UX Lift links roundup – the best UX and design links from the last few weeks

Hi, thanks for subscribing and welcome to the first newsletter of 2024.

Even though the newsletter has a bit quiet lately, I’ve been busy rebuilding the UX Lift website from scratch and working on a new feature I’m really excited about: Search. Fancy AI-powered search. Ask it a UX question and with a bit of AI magic it’ll write you a summary and suggest relevant articles from the directory.

Please do give it a try, it’s very experimental and probably full of bugs, but I’d love to hear how you get on with it and whether you find it useful.

It’s also the first edition on a new email platform – it’s taken a while to get everything sorted, but I was keen to not do another issue on Substack, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, this is the UX Lift links roundup and here are the links:

Articles

Airfoil – Another excellent article from Bartoz Ciechanowski, this time on the principles of flight. Gold standard for using the Web as an interactive medium for explaining concepts.

A web designer’s accessibility advocacy toolkit – Strategies and selling points to help you encourage and advocate for accessibility in your place of work.

Attitudinal vs. behavioural research in UX – Attitudinal research captures user opinions and feelings in the form of self-reported data; behavioral research observes user actions.

Chat GPT and tone – avoid sounding like a robot – Prompting tips for more natural-sounding text.

The rebalancing of Design Management – Good design management should be just as much about managing the work as managing the people.

Is it the designer’s responsibility if an app is addictive? – What responsibility do we have as designers for the products we create?

Cool tools

Linearity Move – Free motion graphics app for Mac and iPad, from the people behind Vectornator, now called Linearity Curve.

Procreate Dreams – Keyframe animation app from Procreate. Very much a first release, but an absolute steal for a £20 one-off purchase.

Jitter – Jitter enables creators and teams to easily design stunning animated content and interfaces.

Fable – The modern creative studio. Fable is where teams design, animate, and scale meaningful creative work.

(This has accidentally become an animation special, so honourable mentions should also go to Rive, Lottielab and Cavalry.)

Cool stuff

Downpour – This is great. Make and share super-simple point-and-click games on your phone. Exactly what the Web should be.

Betterverse – A library of games designed to imagine a better future.

SDXL Lightning – Generate janky AI images faster than you can type.

The Pudding Cup – Call for entries for the best non-commercial visual and data-driven stories published in 2023.

Information is Beautiful Awards 2023 – Collecting the best infographics of the year.

Social Justice Kittens calendar 2024 – Cute kittens bravely speaking out about the hottest topics of the day.

Sora – New text to video model from OpenAI. Impressive but deep in the depths of the uncanny valley. Check out the chair video, yikes.