In an ever-changing discipline, it can be hard to keep abreast of everything as a user experience designer. It’s a challenge! An understanding of core design principles, however, will stand the test of time and serve you well throughout your career. In this article, the second in a series of ten sponsored by Adobe XD, Christopher Murphy provides an overview of universal principles of UX design, ensuring your skillset is built on firm foundations.
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Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables for that purpose. Don’t be surprised by the number of deliverables Nick Babich mentions in this article. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective for all projects. Each deliverable becomes an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience.
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When designed properly, Feature comparison 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. In this article Vitaly Friedman will look into all of the fine details that make a perfect, accessible and helpful feature comparison table.
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In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into the fine details of designing better slider controls for selecting a value or a range of values. A slider is helpful because it allows users to explore a wide range of options quickly. The main point of interaction with the slider is to display options quickly. This means not forcing the user to click on a button to see the outcome or wait until the result is displayed. Feedback should be smooth and continuous. However, sliders are just a bit too difficult to use, require just a bit too much precision, are a bit too confusing to navigate, and are a bit too difficult to grab and move around. After a close look at perfect accordions and date and time pickers, let’s turn our attention to sliders, with do’s and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one.
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Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites.
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HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general.
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In this article, Jeremy Wagner will teach you everything about server push, from how it works to the problems it solves. Server push allows you to send site assets to the user before they’ve even asked for them. It’s an elegant way to achieve the performance benefits of HTTP/1 optimization practices such as inlining, but without the drawbacks that come with that practice. Jeremy will also show you how to use it, how to tell if it’s working, and its impact on performance. Let’s begin!
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In this article, Steve Benjamins shows you what he discovered after asking the owners of several websites built with e-commerce software, if they’d recommend a particular software. Typically, they’d reply and I’d record their response in a spreadsheet (and personally thank them). Occasionally, I would even go on the phone to speak with them directly (although I quickly found out that this took too much time). Steve created a guide to help others find the e-commerce software that suits them best.
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In this article, you’ll find an overview of all of the obscure little things that I forget about every year; so, I decided to gather them all in one place once and for all. The list below serves as a personal reminder for yours truly, and I thought that it might be useful for you as well. In fact, I set up a yearly reminder on December 28th just to have a couple of days to free the mind for the more important things in life and to start the next year without second thoughts or unresolved issues. Curious? Well, let’s dive in!
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