We love sharing buttons, and hope you’ll love our newest set of sharing buttons. They’re not only big and beautiful (meaning more shares) they are also responsive sharing buttons.
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Throughout the design and development process for our latest product, AddThis Pro, we made some bold design decisions based on user feedback, and I wanted to share some of the thinking behind them.
Our team works hard to make sure that every tool and feature we develop automatically looks (and works!) great on mobile devices, so our publishers can give visitors a seamless mobile sharing experience. We’ve learned a lot along the way that has helped structure design strategies we use to tackle the mobile web.
Last night we had a solid turnout for the July NoVA UX meetup at AddThis headquarters. Tim Mannino from Kettul Design joined us to give a talk on creating great web application user experiences. Continue reading
These days mobile and tablet rule the web, and we’re realigning our focus to create retina-ready sharing tools at AddThis. There are several trends happening, but we chose to focus on the following principles for Smart Layers: flat design, svgs, and the road to responsive, retina-ready tools. Continue reading
At AddThis we’re passionate about our work and we enjoy spreading the word about topics that interest us. Several of my co-workers organize meetups that are hosted here at AddThis, including the Big Data DC and Cassandra DC groups. Earlier this month my meetup, NoVA UX (Northern Virginia User Experience), celebrated it’s first birthday.
Web sites want to maximize engagement, but it’s hard to guess what each visitor will want to read or buy. Pixels are cheap, so many sites approach this question by adding widget after widget, hoping that a user will find one they want to click on. This is the shotgun approach to boosting engagement. The problem with it is that user attention is expensive, and each additional widget distracts them from your content, products and ads.
At AddThis, we do our homework. We monitor analytics, talk to our publishers, and watch real people use real products. We’re big fans of data-informed design. We believe the best work comes from the powerful combination of creativity and insights.
Today, we’re going to share some insights we’ve discovered in our research that can help you improve the tools on your site to maximize engagement.
For the May NoVA UX meetup, Microsoft Dev Evangelist Andrew Duthie gave the group a presentation on the design thinking behind Windows 8. He described three influences–Bauhaus design, Swiss typography, and motion cinematography–and five design principles that guided the team: Continue reading
Everywhere you look, people are talking about “mobile.”
Mobile-first design, mobile responsive design, mobile apps, mobile sites, etc.
“Mobile” is clearly a handy buzzword for all of the new devices, but…
What does “mobile” actually mean?
On the go?
A small screen?
A touch screen?
Handheld?
Unfortunately, the term “mobile” is used to describe many different things. Continue reading
