Yearly Archives: 2014

User Personas and UI Design

Personas are rooted in thorough research and used to create a portrait of your user’s needs and characteristics. While your product may have tens of thousands of users, most of them share similar needs and characteristics. User demographic research and user testing will be among the first steps in creating several workable personas. It is…

Areteworks has moved!

Areteworks, home of innovative and intuitive user interface design solutions, has changed locations. Our new address is: 30700 Russell Ranch Road Westlake Village, CA 91362 Come by and visit us today!

Emotional responses in User Interface Design

UI Designers used to concentrate on the logical factors in their user interface systems. Navigational organization, graphical layouts and engineering constraints often used to be the only things to dictate the look and feel of the product. The evolution of mobile devices and their users—particularly the popularity and intimacy inherent in the interaction between them—has…

Achieving sophistication in UI Design through Minimalism

A popular design trend in user interface design is using minimalism to not only give an intuitive clarity to your user interface system but to also to give the interface a noticeable level of aesthetic sophistication. The benefits of a clean, elegant user interface goes beyond ease of use and understanding. A well-designed minimalistic user…

Icons and button labels in User Interface Design

Icons, in many ways, work similar to bullet points. Both can make information easier to find and scan, as long as they’re placed in the right spot. Just as a bullet point will draw attention from the rest of the text on a page, icons will draw attention from the rest of the text on…

Localization and UI Design

When creating a user interface system, it is important to design it in a way that is easily adaptable to localization. Many design decisions you make in the early stages of a product’s development will affect your efforts to localize the UI for other countries and languages. Some design areas to keep in consideration include…

The importance of contrast in flat user interface design

Within the confines of a flat UI, contrast is essential. Many flat user interfaces rely on contrast to emphasize interactivity and visual hierarchy. To make the interface as intuitive and innovative as possible, the immediate impact of contrasting graphical styles convey can solve a long list of UI issues. Because of this, generating the proper…

Utilizing blur in User Interface Design

With space limitations of mobile devices affecting how a user interface can convey the levels and layers of its features, more and more designers are incorporating the blurring of graphics on certain layers within the UI of applications. Giving the appearance of depth by blurring the elements beneath the top level of features, it’s an…

UI Design and User Experience quotations

“The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.” – Edward Tufte “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the…

Interaction14 Interaction Design conference

The seventh annual conference Interaction14, hosted by the Interaction Design Association, will be taking place February 4-8, 2014 in Amsterdam. The conference concentrates on the multiple relationships and emerging languages that are part of the broad scope of disciplines that Interaction Design interconnects with, such as GUI Design, Industrial Design, Ethnography, User Experience Design and…

The mobile-first approach to User Interface Design

UI design is increasingly going in the direction of a “mobile first” philosophy: where the interface is designed for mobile applications first, and desktop second. With the rise in use of mobile devices, having your user interface system function on as many platforms as possible is a must. One benefit of having a mobile-first design…