Have you tried experimenting with the Complications API? Thanks to the Complications API, every Android application can easily export the most important data and make it accessible at a glance directly on the user’s wrist, even without requiring a dedicated watch face. In this article, Daniele Bonaldo shows how to make your app’s data available directly from a wearable watch face, allowing the user to access it at a glance. You’ll also learn how to sync data between a phone and smartwatch, and how to display it using the new Complications API.
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You can facilitate kickoff meetings to improve shared understanding of a project’s goals and potential challenges. You can facilitate presentations to elicit more productive questions and feedback. Even impromptu discussions and group whiteboard sessions would benefit from better facilitation. In this article Brian Frank focuses on developing the soft skills to feel more comfortable facilitating UX design, research and strategy sessions. You don’t need to be a full-time facilitator or leader, or even a designer. These skills can be used by anyone in any role to inject more productive collaboration throughout their design process.
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Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. We’ve got you covered with The Sketch Handbook which is filled with practical examples and tutorials that will help you get the most out of this mighty tool. In today’s article, Christian Krammer gives us a little taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life.
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Digital products are getting more and more complex. In this article, Yury Vetrov explains why we need to support more platforms, tweak usage scenarios for more user segments, and hypothesize more. Our industry has both high- and low-skilled designers, and it will be easy for algorithms to replace the latter. However, those who can follow and break rules when necessary will find magical new tools and possibilities.
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Have you tried drawing animals from circles? It can be quite a challenge, especially if you can only use a particular amount of circles. In this article, Dorota Pankowska explains how she created 13 animals with only 13 circles. The drawing challenge mostly consists of three Adobe applications: Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.
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This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now. In this article, artists and designers from across the globe put their creative skills to the test and created unique desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works, because we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. The following wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Happy New Year!
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A 2014 study found that people with easier-to-pronounce names are deemed “more trustworthy”. Atif Azam built Vocalizer (a simple, lightweight JavaScript plugin that facilitates the accessibility of difficult to pronounce names) to solve a problem that has persisted all his life. Now, he hopes this will prove useful to others, helping them solve the same problem.
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The best way to convert a user on a mobile landing page is to provide a clear description of what you’re offering, along with obvious ways to contact you. Be clear in describing what your product does and how you’re solving your target customer’s problems. Get to the point of what you’re selling and show the user how to buy it or contact you. Creating landing pages with mobile users in mind will help you to focus on how best to convert people on smartphones. When building a landing page for any online campaign, take special care to consider the mobile experience. Review the presentation of content, as well as the prominence of contact information.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Building a genuinely helpful and attractive chatbot is still a challenge from a UX standpoint. While chatbots can be a great tool for creating more personalized customer experience, conversational design still have certain limitations. There are clear cases when a conversation can help or hurt the UX. Before building a chatbot for your business, you should clearly define its purpose and the exact value it could bring to the user. Teach the bot to do one thing extremely good, such as delivering weather forecasts or introducing the company’s scope of service before experimenting further with more advanced features.
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