How difficult can it be to design a bulletproof language selector? It’s not as straightforward as one might think. We need to avoid redirects, decouple our language and country presets, allow for overrides, and use non-modal windows. Can we fix it? Absolutely! We just need to decouple presets, allow for overrides and allow users to specify their intent.
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Developers often reach for UI frameworks like Bootstrap or Material UI, hoping that they’ll save a bunch of time and quickly build a professional-looking app. Unfortunately, things rarely work out this way. In this article, Josh Comeau is going to make his case for why you probably don’t need these tools. He’ll also share some of his go-to strategies for building professional-looking applications without a design background.
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Let’s welcome May with a new collection of wallpapers. Designed with love by artists and designers from across the globe, they come in versions with and without a calendar for May 2022. As a little bonus goodie, we also compiled some favorites from past May editions at the end of this post. Thank you to everyone who took on the challenge and shared their wallpapers with us — you’re smashing!
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Performance needs to be built in starting at the code level, and user-centric metrics like time to interactive (TTI), total blocking time (TBT), and first input delay (FID) help you gauge how fast a website is. But modern web pages are heavy and ever-growing in size Introducing Partytown, a lightweight open-source solution that reduces execution delays due to third-party JavaScript by offloading third-party scripts to web workers, which run in background threads.
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In this article, Nathan Smith explains how to create modal dialog windows with rich interaction that will only require authoring HTML in order to be used. They are based on Web Components that are currently supported by every major browser.
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We should be able to measure how well a particular design solves a particular problem. Let’s explore design KPIs that capture user’s experience, how to measure them and how to keep both users and business stakeholders happy, over time. In this series of articles, we highlight design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. You can find more examples in “Smart Interface Design Patterns”, a 10h-video course with 100s of hand-picked examples, curated by Vitaly.
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Given our increasing dependency on digital interactions, advocating for good UX will become increasingly necessary, as our reliance on digital tools continues to grow. When bad UX has lingered in a product for so long, it can feel like a mountain to overcome. In this article, Ceara Crawshaw shares her advice on how you can invoke joy and assure the quality in the work done on product teams.
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Creative Coding to level up your skills is fundamental. But when so much of the web is very “set in its way”, it takes a little more for us to think “outside the box” and have fun! In this article, Jhey Tompkins explores one of GreenSocks’ newest plugins alongside React to create an impractical whimsical spin on a well-known native element: <input type="range"/>.
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Have you ever wondered, why do people write CLI tools? When is a good time to think about yours? Today we’ll touch on these questions, along with some tips to remember when creating one. However, all of this serves as a prelude to the real topic: end-to-end testing of CLI tools.
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There are a few navigation patterns that are often forgotten or dismissed. We can think of them as navigation shortcuts, helping users get where they want to go, faster — without having to use traditional navigation at all. As it turns out, sometimes they are much more effective, especially on large sites with thousands of pages, many of which have been gathering dust over the years. In UX, we can use navigation queries, evaluation journeys, A-Z index and tap-ahead autocomplete to help users get where they want to be, faster. Let’s find out how.
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