A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. In this article, Barry Rueger will show you why designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, “I can read it, so what’s the problem?”
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What is it that makes a haunted house feel so disturbing? Is it the fact that it’s been long abandoned? That it’s riddled with dark and twisty hallways? That it simulates danger? Or maybe it’s the low-quality construction that makes people nervous? In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to take these frightening characteristics and spin them around for the web. After all, what is a website, but a digital house? (Let’s just make sure yours doesn’t feel haunted!)
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When someone reads a story, they have certain expectations about how that story will unfold whether they know how to articulate them or not. The same is true about users coming to our websites. We can pull principles from storytelling to help us meet and, hopefully, exceed those user expectations. Today, John Rhea will pull out and discuss just a few examples of how thinking about your users’ stories can increase user engagement and satisfaction. He’ll look at audience expectations and how your site is meeting those expectations or not.
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Speech-to-text promises to save time transcribing long audio sources like podcasts and interviews. However, the poor quality of the resulting transcription severely limits the technology’s present use cases. We attempt various methods to improve transcription quality, but ultimately the technology fails to accurately represent human speech. That said, its speed and low cost compared to manual transcription still leaves us with some interesting use cases. In this article, Philip Kiely will use speech-to-text to draft transcripts of podcasts and interviews for publication. He ’ll also evaluate the overall accuracy of these format-transformation technologies by running a few samples through round-trip transcriptions.
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Design is increasingly becoming more complex. Design processes require having a tight cross-functional collaboration between all teams involved in the creation of the product. Having a shared design language empowers teams to collaborate more effectively. That’s why many companies invest in design systems. But how can we ensure that a design system actually works for a product you’re working on and improves your team’s productivity? In this article, Nick Babich will try to find the qualities that make a design system good for your product development.
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This is a detailed guide for those who are struggling with tables in Figma. Today, Sasha Belichenko will show you how to create a table using components, so that later on you could save a lot of time on scalability and edits. Moreover, you’ll be able to easily integrate the table into your design system. To follow along, you will need to have at least some understanding of the basic Figma concepts, its interface, and how to work with Figma components. So, without further ado, let’s dig in!
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Why do humans only have to use this powerful invention to solve business-related issues? Why can’t we think a little more like Duchamp and use this ‘all-powerful’ technology to solve one of the scariest problems that mankind has ever faced? Climate change is a complex problem that cannot be solved with a swift flick of a biodegradable, magic wand. But certain environmental issues can be solved with the right code. That’s where you come in.
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Using JavaScript and frameworks like Tensorflow.js is a great way to get started and learn more about machine learning. In this article, Charlie Gerard covers the three main features currently available using Tensorflow.js and sheds light onto the limits of using machine learning in the frontend.
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Text-to-speech can help you create more versatile, accessible content. You could purchase recording equipment and spend hours recording and editing each narration, but if you want most of the benefit for only a couple of minutes and a few pennies per post, consider using AWS instead. In this article, Philip Kiely will demonstrate how to use Amazon Polly to narrate your content. In the next article, he will embark on the return journey, from speech-to-text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.
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In this series Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Reducing the data footprint of your website goes hand in hand with improving frontend performance. It is the single most reliable thing you can do to speed up your site. In this article, Chris puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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