Having a comprehensive data report about your website is like having a Rosetta Stone to guide your decision-making process over the lifetime of the website. A powerful report combines data gathered from a variety of sources, including observation of and interviews with users, and analysis of the website’s analytics. Assembling this information into one place will help you to make effective design decisions and determine key priorities and will strengthen your position when working with stakeholders.
The goal is to put the key insights from your research of a website into a single document. The report would consolidate the most important discoveries from a variety of research techniques and would help you to identify trends. These trends would provide a more accurate view of your website than one research method alone could provide. Such a report is an extremely useful reference when redesigning a website or brainstorming about enhancements. It is also a deliverable that you can provide to your client, teammates or employer.
Read more...
This article is the last in a series of articles covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we covered how to build a tip calculator in native iOS, native Android and PhoneGap. In this article, we’ll look at another cross-platform development tool, Appcelerator Titanium.
PhoneGap enabled us to build a tip calculator app quickly and have it run on both the Android and iOS platforms. In doing so, we were left with a user interface (UI) that, while quite usable, did not offer quite the same experience as that of a truly native application. Our PhoneGap solution leveraged a Web view and rendered the UI with HTML5 and CSS3.
Read more...
WordPress has come a long way since its genesis in 2003. Once reserved for humble blogs, it now powers websites for some of the world’s largest companies and is even being promoted as a platform to power the next generation of Web apps.
As a result of this increasing popularity, over the last couple of years my team and I have been regularly tasked with building ever more complex WordPress websites and apps. As the sizes of these projects increased and our team grew, however, we noticed that keeping the various dependencies of a given project in sync across our development team was becoming increasingly difficult.
Read more...
As UX professionals, we often lead design exercises with our stakeholders, including immediate team members and external clients. In these brainstorming sessions, participants identify opportunities to improve the design, thereby aligning everyone’s vision and expectations of the project.
As UX professionals, we often lead design exercises with our stakeholders, including immediate team members and external clients. In these brainstorming sessions, participants identify opportunities to improve the design, thereby aligning everyone’s vision and expectations of the project.
Read more...
If you haven’t seen Joe Harrison’s responsive icons technique yet, you’ll most probably be impressed as much as I was when I first discovered it. In this article, I’d like to explore what we can do with SVG beyond “traditional” scalable vector graphics that are used to replace bitmap PNGs.
In fact, we can see SVG as an independent module that encapsulates CSS for the customization of views as well as the responsive behavior that also encapsulates JavaScript for the interaction logic. Now, let’s dig a bit deeper into this technique.
Read more...
You’ve probably heard all the noise about Web Components and how they’re going to change Web development forever. If you haven’t, you’ve either been living under a rock, are reading this article by accident, or have a full, busy life which doesn’t leave you time to read about unstable and speculative Web technologies. Well, not me.
Web Components are a suite of connected technologies aimed at making elements reusable across the Web. The lion’s share of the conversation has been around Shadow DOM, but probably the most transformative technology of the suite is Custom Elements, a method of defining your own elements, with their own behavior and properties.
Read more...
Mobile first! Responsive design! You’ve heard all of the buzzwords and catchphrases. Countless helpful and not-so-helpful articles proclaim the rise of mobile, but what practical steps can you take to make your brand more approachable for mobile users?
When arguing a case to make a website mobile-friendly, abundant evidence exists to present to the business owner, such as the Pew Research study that shows that 56% of US adults carry around a smartphone. However, while general statistics are useful for demonstrating the value of designing with mobile in mind, they don’t provide the guidance necessary to understand precisely how users will interact with a particular brand on their phone.
Read more...
We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.
This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we're very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for March 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your desktop wallpaper!
Read more...
A few HTML elements don’t play nice with responsive layouts. One of these is the good ol' iframe, which you may need to use when embedding content from external sources such as YouTube. In this article, we’ll show you how to make embedded content responsive using CSS, so that content such as video and calendars resize with the browser’s viewport.
For those occasions when non-coders will be embedding video on your website and you don’t want to rely on them adding extra markup, we’ll also look at a solution that uses JavaScript instead of CSS.
Read more...
Smashing Newsletter
