This article is a part of the series about how we work and design and build and play. Today is the day when everything changes. Meet Smashing Membership, a community effort dedicated to support and highlight new and old voices of the community side by side. And you can be a part of it. A safe, friendly place where together we can share, learn and decide on the future of the web. But also an effort to move away from an ad-ridden, noisy, clicks-driven web to a friendlier, cleaner and calmer place.
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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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Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann summarizes what happened in the web community in the past few weeks in one handy list, so that you can catch up on everything new and important. Enjoy!
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How do you come up with your list of supported browsers? Why would you force a bunch of JavaScript onto those devices? The question of browser support has to be addressed when using any new CSS. In this article, Rachel Andrew will explore approaches to dealing with browser support today. What are the practical things we can do to allow us to use new CSS now and still give a great experience to the browsers that don’t support it?
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With our third annual conference in San Francisco, we want to explore strategies for breaking out of the box: leaving behind generic designs and smelly code base. We’ll unlearn old habits and dig into strategies for breaking out: leaving behind the generic solutions, exploring new design workflows, understanding new performance techniques, and all the capabilities that we have at our hands already and in the near future. We’ll find out find out how we all can be more productive today and how we can make smarter decisions tomorrow.
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Understand your audience and purpose. Try employing mobile usability testing to better understand your visitors’ needs. Have one big idea per screen. Put content under properly labeled display elements, instead of on secondary pages. Maximize mobile capabilities. In this article, Alex Jasin covers five mobile interface myths that you’ve probably been sold on (and why that might be a bad thing). Remember: Test, test, test. And then test again.
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Does your site still send password reminders via email? This should be a red flag to you, as both a user of the website and as a developer. Either your password is stored in plain text or it can be decrypted, instead of having the much stronger, more secure one-way encryption. In this article, Jamie Munro will demonstrate how to use JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to generate a URL-safe token. The JWT contains encoded information about the user and a signature that, when decoded, is validated to ensure that the token has not been tampered with. Jamie will focus on the password-reset process by securing the password-reset flow with a URL-safe token that is validated with a signature.
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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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