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

Articles

Four tradeoffs when designing navigation menus – Information Architecture is about choosing directions, both for the user and for the designer. The tricky bit is choosing the right ones.

Democratise user research in 5 steps – How to encourage anyone to take part in the user research process, and why that’s a valuable thing to do.

Mobile UX trends: the current state of mobile e-commerce UX – A typically thorough research piece from Baymard outlining common pitfalls and best practice for mobile UX.

Systems thinking is what makes designers great – Good design resolves problems without negatively affecting anything else in its ecosystem and great designers always think about the larger picture.

Paying off design debt – How to decide which design debt to fix and incorporate it into the roadmap without causing friction.

Cool tools

Andy.works – Beautifully designed apps from the founders of Paper on the iPad (and ex Microsoft Courier devs). Rethinking basic apps like weather, calculator and timer with playful, interactive, three-dimensional interfaces.

InVision – Recently pivoted, InVision has now become another whiteboarding and collaboration platform. Goodbye Sketch prototyping, hello Miro.

DesignStripe SVG animator – The main product appears to be 100% Corporate Memphis, but this is a fun, free tool to create doodle-y animations from SVGs.

Fun stuff

Partita Prelude for 8-bit ensemble – Bach played live on three Commodore 64s, a tape cassette drive and a floppy drive.

Make word art – For when design is your passion.

Web design museum – Explore trends in web design between 1991 and 2006.