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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Generally speaking, writing a requirements document is mostly about conveying your vision to the rest of the team. In this article, Eduard Khorkov will outline the most common approaches to writing requirements documents. You will learn the basic steps of writing mobile application requirements and what a good requirements document looks like. Eduard will create two documents: a PDF with user stories and wireframes, and a screen map that complements the PDF. Together, they describe in detail what features the application should have.
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Javier Cuello started using Sketch a few years ago, as a replacement for his favorite design software back then, Fireworks, which had been discontinued by Adobe — leaving a whole generation of designers broken-hearted. In this article, Javier will outline how to make use of symbols in Sketch in order to unleash their full potential, going from the most basic situations to some more advanced use cases. He’ll also include some tips and tricks that he has learned along the way.
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IoT is a vast topic, and there are many ways to approach it. In this article, Svetlin Denkov will introduce readers of different backgrounds to prototyping IoT experiences with minimum code knowledge. This article assumes you are using a Mac, but much of the content carries over to Windows systems as well. For the coding sections, he will be using Arduino’s integrated development environment (IDE) and the C/C++ programming language. There are different ways to get to the same result, so pick the board and programming language that you are most familiar with. There is a lot of ground to cover, so let’s jump right in!
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This two-article series will introduce readers of different backgrounds to prototyping IoT experiences with minimum code knowledge, starting with affordable proof of concept platforms, before moving to costly commercial offerings. Stay tuned! In this first article, Svetlin Denkov will identify the problem, the criteria for selecting hardware and, finally, show you a step-by-step guide on how to put together all of the hardware components into a working rig.
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Today, most designers want to create prototypes with integrated pull-to-refresh animation, preferably a custom one. This tutorial explains how to build a prototype in Flinto, a tool that makes swipe-gesture animation possible, and obviously you cannot create a pull-to-refresh animation without a pull. In this article, Ellina Bereza & Simon Bronnikov will help you master Flinto, understand the logic of creating prototypes of this kind, and learn the process of coding these prototypes in your application. To follow the steps, you will need macOS, Sketch for Mac, Flinto for Mac to create the prototype, and Android Studio and JDK 7+ to write the code.
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In order to improve your workflow, in this article Edric Lapniramai provides a checklist to refer throughout the UX designer’s wireframing process. Divided in three sections — decisions to consider before wireframing, detailing the design elements, and annotations —, this guideline can help you perfect your wireframes and be practical with your time.
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Adobe Experience Design CC (Beta), has introduced the Repeat Grid feature to address the tedious aspect of a designer’s workflow. In this article, Elaine Chao will dig deep to uncover the true power of this time-saving feature. She’ll create and adjust a Repeat Grid, add content to it, and wire it up in Adobe XD’s simple and powerful Prototype Mode. If you’d like to follow along, you can download and test Adobe XD for free.
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You don’t need a sixth sense or any other superpowers in order to choose a prototyping tool. There are other, more objective means of choosing one. It all depends on your current priorities, so let’s start there. When it comes to creating prototypes, so many tools and methods are out there that choosing one is no easy task. But which one is the best? In this article, Javier Cuello will share a few.
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Have you tried creating a website with some Dropbox-powered hosting tools? In today’s article, Cosima Mielke has collected nine tools for you that hook up to your Dropbox to streamline the process of creating and hosting static websites. However, before you settle on a Dropbox-powered platform, always balance the pros and cons to make sure it is the right choice for your project. As for prototyping, the following tools are a great way to make your workflow more efficient so you can spend more time on the details that really matter.
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