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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We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components.
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In this article, Nikola Lazarević will show you how to create a very realistic and detailed vector illustration of a watch using basic shapes, layer styles and cool Sketch functions such as “Rotate Copies” and “Make Grid.” No bitmap images will be used, which means you will be able to easily adapt the final image to different sizes and resolutions. While Sketch is undoubtedly an excellent UI design tool, it can be used as a powerful illustration tool as well. So, in this tutorial, he’ll walk you through the process of creating the iconic Heuer Autavia wrist chronograph, all in vectors.
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Designers need to create the most usable and attractive websites possible, and well applied minimalist principles can help designers make attractive and effective websites with fewer elements. Minimalist websites simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements and paring down content that does not support user tasks. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some examples of minimalism in web design, things to consider when designing minimalist interfaces, and explain why sometimes “less is more”.
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If you feel that your own confidential business information needs to be protected, a mutual NDA might be a great idea. It’s normal to feel a little intimidated when reviewing a legal document. However, NDAs are a part of life for developers. If you want to work for top clients, you will be asked to sign them. If you’re not sure whether to sign an NDA as a developer, Kimberly Bond will guide you to make an educated decision.
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This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for nine years already, and we are very thankful to everyone who has and still is contributing to it each month anew. Today, to provide you with some fresh inspiration even when the weather is gray, artists and designers from across the globe once again challenged their creative skills to design beautiful, one-of-a-kind wallpapers for you to indulge in. The wallpapers in this collection all come in versions with and without a calendar for October 2017 and can be downloaded for free. Happy October!
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Prior to CSS Grid Layout landing in browsers, many people saw flexbox as the answer to all of our design-related problems. However, flexbox doesn’t provide a grid system any more than floats do, although it does make creating one simpler. CSS Grid is such a different way of approaching layout that there are a number of common questions Rachel Andrew is asked as people start to use the specification. In this article, she will answer some of those, and will be one in a series of articles on Smashing Magazine about layouts.
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UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They use deliverables for that purpose. Don’t be surprised by the number of deliverables Nick Babich mentions in this article. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all deliverable that will be equally effective for all projects. Each deliverable becomes an effective communication tool in the right context and with the right audience.
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