July 30, 2014 — The process of telling a computer how to perform a task, such as generating a web page, is what web developers commonly call “programming,” but it’s only a subset of programming: imperative programming. There’s another type: declarative programming. With it, you tell a computer what, not how. This subtle shift in approach to programming has broad effects on how you build software, especially how you build the future web. So, let’s take a moment to investigate declarative programming and the web you can build with it. Read more…

July 29, 2014 — One of the most important things Trevan Hetzel has learned is how to sell the value of the web. Many of his clients needed to be convinced that a website would actually be good for their business. He started from a blank canvas after having moved to this town and building a clientele that now includes over 80 small businesses, mostly in southwest Iowa. He has gotten to the point that most new businesses around here are referred to his company, on the strength of my successful track record and portfolio. In this article, He’ll share with you, his experience with selling to small-town clients. Read more…

July 28, 2014 — “Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. In this article, Ben Johnson will show you how it came to be and what his team ultimately learned in the process. Also he’ll give you some advice for when you build your next great idea. This is the story of how limitations led to his biggest success in the App Store — and his biggest failure. Read more…

July 25, 2014 — Knowing how groups influence people can help you to move from being a common designer to a strategic influencer of your target audience with relative ease, and social influence, particularly social identity theory, provides key concepts for you to address through UX design. You can influence people by thoughtfully incorporating social identity concepts into your design. In this article, Victor Yocco will focus on how concepts related to social identity theory can help UX professionals to more effectively incorporate social influence in their work. Read more…

July 24, 2014 — To bring order into projects, a new product manager is appointed, under huge expectation, and with unclear responsibilities and big goals defined within a very short timeframe. Making It Right is a book about just that: what product management is and how to approach it strategically and meaningfully to get things done well. If your company has to address these issues or you’re looking for a hands-on book to guide you through product management, this is the book for you! Read more…

July 22, 2014 — Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss. Read more…

July 22, 2014 — Is drawing the best way to begin to design an interface? Luca Leone started by writing an imagined human-computer conversation, and only afterwards he continued by drawing. The easiest tool is to imagine an interaction. The diagrams and sketches come afterwards. This changed his way of thinking and he never went back to drawing first. In this article Luca will explain the reasons behind his decision. Read more…

July 21, 2014 — Smashing Mystery Riddles are little experiments that challenge us to come up with something new, original and a bit crazy—every single time. The ideas are usually a synthesis of the things we discover, stumble upon or try out ourselves—and oh my, they take quite some time to get right. The basic idea for the most recent riddle was simple: as usual, you have a series of animated GIFs containing clues. One animated GIF leads to another, and every animated GIF contains a key that have to be discovered. Once you uncover all the keys, you construct a solution and send out a tweet containing that solution. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? Read more…

July 18, 2014 — Since Adobe decided to feature-freeze Fireworks in 2013, there is no replacement available for this Software, and, as every designer out there knows, Fireworks works best with extensions! However, there are many extensions that might help you improve Fireworks. In this article, Michel Bozgounov will show you some of the most useful Fireworks extensions that will help you work faster and be more effective with Fireworks; he has tested many of them himself, to be sure that they work flawlessly. Read more…

July 17, 2014 — To make the right choices for your project, you need to start with a general approach, or methodology. You probably already know of BEM, one of those methodologies developed by a big company, but Maxim Shirshin decided to try BEM on a smaller scale. He wanted the same benefits that Yandex gets from BEM: code sharing, a live style guide, scalability, faster development. He is now convinced that BEM applies to small projects as well. Maxim has written down his findings, in case you find them useful! Read more…