Personal reflection enables us to process and make meaning of all of the great (and not so great) learning and working experiences we’ve had. Everyone stands to gain from engaging in some type of reflection. We can also encourage others to grow through personal reflection. In this article, Victor Yocco will cover some of the benefits of personal reflection, as well as methods of reflecting that you can incorporate into your routine.
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Sometimes it’s good to think outside the box. The Mozilla Developer Roadshow gave Markus Seyfferth the opportunity to get up close with developers in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Hong Kong. How do they work? How do they learn? And what are their local communities like? Let’s find out!
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Knowing who your competitors are is pointless unless you do something with that information. Learn how to build your own competitive analysis matrix that organizes your collected information into useful, usable data. In this article, Amanda Short elaborates how you can start improving your mobile app today.
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A grid is like invisible glue that holds a design together. Even when elements are physically separated from each other, something invisible connects them together. Grids help designers to build better products by tying different design elements together to achieve effective hierarchy, alignment and consistency, with little effort. If executed properly, your designs will appear thoughtful and organized. In this article Nick Babich aims to give you a good understanding of grid systems, what they are, and how they can be applied to your design process. Understanding how to use grids will come from practical experience.
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Links make the Internet what it is. A robust visual design is essential to making the user journey joyful. While underlining has its downsides, it remains one of the most explicit ways to indicate the presence of a link. Underlining text makes links both easy to find and easy to understand for visitors. In this article, Nick Babich will explain the concept of underlining and provide a few tips on how to use it to improve the web experience, and help you find out when and why underlines should be used in our digital products.
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Integrating prototyping deeply into your creative process can be transformative. It can make for a more positive, enriching team culture. In this article, Jamie shares his experiences and advice on how prototyping can help you work on a wider variety of projects much faster. He’ll provide some prototypes that he created for a game he made, Melody Jams, which got featured by Apple in 130 countries and was the number one kids app in the store for a brief time.
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(This series of articles is kindly supported by Adobe.) User Experience (UX) is evolving rapidly, and as designers, we need to ensure our knowledge keeps pace with the changes. This article, the first in a series of ten sponsored by Adobe XD, gets the ball rolling, exploring how UX is evolving.
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Creating inclusive experiences is a question of using the right menu patterns in the right places, with the right markup and behavior. In design, we often make the mistake of giving different things the same name. They appear similar, but appearances can be deceptive. In terms of inclusion, it may lead you to repurpose a semantically and behaviorally inappropriate component. Users will expect one thing and get another. In this article, Heydon Pickering will give you an insight into inclusive menus and menu buttons.
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Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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You can’t afford to skip testing, because even a simple round of testing could make or break your product. Investment in user testing is just about the only way to consistently generate a rich stream of data on user behavior. Testing provides the inspiration, guidance and validation that product teams need in order to design great products. That’s why the most effective teams make testing a habit. In this article, Nick Babich will show you some tips that can be applied to different types of testing.
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