In this article, Huijing Chen covers known and obscure features of Firefox DevTools that can come in handy when you’re building and debugging CSS Grid layouts. You may have heard quite a bit of talk about a CSS feature called “Grid” this year. If you are someone who cringes when you hear the words “CSS” and “grid” in the same sentence, then I highly suggest you check out this new CSS module called CSS Grid.
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You can’t afford to skip testing, because even a simple round of testing could make or break your product. Investment in user testing is just about the only way to consistently generate a rich stream of data on user behavior. Testing provides the inspiration, guidance and validation that product teams need in order to design great products. That’s why the most effective teams make testing a habit. In this article, Nick Babich will show you some tips that can be applied to different types of testing.
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A design sprint allows you to see into the future to learn in just five days what customers think about your finished product. As a UX consultant and in-house design strategist, Claire Mason has facilitated dozens upon dozens of design workshops (ranging from rapid prototyping sessions to, of course, sprints). The sprint is by far the most effective process she’s seen to drive customer-first decision making in a design thinky way.
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Sooner or later, physical mobile devices will appear in the integration system of every relatively large Android project. The need to fix mistakes, perform non-standard test cases and simply test for the presence of certain features all inevitably require an actual device. Regression testing is one of the most time-consuming tasks when developing a mobile Android app. Using myMail as a case study, Alexey Perfilov would like to share his experience and advice on how to build a flexible and extensible automated testing system for Android smartphones — from scratch.
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Open device labs (ODLs) are a response to the myriad of operating systems, browsers and devices that litter our technical landscape, and offer developers a free space to go to test their web systems. In this article Gemma Church will highlight some of the many open device labs out there — fantastic and helpful initiatives by the community that deserve support and attention.
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The team behind Adobe’s new prototyping tool Experience Design (Adobe XD) uses prototyping as a method to test new features before they make it into the program. In this article, Demian Borba will share some insights into how the team uses prototyping to build and improve Adobe XD, and make prototyping more efficient for designers. A prototype is an extremely powerful tool to help teams “see” more, experience more, “fail” more, learn more and, in the end, pivot faster to where the secret for success is.
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Getting an app just right, getting it to work across all possible devices, with different OS versions, display resolutions, chipsets and other hardware characteristics, and making the user experience smooth across all possible configurations, is a challenging task. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will look at what’s available for testing React Native apps. He’ll explain some key features of React Native, before looking at how to implement these tests, and then he will categorize testing methods and frameworks on three levels, providing examples for each.
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How do we make sure the website layout stays responsive and displays correctly on all kinds of devices with various resolutions? In this article, Ivan Shubin will guide you through an interesting new layout testing technique. Using Galen Framework, he will provide a detailed tutorial for writing meaningful generalized layout tests, which can be executed in any browser and on any device and at the same time used as a single source of truth in your design documentation. You will learn how to extend Galen’s syntax with your own language, how to improve the test code and how to turn a layout testing routine into art.
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The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
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This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine — using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons learned that a traditional article would have provided. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will take you through the story of Noah, the “UX guy” for the corporate office of a regional fast food restaurant, that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allow patrons to customize their meals, place orders and earn rewards.
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