Team Roundup #8: What We’re Reading
Team Testomato is always on the hunt for interesting industry news and cool tools from around the web. Here’s another team roundup of our favorite finds from last month.
As some of you might already know, we’re planning to redesign Testomato’s dashboard soon, and as a result, a lot of our recent reads have been focused on UX and design. Reading is for more than staying informed about your industry, it’s also a great way to learn new techniques and get inspired.
731 Slack Users Reveal Why It’s So Addictive
The first part of Hiten Shah’s “open research” project of Slack, coordinated with the help of a group of volunteers. This article takes an in-depth look at the results of a product/market fit survey about Slack that had over 700 participants. The responses revealed interesting stats about how users feel about Stack and what makes the service useful for teams. Shah finishes the analysis with relevant learnings from users and his recommendations for Slack based on the survey data.
Team Tip: Sign up for Hiten’s SaaS Weekly to get a weekly email of useful links about SaaS business.
5 Simple UX Principles to Guide your Product Design
Clark Wimberly assembled a list on Sitepoint of the 5 UX principles he uses to guide his product process. Understanding how and why to make UX decisions is not only important for team discussions, but also helps to ensure your UX decisions make it into the final product.
Here’s a sneak peek at his 5 principles:
- Digestibility – Good design means people just “get it” and don’t waste energy trying to understand a product.
- Clarity – Good design means people understand the actual value of a product without having to be coy or unclear.
- Trust – Good design means people understand why a task is needed before you ask them to complete an action.
- Familiarity – Good design means that people convert, even if it isn’t new or flashy.
- Delight – Good design means people forget that your product is a “product” and are simply happy with your solution.
Read his full list, here.
How to Choose the Right UI Patterns for Your Web Design
Speckyboy is one of our favorite online magazines for informative reads, finding resources, and discovering new techniques. In this tutorial, Jerry Cao shows you how to apply a problem-oriented approach in order to choose the right UI pattern and avoid choosing a layout based on popularity.
Why ‘Mobile First’ May Already Be Outdated
“Mobile screens may still be their most important and dominant channel, but it is not their only one.”
An interesting article from Paul Adams, the VP of Product at Intercom, about why screen size matters more than the device it belongs to. Adams says, focusing on “mobile” in terms of device is a mistake – information via screens is the key idea of the future.
10 Color Inspiration Secrets Only Designers Know About
Canva is one our favorite fast design tools for whipping up simple graphic images. They also have an awesome online “design school”, complete with useful tutorials, a blog, and workshop materials. This useful post by Laura Busche shares 10 color inspiration secrets expert designers use to create stunning color combinations.
Here are a few of our favorite tips:
- Capture color inspiration on-the-g0 using a tool like Photocopa to upload an image and explore its different hues.
- File away your favorite color palettes for later as a screenshot or on Pinterest to make sure you always have a place to get instant color inspiration.
- Stick to 3 or 4 colors and fight the urge to combine an excessive amount of colors. If you have to use more than three, add textures to help tone down the rest.
You can read the full list of tips on Canva’s blog.
What Inspired Us Last Month
Looking for some new sources of inspiration?
- The End of Global CSS – An extremely interesting post about doing away with global CSS and keeping CSS local with Webpack.
- Announcing GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub – Chris Ball‘s post explaining his new project GitTorrent, why it’s important, and how it could work. It’s also worth checking out the discussion on Hacker News.
- Wee is a lightweight front-end framework for logically building complex, responsive web projects
- A collection of 300+ Free Flat Color Icons from Icons8.
- Pexels provides over 2,500 free stock photos and adds 70 new high-resolution photos each week.
What would you add to our roundup? We’d love to hear your suggestions!
Share with us in the comments or on Facebook. You can also find us @testomatocom.
