typeface has been produced from size-specific drawings and with size-specific spacing and is the first redesign in 35 years of what many argue is the world's most ubiquitous font, Helvetica.
Every character has been redrawn and refit, and a host of useful alternates have been added to help brands meet modern-day branding challenges.
What do you think of Monotype’s re-design? Do you think it was necessary? What do you love most about it?
4. Designing for People? Use People Language.
An awesome reality-check post from Julie Zhou on the way we as designers (and product people in general) talk about the work we’re doing, and the impact (both good and bad) it can have on the product and in turn user.
Designing for people? Talk about it in people first language.
How do we increase usage of this feature? => What would make this feature more valuable for people?
Bookworms
+ It Didn't Start with You
Mother and offspring live in a biological state that has much in common with addiction. When they are parted, the infant does not just miss its mother. It experiences a physical and psychological withdrawal...not unlike the plight of a heroin addict who goes cold turkey.
This book on how inherited family trauma shapes us sheds light not only on the why but also how to combat the roots and their effects that come with the shaping—from depression and anxiety to ADHD and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
”...before your mother was even born, your mother, grandmother and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body—three generations sharing the same biological environment.”
Mind = blown.
What’s new from Stark
+ New-ish: DRAGGGGABBBLEEE WINDOWSSS ARE BACK!
With this latest update of Stark 2.5
you have the ability to drag your window around again! We’re so so happy with this as it was a burden to those of you simply trying to move it around or use Stark on dual monitors. Trust me, it bugged us too. Thanks so much to everyone who shared concerns and pain points with us.
+ New: Contrast checking with opaque layers
This week we also rolled out the ability to check contrast with opacity. Had us saying “This is pretty damn cool!” quite a few times; especially given the fact that after scouring the internet for products that have this, we found that we’re seemingly the first design and accessibility tool ever to do it.
How does it work?
Turn the fill, text or layer opacity of your foreground element to
< 100%
.Select your additional layer (two, as always).
Run the check from the plugin menu by going to
Plugins > Stark > Contrast Checker
or use the hotkeys / shortcuts feature.
Bam. Look how Stark successfully did color mixing magic, delivering a (hopefully passing) contrast ratio :] See? Told ya. Pretty damn cool.
+ Updated: Contrast check hotkey on Windows
For those of you using Stark in @AdobeXD Windows: With our latest release, the contrast checker hotkey was removed (unintended) because it needed to be altered. Long story.
Regardless, we submitted a new build (Wednesday night) with the updated hotkey `ctrl + shift + Q
`. So you should have had that update available by the time you’re reading this :)
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–Team Stark