If Wesley Hales asked you what could have been better at the last conference you attended, you’d probably say that the content or the interaction could have been better in some way. To solve this problem, he created Onslyde: A free service and open-source project that will make public speaking easier and conferences better. It’s been a lot of fun and work, and now you get to see the result!
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The best thing any designer can do is to collect feedback from real users. Recently, Joshua Gross had an opportunity to experience thiswhen iterating on HelloSign. Thanks to testing, the app went from four stars to a solid five stars after a redesign. You’ll look at how the app started, how they ran the tests and how the product ended up with five stars.
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Video on the Web has improved quite a bit since 7th grade. But for the most part, videos are still separate from the Web, cordoned off by iframes and Flash and bottled up in little windows in the center of the page. They’re a missed opportunity for Web designers everywhere. But how do you integrate video into an app or a marketing page? In this article, Sean Fioritto will find inspiration, how-tos and a few technical goodies to get you started with modern video on the Web.
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Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage, and this is where Specctr can help. Specctr is a plugin for Adobe applications, which transitions a visual design to production by enabling you to specify form and function. It automatically generates a specification and creates a blueprint for the design, which saves a lot of time!
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In this article, Bryson Meunier would like to audit the US version of Disney Junior. He has chosen this website for three reasons: it’s not run by a client or a partner; it exhibits a lot of the SEO issues of many responsive websites; and his two and four year olds are huge fans of the brand and often use my smartphone or our family iPad to visit it. This audit of Disney’s beautiful but often frustrating website shows that mobile SEO doesn’t end once you’ve made a website responsive, and it gives Disney a framework to make its website more usable and findable on search engines.
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Veterans in this industry should mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that they know they will need to succeed. This article is a follow-up “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” This one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that Jeremy Girard has found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.
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After a decade of JavaScript library work, the progressive-enhancement revolution, the advent of polyfills, and the effort to birth the “Web Components” and “Shadow DOM” specifications have taught us surprising lessons: In every period, being able to use features in both high- and low-level forms has always been desirable. HTML is great, until it isn’t. And JavaScript-only has predictable drawbacks. Thinking that there is a “right way” to build new Web features is seductive. Turns out, it’s not that simple.
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Events can be triggered on any part of a document. They don’t just start and end in one place; they flow though the document. This life cycle is what makes DOM events so extensible and useful. As developers, we should understand how DOM events work, so that we can harness their potential and build engaging experiences. In this article, Wilson Page will introduce the basics of working with DOM events, then delve into their inner workings, explaining how you can make use of them to solve common problems.
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If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Therefore we invested eight months conducting a large-scale usability research study on the product-finding experience. We set out to explore how users navigate, find and select products on e-commerce websites. Throughout the test sessions, the subjects would abandon websites because they were unable to find the products they were looking for. All of these usability issues have been distilled into 79 concise guidelines in a report titled “Homepage & Category Usability.” In this article, we’ll go over seven of the guidelines.
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If you are launching a product, then your aim should be to make your product something that people would be happy to buy. You can then begin to develop additional features based on what customers actually want and need. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains, based on her own experience, how to start with a new product, develop and support it over time. She’ll describe how it is possible to launch with a really small product and grow from those small beginnings by listening to your customers.
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