UX Lift roundup – the best UX links, tools and more from the last few weeks.

Bumper edition this week, so let’s get started…

Articles

Dig in the right places – You’ll only get the good answers if you’re asking the right questions.

Data tables: Four major user tasks – Excellent tips for designing data-heavy interfaces.

8 design guidelines for complex applications – Guidelines for complex-application design, given the shared challenges that designers and researchers face.

Foundations: text descriptions – Writing better text descriptions for better accessibility.

Direct-to-consumer UX benchmark: 5 common pitfalls – Typically well-researched article from Baymard on direct-to-consumer websites.

Let’s get inclusive: designing products for everyone – How to design for inclusivity as a key principle.

Google Slides is actually hilarious – Flashbacks of attempting to make non-terrible presentations in Slides *shudders*.

Cool tools

Interface inventory blueprint – Handy Figma template for collecting and categorising your existing interface elements when creating a design system.

ProsePainter – An interactive tool to ‘paint with words.’ It incorporates guidable text-to-image generation into a traditional digital painting interface.

Hue Tools – Open source toolbox for colours. Mix, blend and create gradients.

Age-positive image library – The Centre for Ageing Better has launched a free library of positive and realistic images of people aged 50 and over.

US Web Design Systems – Excellent design system and principles. The guidelines on colour are great, especially the ‘magic numbers’. Lots to think about.

Cool stuff

Dall-E 2 – OpenAI announce the latest version of their text-to-image AI. From the demos it looks stunningly good. Is this the end of art or just the beginning?

Wilderness Land – Explorable pixel art spreadsheet of interesting websites.

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