At work we have a small external consultancy which don't appear to have much UX/usability experience. For example, their primary approach so far to responsive design has been to have a mobile breakpoint for font sizes (usually expressed in px, to boot) for heading tags, and nothing else. Even text scaling is a foreign concept to them.
We are going to release a new forms system, and they've submitted mockups of what they envision for the form look and feel. Besides the obviously faulty approaches of using placeholder text as labels, floating the label above the form when a user clicks in it, etc., their least poor mockup has each field with the label floated to appear above and inside the field boundary.
With this approach, padding is used to slide the actually enterable portion of the field down. The field boundary in this particular case is a non-gray color and with rounded corners as well. The net visual impact is of a visual bounded region with no visible field inside of it, and a label inside the top.
For dropdowns, there is however at least a visual cue that there's a field there: the down arrow. Still, where a user would expect to see field boundaries, there are none.
I'm a little concerned at this and not sure how to raise my concerns. A/B testing of this before a full release isn't possible currently, or I'd go there. Politically, my boss's boss loves these consultants, so it'd be dicey to simply express concerns without something to back them up.
I see a lot of studies and blogging about rounded vs. square corners, with studies showing that rounded corners can be more inviting and square corners draw more attention. But here, the concern I have over rounded corners is that, without any other visual cue that "here is a field", the rounded corners and the label inside and at the top directly communicates, "This is NOT a field but an empty region". Is there research or other support for this?
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I am working on an iPhone app (Swift and Storyboard) and I would like to show some text, e.g. the price of a product people can buy, inside a box, as shown in the image. Nothing special, just an image of a box, with a UILabel on top of it, vertically entered, so the text fits nicely within the box.
This is fine if only numbers are used, but if the text includes (lowercase) letters, the letter is not centered (example in red).
I know that this is how fonts work, and it depends on the baseline and ascender/descender of the character, etc.
But what I would like to do, is vertically center each individual character, so that a text like "200 p" ends up looking like the example in blue.
I quite extensively searched the internet and tried something myself with UILabel and a little bit of CoreText, but until now didn't find a solution to this.
You would think (well, I would think), that this kind of problem would already been solved, but I am unable to find it.
Does anybody know how to do this? So vertically center the characters in a string so that their (visual) vertical centers line up. Or is there maybe some 3rd party library that is able to do this?
I've been playing around with the auto-layout feature of XCode 6 in developing a Swift application for the iPhone.
It works well for a small number of controls but I now find myself with a section on the screen which will consist of a matrix of eight by eight small text controls (in portrait mode) of the form 7☐ and 42☑ (all three characters), each which can be selected by the user (toggling the checkbox).
I'm wondering what's the best way to handle this. I started by simply laying out all sixty-four text controls but this quickly became a nightmare in trying to join them all together with constraints.
I then wondered whether it would be easier to have one text control in a fixed-width font (or in a font where all digits are the same width and a space character of that width is also available) so I could control the layout manually (with newlines). The downside of that is that I'll then need to perform hit-testing on the control to see which item should be toggled.
Both these approaches have the downside that they don't adjust well when switching to landscape mode or to other resolution changes.
So my question is, how do I handle this in a way that can take full advantage of auto layout (i.e., minimal work for the developer). Ideally what I'm looking for is something like the Java Swing FlowLayout container, to which I can just insert those text controls in order, and it will fill it out as if it's a book (populate top line, left to right, then next line and so on).
If you have a matrix like layout and you want it to flow like the FlowLayout from Swing, you can use a UICollectionView.
I think that matches best what you are trying to achieve.
I'm using an UISlider for selecting different variants (fragrances to give you an idea) from a group of 12. The slider is about half a screen wide (on iPhone). Comparing to choosing a continuous value when precision is not so important, I imagine users may have difficulty with choosing a specific variant. I chose the slider because it is more uniform and also because the picker would take too much space. Could it be a reason of rejection of an app from apple store? (I haven't submitted yet.)
Almost certainly okay. Is the selection discrete or continuous? A set of discrete choices along a continuum could be a great application of a slider, with a couple caveats:
1) If the choices are really discrete, adjust the slide position after a drag to the nearest choice - like paging in a scroll view.
2) The blue fill on the left side represents an increasing quantity. Does your model have one? e.g. Let's say there are four beverage sizes on the menu, and the discrete positions represent a size the customer can order, smallest to largest. The blue bar here tells you how much beverage is going to be in the cup (even cooler if you rotate it 90 degrees to fill up towards y==0). But how about selecting a season: (spring summer fall winter)? There's certainly a discrete choice on a continuum, but what does the blue fill mean? Days of the year? Not really.
In the seasonal selection instance, I'd be tempted to write my own slider, just like Apple's but with no blue fill. Then again, once you've decided to custom build, you can be less influenced by the standard control.
Here's my anecdotal do and don't list for Apple approval (mostly don't): don't crash, don't call private apis, don't do demo + up-sell, don't copyright infringe, don't interfere with apple business objectives - like sell add-on content outside of the store, do something cool and simple.
But minor slider abuse isn't on my list. Good luck.
Any ideas why this page: http://mpdteam.net/projects.html is flashing when it scrolls? I've determined it's due to the background of the main content container, but why? is it a eye-trick, an image flaw, a browser flaw, or a code flaw? The code is easily viewable with view source or dev tools.
Let me know if you need anymore info. thanks.
(also, feel free to re-tag. i'm having a mind-blank for good tags)
It's because it uses finely spaced grey and white lines.
It is perhaps an example of the Moiré pattern, although this is more typically reserved for two overlapping grids at different angles.
I always assumed on a PC this occurred because of the redraw time between the two colours, and how finely spaced the lines are. The lines not perfectly aligning with pixels (e.g. anti-aliasing) would further enhance the flickering effect.
To fix it, try changing the size of the bands (e.g. try zooming out or in on the current page, and moving the browser, and note how you get reduced and even none of the described flickering effect).
Alternatively, you may want to apply a blur such that the difference between bands was softened (not sure if this would necessarily help).
Another suggestion that research yields is that it is due to background redrawing/scaling. However, a fixed background (as compared to a repeating one) isn't particularly applicable to your page.
In any case, for an in-depth discussion of some of the concepts involved, check out this awesome page (http://www.techmind.org/lcd/)
Please pardon my lack of Photoshop skills, but I'm curious what type of strategy Apps like Facebook and AP Mobile News are using for the 'label slider' in their applications. Here's a quick snippet outlining what I'm talking about as I'm sure the name I'm labeling the utility as is being butchered: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/57676/slider.jpg
Essentially the user can touch the label and glide it along the X axis. It has a smooth bounce effect also once it hits the edges. This gives quite a bit more real estate if you need to present more on the screen than what your portrait mode allows for and is thus very valuable.
Is it a matter of just creating a UILabel that's wider than the screen with a bit of Touch API + Core Animation? Would love insight on how to start tackling this thing.
You'll most likely want to use a UIScrollView, with a UILabel as its content view. Size the label appropriately to your content, and then set the contentSize property of the scrollview to that size.
I created a similar control, and it's much easier than you think. It's just a UIScrollView with a series of UIButtons added to it. You could use labels instead of buttons - just depends on the feel you want. I think Facebook is probably using labels for theirs.
In any case, you'll probably want to use a series of components rather than one component (which is what Ben suggested) in the event that you want to, say, style the "selected" label differently from the others. It also makes hit detection a little easier.
You get the bounce effect for free by default - you may have noticed that most scroll views in iPhone apps do the same thing. It can be turned off as well.