UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom the products are being designed for.
In order to create better products, designers must understand what’s going on in the user’s world. And that’s where storyboards come in. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on storyboards as a means to explore solutions to UX issues, as well as to communicate these issues and solutions to others.
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Not too long ago, front-end performance was a mere afterthought. Something that was postponed to the end of a project and that didn’t go much beyond minification, asset optimization, and maybe a few adjustments on the server’s config file. But things have changed.
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It’s time for a change. Smashing Magazine has been the heart of everything we’ve been working on throughout all this time, and with many new Smashing adventures scheduled for 2018, it deserves a stronger focus and support. Today, Vitaly Friedman is more than happy and honored to welcome the one-and-only Rachel Andrew as the new editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. Rachel will be helping us bring the focus back to the core of this little Smashing universe — this very magazine that you are reading right now. With her, we are happy to have a reliable and extremely knowledgeable editor on our side, the one we could only dream of!
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The visual interface is an obvious place to begin digging into accessibility. In this article, Tom Graham & André Gonçalves will discuss some of the most common visual impairments, focusing on color-blindness to explain how you can make small changes to your workflow and products to ensure you’re not alienating users.
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Our ears are the second-most important sensors we have, and in some situations, voice conversation is a very effective communication channel. But relying just on verbal communication is not enough. For example, would you buy a shoe without seeing it first? Of course not. As long as visual image-processing remains people’s main information source, and we are able to process complex information faster visually, the GUI is here to stay. On the other hand, more traditional GUI patterns cannot survive in their current form either. So, instead of radical predictions, David Pasztor suggests another idea: User interfaces will adapt to our sensors even more.
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When Denys Mishunov was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, he felt like he did not deserve to be at that conference. And he didn’t even know that those feelings of his had a name! This is called impostor syndrome and it is a real psychological issue, rooted deeply in many of us. If we do not pay attention to its symptoms, if we blindly follow its triggers, then we can get into real psychological trouble. The good news is that, even though there is no pill for it, we can change out attitude towards it. Simply acknowledging the feeling can help to neutralize its effect.
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There are methods that enable the naming of lines and even grid areas. Using these methods enables easier placement of items by name rather than number, but also brings additional possibilities when creating systems for layout. In this article, Rachel Andrew will take an in-depth look at the various ways to name lines and areas in CSS Grid Layout, and some of the interesting possibilities this creates. Try not to get hung up on what is “right” or “wrong”. If you find a method confusing, or it doesn’t seem to work in your context, simply don’t use it. The beauty of this is that we can choose the ways that make the most sense for the projects we are working on.
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The web is developing and changing so fast, and we need to acknowledge that we as individual persons can’t know and understand everything. And that’s fine. Choose what you want to do, set your priorities, and, most importantly of all, don’t hesitate to hire someone else for the things you can’t do on your own. In this article, Anselm has summarized the most important happenings in the web community that have taken place over the past few weeks in one handy list for you. Enjoy!
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When soliciting and listening to user feedback, you will inevitably run into bias on both sides of the coin: Biases will influence the people providing feedback, and your own biases will influence the way you receive that feedback. Bias is universal, but so too are the methods you can take to avoid it. By simply understanding what each bias is and by breaking down the ways that it appears during the feedback process, you can put measures in place to overcome misleading preconceptions and gather the most impartial feedback possible. In this article, Hunter Jensen will take a closer look at four of the most common types of cognitive biases that pop up when collecting and interpreting UX feedback — and how you can nip these biases in the bud, before they skew your production process.
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In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will share his experience with implementing service workers for PoP, an SPA website that runs on WordPresss. SPAs greatly enhance service workers, such as enabling you to choose from different appshells to load during runtime. Integrating with WordPress is not all that smooth, but it’s worth doing: the website will load faster and will work offline.
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