People make all sorts of visual notes. An army of sketchnoters is out there, and everyone has their own style. Some do amazing sketches and lavish letters. Some translate complicated concepts into easy-to-grasp diagrams. But for the sake of this article, let’s keep it simple. Making your notes more interesting doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. It’s not like learning to play the piano or taking up diving. If you think sketchnoting looks fun, Elisabeth Irgens has some tips to get you started.
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CSS is usually considered a language for applying styles to webpages. However, in this article Krasimir Tsonev will show you that it is more than that. It is also a handy tool for collecting statistics. What matters in the end is the impact for clients. Are they getting more products sold or are there more visitors for their campaign sites? The final results usually show if your project is successful. Google Analytics is a powerful way to collect data. In this article, you will see a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics.
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Design blueprints could mean the difference between a correctly implemented design that improves the user experience and satisfies customers and a confusing and inconsistent design that corrupts the user experience and displeases customers. For those of you who create digital products, design specs could mean the difference between efficient collaboration and a wasteful back-and-forth process with costly implementation mistakes and delivery delays. Specs can help you to build the right product more quickly and more efficiently. Effective collaboration requires effective communication. Investing in the development of workflows and tooling around to make this communication easier will pay off big with the effectiveness with which products are built.
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Visual-feedback and bug-tracking services are becoming ever more popular, and integrating one of them into their workflow would simplify the communication process of any web developer. Fortunately, today’s web provides various solutions to optimize the communication process. In this article, Lusya Galkina has selected her top five tools and compared their features, functionality and pricing. She hopes that this review will simplify your workflow and speed up communication between your team and clients.
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In a previous article, Svetlin Denkov briefly mentioned another category of clickthrough prototypes: widget-based mockups that are designed on the target device and that expand on sketches by introducing user interface (UI) details and increased visual fidelity. These prototypes can be used to pitch ideas to clients, document interactions and even test usability. In this article, he will teach you how to use the iPad app Blueprint to put together such prototypes in the form of concept demos, which help to manage a client’s expectations when you are aligning your visions of a product.
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JavaScript-based animation is often as fast as CSS-based animation — sometimes even faster. CSS animation only appears to have a leg up because it’s typically compared to jQuery’s $.animate(), which is, in fact, very slow. However, JavaScript animation libraries that bypass jQuery deliver incredible performance by avoiding DOM manipulation as much as possible. In this article, Julian Shapiro will smash some myths, dive into some real-world animation examples and improve your design skills in the process. If you love designing practical UI animations for your projects, this article is for you!
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In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. You’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Matthew will also be running a “Making It Work Offline workshop” at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014.
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WordPress has released the first release candidate for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, and a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Since Daniel Pataki has always used WordPress in English, it took him a while to realize how important internationalization is. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Let’s take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us!
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In this article, Mattan Griffel will share best practices that he has discovered from using spaced repetition to learn and master a programming language. Some great articles on this topic are already out there, including “Memorizing a Programming Language Using Spaced Repetition Software” by Derek Sivers and “Janki Method” by Jack Kinsella. But because you’re busy, he’ll quickly summarize some of the best practices that I’ve learned along the way.
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According to a 2009 study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Mobile Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop usage. This shift towards Internet-enabled mobile devices means that having a fast website has never been as important as it is today. Users now expect websites to be lightening fast, and developers who don’t comply will ultimately lose out to developers who invest in delivering a great experience.
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