Ruth John has met some resistance when talking about this API. People either can’t see a need for it with the web, or they would feel uncomfortable talking to their device — both valid views. However, he hopes he will inspire you to at least give it a go and think about it the next time you are building something. Start welcoming speech: It might be just what you’re listening for.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
In this article, Sara Soueidan will go over the prerequisites and techniques for working with CSS in SVG.
She’ll also go over how to export and optimize SVGs, techniques for embedding them and how each one affects the styles and animations applied, and then we’ll actually style and animate with CSS. Make your SVGs accessible! You can do several things to make that happen. In addition to accessibility, don’t forget to optimize your SVGs and provide fallbacks for non-supporting browsers. We hope you’ll find this article to be useful.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
At Typeform, David Okuniev was inspired to simplify online forms by a movie that’s decidedly a blast from the past: the 1983 film WarGames, which centers around a student who remotely logs into a research computer and, through its terminal interface, nearly sparks a nuclear war. Stripping forms down to their basics and building them back up into something better took four years of work, but that core idea guided the team all along: questions are better than lists. In this article you will find David Okuniev’s story of how he turned that idea into a product that’s helped companies of all sizes get a 55% completion rate on their forms.
Read more…
The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
Read more…
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!
Read more…
With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. To put it bluntly, these hacks don’t work. If you’re recreating issues on the desktop, then you can’t be certain that any of your fixes will work. In this article, Jon Raasch will explore a variety of emulators and simulators that you can use for quick and easy testing. Then, he’ll look at remote debugging tools, which enable you to connect a desktop computer to a mobile device and leverage a rich debugging interface.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
