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Did you know that we publish useful books and run
friendly conferences — crafted for pros like
yourself? E.g. our upcoming SmashingConf Barcelona,
dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
UX design hasn't been the same since Sketch arrived on the scene. The app has delivered a robust design platform with a refreshing, simple user interface. A good product on its own, it achieved critical success by being extended with community plugins.
The open nature of the Sketch plugin system means that anyone can identify a need, write a plugin and share it with the community. A major barrier is stopping those eager to take part: Designers and front-end developers must learn how to write a plugin. Unfortunately, Objective-C is difficult to learn!
You might have noticed it already: in the past few weeks you might have missed Anselm's Web Development Reading List issues here on SmashingMag. No worries, from now on, we’ll switch to collecting the most important news of each month in one handy, monthly summary for you. If you'd like to continue reading Anselm's weekly reading list (and we encourage you to!), you can still do so via email, on wdrl.info or via RSS. — Editorial Team
Hello again! I’ll continue publishing this resource and am grateful for everyone who supports my ongoing work. And to celebrate the last weekly edition, I found a lot of great articles for you: Biohacking news that sound like science fiction, advances in deep learning with JavaScript, and a lot more. Happy reading!
Developers and organizations alike are looking for a way to have more agility with mobile solutions. There is a desire to decrease the time from idea to test. As a developer, I often run up against one hurdle that can slow down the initial build of a mobile hypothesis: user management.
Over the years, I have built at least three user management systems from scratch. Much of the approach can be based on a boilerplate, but there are always a few key items that need to be customized for a particular client. This is enough of a concern that an entire category of user management, authentication and authorization services have sprung up to meet this need. Services like Auth0 have entire solutions based on user and identity management that developers can integrate with.
Not all products are created equal. While we repeatedly buy some products almost mindlessly, for others, we take a lot of time to make a purchasing decision. For a price tag that meets a certain threshold or if we are particularly invested in the quality of a product, we want to be absolutely certain that we are making the right choice and are getting a good product for a good price. That's where a feature comparison table makes all the difference.
Feature comparison tables are helpful not only in their primary function, though. When designed properly, they can aid in decision-making way beyond placing product specifications side by side. They can also add meaning to an otherwise too technical product specification sheet, explaining why a certain feature is relevant to the customer or how a certain product is better than the others.
Recently, I was leading a training session for one of our clients on best practices for implementing designs using HTML and CSS. Part of our time included a discussion of processes such as style-guide-driven development, approaches such as OOCSS and SMACSS, and modular design. Near the end of the last day, someone asked, “But how will we know if we’ve done it right?”
At first, I was confused. I had just spent hours telling them everything they need to “do it right.” But after thinking about it, I realized the question was rooted in a deeper need to guide and evaluate what is often a set of subjective choices — choices that are sometimes made by a lot of different people at different times.
Editor's Note:This article is targeted at readers experienced in using Google Analytics. If you're new to Analytics, the following guide might be challenging.
Many websites use internal advertising in the form of banners or personalized product recommendations to bring additional products and services to the attention of visitors and to increase conversions and leads.
Naturally, the performance and effectiveness of internal marketing campaigns should be assessed, too, as this is one of the most powerful instruments for generating more leads, more conversions and more revenue on your website. In many cases, web analysts use Google Analytics' UTM campaign parameters to track internal advertising.
Creating good user experiences for apps inside messaging platforms poses a relatively new design challenge. When moving from desktop web to mobile interfaces, developers have had to rethink interaction design to work around a constrained screen size, a new set of input gestures and unreliable network connections.
Like our tiny touchscreens, messaging platforms also shake up the types of input that apps can accept, change designers’ canvas size, and demand a different set of assumptions about how users communicate.
Have you ever read a post that has left you feeling wholly inadequate because you know you can't live up to the high standards they layout? Well, that is how I feel when I read posts about how much to charge my clients.
When Smashing Magazine asked me to write an article sharing my thoughts on pricing my services, I agreed without much thought. But now I sit down to write it, and I'm faced with a conundrum. Do I write about how you should price projects or do I tell you the truth about the unorthodox approach I take?
Using voice commands has become pretty ubiquitous nowadays, as more mobile phone users use voice assistants such as Siri and Cortana, and as devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home have been invading our living rooms.
These systems are built with speech recognition software that allows their users to issue voice commands. Now, our web browsers will become familiar with to Web Speech API, which allows users to integrate voice data in web apps.
The world around us is full of little things and experiences that shape us, our way of thinking, but also how we tackle our work. Influenced by these encounters, every designer develops their unique style and workflow, and studying their artwork — the compositions, geometry of lines and shapes, light and shadows, the colors and patterns — can all inspire us to look beyond our own horizon and try something new.
It really doesn't take much to let your mind wander. Always remember to take a closer look at things around you; you'll be sure to find inspiration in the little things. But for now, let's dig into another collection of brilliant illustrations and photographs.
If you're like me, then being persuaded requires a scientific approach and concrete examples. And that's exactly what this article does. It explains how gamification can work by showing the relationship between gamification, UX design and BJ Fogg's modern persuasion phenomenon, "mass interpersonal persuasion." And it has a lot of practical gamification examples that you can apply to your own products for more engaging experiences.
Today, virtually all companies (except for special ones like Basecamp) have to grow non-stop. Why? Well, that's simply how the capitalist engine works. Investors pour money into startups, banks loan money to entrepreneurs, employees accept stock options instead of cash, all in the hope of the company growing much bigger.
In its move to patch a security hole as part of the iOS 10.3 release, Apple has introduced (yet) another redirection mechanism that developers must handle when attempting to implement mobile deep-link routing (i.e. the mechanism to route users to a specific page inside a mobile app, rather than the App Store or app home page).
This redirection instance has introduced additional friction to the app download and reopening process, and data shows that it has decreased conversion rates on iOS 10.3. This post examines the issue in detail and discusses solutions to help developers fix it.
