Flat design can be seen as the more sophisticated cousin of minimalism —all design elements are centered on the idea of simplicity. However, the simplicity of flat design is hard to achieve — everything should be designed with the same goal in mind to create a cohesive visual and functional design.

Let’s look at what you can do to make flat design works for your users.

Visibility of system status is one of the most important rules of UI design. The goal behind this rule is pretty obvious — to minimize user tension you should provide feedback to the user about what is happening with the app within a reasonable amount of time. Don’t keep the users guessing — tell the user what’s happening. And one of the most common forms of such feedback is a progress indicator.

In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the main types of progress indicators and the use cases for them.

‘Errors’ happen. They happen in our apps and they happen in our life. Sometimes they happen because we made mistakes. Sometimes because a system failed. Whatever the cause, these errors — and how they are handled — can have a huge impact on the way a user experiences your app. Often overlooked, a lazy error handling and ill-constructed error messages can fill users with frustration, and make them stop using your app. A well-crafted error handling, on the other hand, can turn a moment of failure into a moment of delight.

In this article, we’ll examine how the design of apps can be optimized to prevent excessive user errors and how to create good error messages.

Even though user registration is quite a common thing, it’s also one of the trickiest parts of web design. You need to make sure that your sign-up page isn’t an obstacle for your users by following these tips for designing a better registration process.

This post originally appeared on babich.biz, written by Nick Babich. Nick is a software developer who’s passionate about user experience.

Breadcrumbs (or breadcrumb trail) is a secondary navigation system that shows a user’s location in a site or web app. The term came from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in which the main characters create a trail of breadcrumbs in order to track back to their house.

In this article, Nick explores the use of breadcrumbs on sites and discusses some best practices for applying breadcrumb trails to your own website. Highly recommended read!