Enterprise UX Design

There's this thing about the design community, especially visual designers. They generally prefer to use a Mac for design work. I get it. The first time I saw my company's website on a Mac using Netscape, "Wow!"  I've always been a Windows girl, even for design work. I live in the Seattle area. What do you expect? But seriously, there's more to it than that. My first experience with Mac versus Windows was when I was working as an office administrator in a small business with an open office and no conference room environment. My boss, the owner of the business, met multiple times with a designer to create the logo for the company and I always overheard the meeting conversations. My boss kept telling the designer that when he sent over his mocks and she looked at them on her (Windows) computer, the colors were different than when the designer showed her his work (on his Mac). The designer was forced multiple times to look at her computer screen at the color bein...

Lately I've been loaned out to another group at my company, but not just to another group. I'm having to work with a third-party consultancy helping with a consumer facing application. They had already been working on the project for over a year when I came on board. Because the consultancy's design group was lead by visual designers and they didn't ask our EUX group about our process and tools, I've been forced into using Sketch and all of its accouterments. Sketch is THE most miserable software I have ever used for enterprise UI design, followed by Abstract the version control I was forced into. I happen to be heavy-fingered on the mouse. Because of it, layers unknowingly move around on me constantly. Even when I'm aware, it can happen and I'm trying hard not let it happen. I screwed things up in a master library file royally. But I wasn't alone. 3 of the other 4 designers have done the same. Sketch is probably quite fine for small consumer produc...

Recently one of our UX designers floated the idea of going with a font size smaller than our standard because they needed the extra space. Being the avid researcher I am I went out and started hunting for information on best practice font size on the web or in applications. I mean it's been years. Someone must have done a study. I came across someone else on Stackflow asking the same question , but none of the answers were anything supported. Just unsupported tribal knowledge. To make a long story short I managed to find a great study, The Uncrowded Window of Object Recognition , done by Denis G Pellli and Katharine A. Tillman, 2008. It comes down to this. Letters in a word are an object and must be recognizable by the brain. As you reduce a font, you need to add a little space around the letters so they can be recognized. It really doesn't have anything to do with size. Here's an example in the standard Verdana/Helvetica at 13 pixels: "You saved my life,"...

We've had an on-going discussion at my company about where to place main functional buttons. At one point we were following an application paradigm where all main functional buttons were placed in a menu bar at the top of the page. Prior to that and now we follow a web paradigm where all the buttons are placed at the bottom. We always placed them to the right until one designer started refusing to do this especially with search forms. His reasoning, and rightly so, was that the button was being placed too far to the right and away from the form so that the user was being forced to search for the Search button. When I finally understood my job as an enterprise UX designer, two things changed how I lay buttons out on the page. First, red routes. What is the single main task the user will do on the page? What does that part of their process look? What is the main data and/or inputs they need to do the task? When do they have the data to enter or review so that I arrange that inform...