In this article, Matt Reamer will introduce you to the human-centered design process. He’ll tell a personal story in which he built a challenged family member a device to help them communicate more efficient and effortlessly and he’ll share lessons he learned from the failures and successes along the way. He hopes that this will inspire or at least get you thinking about how you can push your skills to help the people around you, as well as shed some light on some basic principles of user experience design that are too often overlooked.
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Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, Ala Ramildi and René Keller will share some insights on how they built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript! PixelMogul is the first game that they created entirely in house. Adobe AIR and Starling made it possible for them to carry over their experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform and to focus on development. The fast-growing and active Starling community was a big plus, too. They would definitively go the same route for another project of comparable scope.
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Technology companies are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. While the concepts they focus on are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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“Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. In this article, Ben Johnson will show you how it came to be and what his team ultimately learned in the process. Also he’ll give you some advice for when you build your next great idea. This is the story of how limitations led to his biggest success in the App Store — and his biggest failure.
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As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward. How do you know when your design has enough friction to be understood but is not overly complicated? In this article, Martijn van Tilburg considers different design scenarios and how to manage the user’s momentum by speeding up or slowing down their flow according to the situation. He will also discuss a framework for thinking about friction in your next design and when to be strategically innovative in order to maintain momentum.
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As mobile browsers continue to improve, offering new features and enhancing performance, new opportunities like this will arise. It’s always important to question whether you should build a native app or a Web app, and keep in mind the pros and cons of each, especially because the differences in their capabilities are narrowing rapidly. In this article, Nick Jonas and Francis Villanueva Will discuss a few of the biggest challenges here: detecting user activity, achieving performant animations, and building an API integrated with Google Analytics.
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As a designer, the value you bring to any project isn’t only your ability to execute tasks. Good clients will appreciate the guidance and opinions that come with your experience, and it’s up to you to base your recommendations on more than subjective opinion. In this article, Jonathan Kochis will refer to specific mobile research projects he has conducted and build a case for audience surveys and review of analytics data.
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We are in the 21st century, and we don’t have a product that makes it easy for everyone to tell time! Clocks and timepieces are all around us — from the microwave in your kitchen to the smartphone in your back pocket — but the digital display still fails to address one basic issue: We have to look at it. Telling time, then, requires sight.
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As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction.
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Responsive design for images is about optimizing the process of serving images to users. In this article, Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund will share their responsive image technique, the “padding-bottom” technique, which they researched and implemented on the mobile version of the Swedish news website Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest website). The technique presented here applies to all types of responsive websites.
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