Defining Grid in terms of web design
Grid is basically a series of horizontal and vertical lines positioned at regular intervals. The grid is useful in web designing as it helps creating an order. The style is best for those who want to have a cleaner and organized look of their website.

WWW gives preference to grids
Web standards change with time and with presently, World Wide Web is giving a special preference to the sites developed with grid format. With so many efficient CSS-based grid frameworks like Blueprint and 960, it has become quite easy for the designers to create incredible websites in less time duration. Although, there are many web designers that still need to realize the potential of grid based design.

Grids allow exploring possibilities
Some web designers have wrong notion about grid based design that they restrict realization of their creative side while designing. But the real fact is that grids can actually facilitate creativity by rendering them a framework that is not only easy to use but suitable to meet a wide variety of web designing requirements. In fact, it helps the web designers to find answers for questions like:

• How wide should the measurement be?

• How should be the placement of folios?

Above all, grid allows strengthening of layouts and streamlining the complete website development process that eliminates any future modifications issues. With easy access to large amount of information in the form of documents and other resources, one can easily create a web design that is not only unique but full of eye-catching effects.

Choosing a base unit for measurement
It’s crucial to choose a base unit for the layout before getting started with the grid-based web design. Taking pixels as the base unit of measurement is preferable, but since individual pixels are too small to create a grid, the designer needs to align the items at a 100% scale.

File creation and baseline grid set-up
File creation and set up of baseline grid requires perfection. In fact, Fireworks offer an interesting and simplified panel which lets the designer control the properties of grids. As an example, it allows easy editing of colors.

When you are creating a new file for web layout, it’s important to take into account the width of the canvas; and it is preferable to go with the fixed width way. This is because it offers a greater control over the measurement and no. of characters available within each line in a column. As of the layouts, they should be limited to approximately 960 pixels in width. This will easily accommodate in 1024 x 768 screen resolution which is a common screen size.

Finally

Integrating grid-based web design approach in web development ensures a way to build websites that are flexible and rich in graphics and functionalities. Grid-based design is strongly backed up by stability and visual strength that will surprise you with its outcomes, no matter what type of website you are designing.

As such, the pros and cons of these fixed navigation bars can be listed as below.

Advantages

• Enhanced usability
The fixed navigation bars make the browsing experience on website a lot easier. Having these ensures a main menu of options at an immediate disposal of the user, especially if the website has large amount of content on a page.

This is beneficial in several regards, but main benefit is speed. A smooth and fast flow through the website is very important. With an always present guidepost set firmly at the top or side of the screen view, a site owner does not need to worry about his or her user reading or navigation experience being damped.

This is extremely significant when the site is dealing with enormous amount of content. Popular examples of this concept come in the form of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Both of the sites feature news feeds with infinite information being loaded up at the bottom of the screen.

In the absence of these bars, user can often waste hours digging through the never ending lines of content, links, and other material.

• Enhanced Speed
Also, when there is a lot of content on the site; for example, take a website listing a range of content on travel destinations. This content may include history, possible visiting time and places, cultural heritage and a lot more details pertaining to a destination. Basically, it’s a lot to scroll through. But with a sticky bar at the top, navigation turns a lot quicker and easier allowing a user to find the required information in no time. In fact, the amount of time this technique saves is really appreciable.

• Prevailing Popularity
The popularity of fixed navigation bars is quite commendable. Every other site is using these to increase usability. This makes it even more demanding. Not only this, it adds a great effect to the website.

Disadvantages

Despite of its advantages, many critics argue that these sticky navigation bars can be superfluous addition to a perfectly usable website at times. In some cases, a website already has a smooth flow, and as such the fixed navigation bar can often seem like a waste of space.

Though it is flashy, it can also be unnecessarily apparent meaning it keeps popping up even when it is not required.Some people might see it as interesting, while other might find it irritating.

Also, at times, the bars seem to take up space unnecessarily. Although, the problem can be addressed by shrinking the bar; once the user has scrolled past its initial appearance.

What’s more?

Apart from simple space constraints, there are other practical concerns for developers too. For instance, fixed navigation bars are usually difficult to transform into mobile format. Also, it leads to a complicated design that can increase page load times.

Final Word

All in all, there’s not much to complain about fixed navigation bars. The concerns are subjective, but when talk about user experience, subjective concerns are certainly justified. As such, it’s the duty of developer to determine what the targeted audience desires from the website and act accordingly.

Why you should create a style guide?
A style guide usually doesn’t seem necessary for a small company that has a single working designer. But if you’ll look at the bigger picture, you’ll realize its importance. Suppose there is only one designer, working on a project, in a company. All the tasks like designing logo, website, business cards, and other marketing material are assigned to him.

Now, a year later the company grows in size, and they feel a need to hire a second designer. The current designer will be required to all of the guidelines for the brand like colors, logo specifications, font, etc. to the new designer. This conveying of information should be accurate and any left out can create a problem.
With style guide, at your hand, you can simply hand over the details without any hassle.

Basic elements of style guide
The exact elements in a style guide depend on the size of brand and type of marketing materials being used. Although, the common elements are listed below:

Fonts
There is a consistent set of fonts for every brand irrespective of their marketing materials. Representing these fonts, with proper examples and character sets, is very important. There are many things that need to be mentioned in this section including font type and size, or any particular style or weight for a font family.

Colors
The colors should be spelled out with accurate details. This includes enlisting hex codes for web use, CMYK and Pantone color values for printing purpose. To accurately transfer color between web and print, exactly listing your preferences is a good option.

Logo
Logo size and placement details are also important. Many logos lose their effect when displayed too small. In such cases, you can specify the minimum size to display the logo or an alternate logo to be used for small sized display.

Specifying the amount of empty space around the logo is also important so that the logo doesn’t lose its effect. Many other details can be included like alternate color scales for logo, the acceptable backgrounds (transparent or colored background), any type of box or border that can be used to encase the logo.

Icons or images
If there are any specific icons or images that are used commonly, then they should be included in the guide. Including a direct link to the icon set is a good option; it will avoid confusion due to icon names.
Specifying whether any particular style of images should be used or not, is always recommended. For instance, you need to apply a vintage filter to the image, or only black and white versions can be used.

Other web elements
Keeping things like button style, hierarchy and form elements consistent across multiple pages is quite challenging. With a defined set of rules in style guide, it becomes a lot easier. Design layouts and grid standards are also worth mentioning.

So, it is quite evident that creating a style guide for designing purpose is really beneficial and every company or designer should look up for it.

User experience design (UXD or UED) is a process of amplifying customer satisfaction and retention by enhancing the usefulness, ease of use, and joy provided in the interaction between the customer and the end product. User experience includes every aspect of a person’s interaction with the product, including the user interface, graphics and hardware design.


Elements of User Experience Design  

• Visual Design: This element deals with the appearance or look-and-feel of the user interface. The aim of visual design is to use elements like images, graphics and symbols in a way that it conveys a given message to the audience in the most appealing manner. In short, Visual Design enhances the look and information conveying capability of visual data.

• Interface Design: As in the traditional Human Computer Interaction, an effective interface was designed to facilitate communication of the user with the hardware (or functionality), interface design involves creating and designing interface elements to provide a friendly user-interface.

• Information Design: It involves designing information to facilitate easy and better understanding.

• Interaction Design: It involves designing the interactive systems to optimize their behavior and usability. It plays a crucial role in providing a better end user experience. Interaction designers take care of several things while working, like defining suitable interaction patterns, including user needs in the design, maintaining uniformity, etc.

• Navigation Design: It involves designing of interface elements to facilitate smooth navigation throughout the product or application.

• Functional Specifications: It involves creating a set of features the product must include in order to meet the user requirements.
• Information Architecture: It involves creating, organizing and maintaining information to facilitate easy access to content.

• Content Requirements: It involves defining required content elements to meet user requirements.

Software and tools for UX designers

Most of the UX designers prefer inexpensive and browser-based tools. Here is a list of a few of them:

Wireframing and prototyping tools:

• UX Pin: UX Pin is one of the most popular tools, providing a wide range of features, including fast and easy wireframing, solid prototyping and easy responsive designing.

• Wireframe.cc: It is a very simple wireframing tool best suited to develop mockups, concepts and layouts.

• Solidify App: With this wonderful tool, you can create and test prototypes, and get numerical facts about user behavior.

• Proto.io: It is a very useful tool for creating mobile prototypes. With the new version, you can even add your feedback.

• Other popular tools include InVision, P.O.P. App, Axure, Paper sketches, Flinto, Pidoco, Appery, Easel, Mockflow, OmniGraffle, HotGloo, Handcraft and the list is very long.

User research and testing tools:

• Wufoo: This tool automatically builds the database, backend and scripts when you create online forms for conducting surveys. This makes gathering and analyzing data quite simple and fast.

• TypeForm: This tool helps you create simple, stylish, responsive and user-friendly forms for online survey needs.

• Bagel Hint: This tool makes the process of comparing different UI versions with a pre-defined array of questions quite easy.

• Verify App: With this tool, one can upload his/her design quickly and perform testing. You can even check detailed reports after the test.

• Other tools include Usabilla, Morae, UX Recorder, Google Hangouts , PollDaddy, WebNotes, Concept Feedback, Frelay, Plunk, Intuition HQ, Delight.io, Camtasia etc.

Information Organization tools:

• Lucid Chart: Allows you to draw a variety of effective visual elements like flow charts, UML diagrams, and ER models.

• MindMeister: Allows you to organize information in maps that connect content, images and links.

• Other tools include Coggle.it, Optimal Sort, WebSort, Xsort, Gliffy, Google Drawings, Xmind, Mindjet and many more.

Analytics and Metrics tools:

There are numerous analytics and metrics tools available in the market like Crazy Egg , Good Data, KISSmetrics, Tableau, Maxymiser, App Annie, Click Density, Flurry, Woopra, Piwik, Clicky, etc.

Providing an enhanced user experience is crucial to the success of any product. UX design clearly provides a way to achieve this success with a planned and strategic approach. If the designer takes care of all the elements of user experience design and use appropriate software and tools, he/she can provide a better end user experience and thus, better business.