How do you go about designing an app? Michael Flarup brings you an article about just that. A top level, somewhat simplified, and very honest overview of the steps involved in designing an app. This is an account of how most of the apps I work on are born, complete with shameless links to the tools he uses. Now when people think of ‘designing’ something, their thoughts often circle around the visual aspects of a product. Pixel pushing in Photoshop or laying grids in Sketch, but that’s a common misconception. Design, in the context of this article, covers the entire process. It is every deliberate action meant to produce something. The truth is that from the moment you get an idea, you are designing.
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Most of us carry the dead weight of an undefined process. We’re too passive, or ignorant, or foolish, or dismissive, or proud when it comes to our workflow. And that’s where we lose. Being ignorant of our process is to be ignorant of how long things really take, or where opportunities for improvement, in skill or outcome, are hidden. In all this we lose control of our intellectual and creative growth, letting too many opportunities slip to become the designers (or developers or writers) we aspire to be. In this article, Alexander Charchar will show you how to master your time and schedule, and how to have more control to make more (and better) choices.
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So you’ve attended a conference, listened to some truly inspiring talks, made quite a few valuable connections, maybe even attended a hands-on workshop and learned a thing or two. What now? How do you bring back the new knowledge and ideas and connections to your team and to your work? This article highlights a practical strategy of getting there without much effort.
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Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings, and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would “add” accessibility on top of the finished product. With our new book, we get to the bottom of it all! Written by Heydon Pickering, a well-respected accessibility expert, the book includes dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you’ll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code.
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A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from clients, project managers and developers. A style guide ensures that your project doesn’t encounter serious problems when you implement the initial design. In this article, Nick Babich will review the process of creating a style guide, the process of handing off a design, and collaboration across the whole team. He’ll also walk through an example workflow, demonstrating how developers and designers can improve cross-team communication and drastically reduce iteration time.
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In 2011, the traditional comp-to-HTML workflow was only beginning to be critiqued, and since then, we’ve seen a myriad of alternatives. Style Tiles, Style Prototypes, Visual Inventories, Element Collages, style guides, and even designing in the browser have all been suitable approaches to multi-device design. Also, applications like Webflow and Macaw have made breakpoint visualization digestible for the code-averse. Many designers have moved on from Photoshop as their workhorse to Sketch, Affinity Designer, or similar. Others have adopted apps like Keynote for prototyping.
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Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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We publish articles because we love sharing what we learn and what others learn, too; we love discovering unique points of view and surprising design strategies, as well as just understanding how our colleagues out there solve difficult UX and front-end problems. Every single Smashing article goes through a thorough editorial review, including multiple passes for editing and refinement, before being published. In this series dedicated to our upcoming 10th anniversary we will explain our workflow and introduce the people behind the scenes!
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Does writing microcopy need to be considered an essential part of the design process? Most definitely, yes. The tendency among most clients and design teams is first and foremost to establish on-screen interactions, pattern libraries, wireframes and workflows and to release the latest and greatest features — to the point that, at times, they’ll defer the copy (specifically, the microcopy) till the latter stages. While the general consensus is that content matters and should be central to any design undertaking, the opposite tends to be true. Words, for the most part, still form the backbone of communication on the web, even with the emergence of new technologies such as Voice User Interfaces (VUI).
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