With the current state of web apps, we can rely on various UI elements to interact with users. With the Web Speech API, we can develop rich web applications with natural user interactions and minimal visual interface, using voice commands. In this tutorial, Tomomi Imura will use the API to create an artificial intelligence (AI) voice chat interface in the browser. The app will listen to the user’s voice and reply with a synthetic voice. Because the Web Speech API is still experimental, the app works only in supported browsers. The features used for this article, both speech recognition and speech synthesis, are currently only in the Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome 25+ and Opera 27+, while Firefox, Edge and Safari support only speech synthesis at the moment.
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Today, virtually all companies have to grow non-stop. What we call “growth” in the tech world is called “persuasion” in academia. With this article, Akar Sumset will show you why gamification is a great tool for growth and how persuasion science proves that. You will see how the six components of mass interpersonal persuasion relate to gamification, with well-known examples and facts for it to be easier to understand and relate to. Let’s get going!
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Paul Boag has been working on the web for over 22 years now, and he feels like he wasted many of those years. To help you avoid making similar mistakes and wasting valuable years of your life, in this article, Paul shares his lessons learned and hard truths at the start of his career.
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In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into the fine details of designing better slider controls for selecting a value or a range of values. A slider is helpful because it allows users to explore a wide range of options quickly. The main point of interaction with the slider is to display options quickly. This means not forcing the user to click on a button to see the outcome or wait until the result is displayed. Feedback should be smooth and continuous. However, sliders are just a bit too difficult to use, require just a bit too much precision, are a bit too confusing to navigate, and are a bit too difficult to grab and move around. After a close look at perfect accordions and date and time pickers, let’s turn our attention to sliders, with do’s and don’ts and things to keep in mind when designing one.
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Strong graphic design makes transportation systems more attractive. Graphical language can be so iconic that you can even buy all sorts of souvenirs with its elements: t-shirts, umbrellas, shower curtains. This helps cities get rid of privately owned cars. People spend more time outside, interacting with each other. This gives small businesses a boost and makes cities more pleasant to live in. Today, Ilya Birman will show you how map design works by taking a look at a series of maps as an example.
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Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out.
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As digital and offline experiences got more intertwined, new interactive advertising formats emerged, with a promise to capture the most scarce and valuable marketing asset of all — people’s attention. The latest mobile trends show promise that publishers and advertisers are getting smarter about the user experience. Google is working to recapture lost attention with a crackdown on mobile pop-ups, and marketers are easing off of aggressive acquisition strategies to focus on retention. In this article, Anya Pratskevich will look at some of the biggest trends in mobile marketing.
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Scrolling opens a lot of new doors to designers. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page. Long scrolling has benefits such as translating well to mobile devices, or having more potential to engage users. In this article, Nick Babich will discuss some of the benefits, things to consider and quick tips for long scrolling.
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Adam Silver redesigned Boots.com so that each panel became its own page, removing the need for accordions and AJAX. This inconspicuous and humble UX pattern is flexible, performant and inclusive by design. Having a lot on one page might give the illusion of simplicity, but like algebraic equations, they are difficult to deal with unless they are broken down. Adam Silver has not come across another design pattern that has as many benefits as this one. This is one of those times when simple is just that: simple.
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Conferences are a brilliant opportunity to get up close with the pros and exchange tips and ideas. But they aren’t the only one. Our friends at the full-stack UX design platform UXPin brought the first free virtual summit to life a few months ago. Now the second edition is on its way, and we are very happy to help make it happen: the Agile UX Virtual Summit, focusing on all things Agile UX. Because, well, we all know that building a UX team with agile organization can be quite a challenge.
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