CategoryUI (User Interfaces)

March 14, 2019 — Slack has done a lot to bring teams and partners together online. It’s also done a lot to empower developers to build their own custom apps for it. Until recently, however, developers were limited by how much they could do to customize the design of those apps. That’s changing today with Block Kit. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to talk about Block Kit, Slack’s contribution to building a better collaboration UI. Read more…

March 13, 2019 — If you’ve ever wondered how games with keyboard-less support for VR headsets are built, then this tutorial explains just what you’re looking for. Here’s how you too can bring a basic, functioning VR game to life. In this part, Alvin Wan will implement the game’s core logic and utilize more advanced A-Frame environment manipulations to build the “game” part of this application. By the end, you will have a functioning virtual reality game with a real challenge. Read more…

March 6, 2019 — Virtual reality (VR) is an experience based in a computer-generated environment, and following Alvin’s introduction to programming in VR, this article series aims to introduce more VR concepts in the context of building a game. In this article, Alvin Wan will show you how you can synchronize the game state between two devices which will move you one step closer to building a multiplayer game. He’ll specifically introduce more A-Frame VR concepts such as stylized low-poly entities, lights, and animation. Read more…

January 24, 2019 — You’ve proven your expertise in designing mobile-first websites for clients. It might be time you made a move into designing mobile-first marketing campaigns for them as well. With this guide, Suzanne Scacca explains how to do just that. She will examine the key areas of marketing that stem from the websites you build. Then, zero in on the ways in which designers should adjust these marketing strategies for mobile-friendly and mobile-first audiences. Read more…

January 23, 2019 — When it comes to change, we tend to naturally resist it. The only real boundary we have are our brains telling us that things are best to be left as they’ve always been. But we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in Human-Computer Interaction — rethinking the whole concept of digital experience. In the next decade, designers will break the glass and move to the interfaces of the future — sophisticated voice interfaces, advanced ARs, and truly immersive VRs. In this article, Gleb Kuznetsov shares his thoughts and ideas of how interfaces will look like and what sort of extraordinary experiences we can expect in the near future. Read more…

December 18, 2018 — We’re at the dawn of a UI revolution. Not only will multimodal interfaces give users more power, but they will also change the way users interact with systems. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how to build your own multimodal UI using Adobe XD. You will explore the concept of a voice-enabled interface and review different types of voice-enabled interfaces; find out why voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience; see how you can build a multimodal UI using Adobe XD. Read more…

November 6, 2018 — In this tutorial, Alvin Wan will program three-dimensional objects and add simple interactions to these objects. Additionally, you can learn how to build a simple message passing system between clients and servers. He will specifically focus on point-and-click adventure games. Such games are a casual class of games; the goal is to point and click on objects in the scene, to finish a puzzle. You will build a simple version of such a game but in virtual reality. Read more…

October 11, 2018 — When creating mobile apps, you have to create and maintain the user interface and app logic for both iOS and Android separately: Objective-C/Swift with XCode and Java with Android Studio. That can quickly turn into a pain. With Xamarin.Forms, however, the UI and app logic for your app resides in a single codebase and you get to use a single IDE to maintain it all — saving time and headaches. In this article, take a lap around Xamarin.Forms to see what it can do for you. Read more…

October 9, 2018 — Good functional animation makes a landing page not just more appealing, but also more usable. When done correctly, animation can turn a landing page from a sequence of sections into a carefully choreographed, memorable experience. Today, Nick Babich brings you Slides, a framework that will help you use animation to communicate clearly. In this article, Nick will provide the best examples of animation created using the Slides framework. Read more…

June 28, 2018 — With mobile traffic increasing on local business websites, web developers and designers are now tasked with a new responsibility. It’s no longer enough for websites to rank well — they need to rank well in local search results, too. As mobile users demand more information about local businesses, your websites need to be creative in how that data is served to them in search and through design. You can use these seven mobile design strategies to do so. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you how to use mobile web design to improve local search ranking. Read more…