A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design

(This is a sponsored article.) What is a product? Until recently, the term was used only in relation to something material and often found in a retail store. Nowadays, it is coming to mean digital products as well. Apps and websites are modern products. When it comes to building great products, design is the most important “feature.” We’ve moved into the stage where product design dominates — it’s what sets companies apart and gives a real edge over competitors.

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Think Less, Embrace More: Inspiring Desktop Wallpapers For February 2018

Time flies by… The first month of the new year is already behind us, and with February just around the corner, it’s time for some fresh inspiration. So how about some wallpapers to tickle your ideas? Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the ones you usually find out there? Well, we’ve got you covered. As every month since more than nine years already, artists and designers from across the globe once again fired up their favorite illustration tools and got out their paint brushes and cameras to create charming desktop wallpapers that are sure to breathe some fresh life into your desktop.

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A GraphQL Primer: The Evolution Of API Design (Part 2)

In Part 1 we looked at how APIs have evolved over the last few decades and how each one gave way to the next. We also talked about some of the particular drawbacks of using REST for mobile client development. In this article, I want to look at where mobile client API design appears to be headed — with a particular emphasis on GraphQL. There are, of course, lots of people, companies, and projects that have tried to address RESTs shortcomings over the years: HAL, Swagger/OpenAPI, OData JSON API and dozens of other smaller or internal projects have all sought to bring order to the spec-less world of REST.

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Respect Always Comes First

The past years have been remarkable for web technologies. Our code has become modular, clean and well-defined. Our tooling for build processes and audits and testing and maintenance has never been so powerful. Our design process is systematic and efficient. Our interfaces are smooth and responsive, with a sprinkle of beautiful transitions and animations here and there. And after so many years, accessibility and performance have finally become established, well-recognized pillars of user experience.

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Automated Browser Testing With The WebDriver API

Manually clicking through different browsers as they run your development code, either locally or remotely, is a quick way to validate that code. It allows you to visually inspect that things are as you intended them to be from a layout and functionality point of view. However, it’s not a solution for testing the full breadth of your site’s code base on the assortment of browsers and device types available to your customers.

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Enter The Dragon (Drop): Accessible List Reordering

Over the years of being a web developer with a focus on accessibility, I have mostly dealt with widely-adopted, standardized UI components, well supported by assistive technologies (AT). For these types of widgets, there are concise ARIA authoring practices as well as great tools like axe-core that can be used to test web components for accessibility issues. Creating less common widgets, especially those that have no widely-adopted conventions for user interaction can be very tricky.

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Offboarding In The Online World

By now, we’ve all heard about onboarding — the beginning of a relationship between a company and a user — but what about offboarding? Both go hand in hand as being two of the most important interactions you can have with a user, but offboarding gets much less publicity and sometimes is even altogether ignored. So, what exactly is it, and why is it so important? Offboarding is usually described as the interaction between a company and their customer at the end of the customer journey.

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Be Watchful: PHP And WordPress Functions That Can Make Your Site Insecure

Security of a WordPress (or any) website is a multi-faceted problem. The most important step anyone can take to make sure that a site is secure is to keep in mind that no single process or method is sufficient to ensure nothing bad happens. But there are things you can do to help. One of them is to be on the watch, in the code you write and the code from others you deploy, for functions that can have negative consequences.

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Using Gradients In User Experience Design

(This is a sponsored article.) Color has the potential to make or break product. Today you’ll learn how to use gradients for a website in Adobe XD through a very useful tutorial. In the last Adobe XD release, radial gradients were added so that designers can easily create unique color effects by simulating a light source or applying a circular pattern. Designers can add, remove and manipulate color stops with the same intuitive interface as linear gradients.

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A GraphQL Primer: Why We Need A New Kind Of API (Part 1)

In this series, I want to introduce you to GraphQL. By the end, you should understand not just what it is but also its origins, its drawbacks and the basics of how to work with it. In this first article, rather than jumping into the implementation, I want to go over how and why we have arrived at GraphQL (and similar tools) by looking at the lessons learned from the last 60 years of API development, from RPC to now.

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Optimizing Sketch Files: Lessons Learned In Creating The Reduce App (Case Study)

Sketch had brought totally new standards for file sizes. You no longer see 10 GB Photoshop files all over the place. Nevertheless, huge Sketch files exist, and they slow down Sketch. As a result, your productivity slows down as well. Let’s be honest: It’s not the design files that become bigger by magic. It’s designers who fill their files with unused, unoptimized and hidden elements that take unnecessary space. We have faced this problem in our startup, Flawless App.

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Work-Life Balance: Tips From The Community

In order to encourage web professionals to consider some of the key points of their working lives in this still nascent industry, we asked folks on Twitter and Facebook to share their best work-life balance tips that worked really well for them. We received lots of responses: most very sensible, many very insightful, some quite unexpected and a few deliberately tongue-in-cheek. The most important thing to note when thinking about work-life balance is that it is different for everyone.

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Now You See Me: How To Defer, Lazy-Load And Act With IntersectionObserver

Once upon a time, there lived a web developer who successfully convinced his customers that sites should not look the same in all browsers, cared about accessibility, and was an early adopter of CSS grids. But deep down in his heart it was performance that was his true passion: He constantly optimized, minified, monitored, and even employed psychological tricks in his projects. Then, one day, he learned about lazy-loading images and other assets that are not immediately visible to users and are not essential for rendering meaningful content on the screen.

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Monthly Web Development Update 1/2018: Browser Diversity, Ethical Design, And CSS Alignment

I hope you had a great start into the new year. And while it’s quite an arbitrary date, many of us take the start of the year as an opportunity to try to change something in their lives. I think it’s well worth doing so, and I wish you the best of luck for accomplishing your realistic goals. I for my part want to start working on my mindfulness, on being able to focus, and on pursuing my dream of building an ethically correct, human company with Colloq that provides real value to users and is profitable by its users.

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How To Internationalize Your WordPress Website

On September 30th, 2017, the international WordPress community united for 24 hours to translate the WordPress ecosystem. For the third time, #WPTranslationDay fused an all-day translating marathon with digital and contributor day events designed to promote the value of creating accessible experiences for global users, better known as “localization”. As an open-source community, we should all strive to localize our open-source contributions. Before you can transcribe your digital assets though, you have to internationalize your codebase.

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Learning Elm From A Drum Sequencer (Part 2)

In part one of this two-part article, we began building a drum sequencer in Elm. We learned the syntax, how to read and write type-annotations to ensure our functions can interact with one another, and the Elm Architecture, the pattern in which all Elm programs are designed. In this conclusion, we’ll work through large refactors by relying on the Elm compiler, and set up recurring events that interact with JavaScript to trigger drum samples.

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Understanding And Using REST APIs

There’s a high chance you came across the term “REST API” if you’ve thought about getting data from another source on the internet, such as Twitter or Github. But what is a REST API? What can it do for you? How do you use it? In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about REST APIs to be able to read API documentations and use them effectively.

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A Comprehensive Guide To UX Research

(This is a sponsored article.) Before embarking upon the design phase of any project, it’s critical to undertake some research so that the decisions you make are undertaken from an informed position. In this third article of my series for Adobe XD, I’ll be focusing on the importance of undertaking user research. Your job title might not be “design researcher”, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at the very least inform yourself of your users and their needs by undertaking at least some initial scoping research before you embark upon a project.

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How Big Is That Box? Understanding Sizing In CSS Layout

A key feature of Flexbox and Grid Layout is that they can deal with distributing available space between, around and inside grid and flex items. Quite often this just works, and we get the result we were hoping for without trying very hard. This is because the specifications attempt to default to the most likely use cases. Sometimes, however, you might wonder why something ends up the size that it is.

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Free Online Event On Building And Maintaining Design Systems

(This is a sponsored article.) Everybody’s talking about design systems, but they are more than just a trend. They are a best practice for design consistency and efficiency between designers and developers. Back in the day, only large companies could afford the effort of building and maintaining a design system. Nowadays, with the growth of new tools and processes, they have become much more feasible for companies of all sizes.

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Announcement Of Reduce On SmashingMag

The Reduce app is a menu bar application that optimizes your Sketch files sizes. It compresses images and automatically removes all hidden layers from all pages. Sketch had brought totally new standards for file sizes. You no longer see 10 GB Photoshop files all over the place. Nevertheless, huge Sketch files exist, and they slow down Sketch. As a result, your productivity slows down as well. Let’s be honest: It’s not the design files that becomes bigger by magic.

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How To Make A Drag-and-Drop File Uploader With Vanilla JavaScript

It’s a known fact that file selection inputs are difficult to style the way developers want to, so many simply hide it and create a button that opens the file selection dialog instead. Nowadays, though, we have an even fancier way of handling file selection: drag and drop. Technically, this was already possible because most (if not all) implementations of the file selection input allowed you to drag files over it to select them, but this requires you to actually show the file element.

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Air Lookout Is The Side Project That Changed My Design Process Forever

In February of 2015, I began working on an iOS app called Air Lookout. The goal of the app was to simplify and remove any obfuscation of air quality information. After over a year of working nights and weekends, the total net income since it launched in 2016 has been less than $1,000. Even with those numbers, I would relive every hour of work. The one thing that I can’t place a monetary value on is how the experience of creating Air Lookout has completely changed my mind on the process of design and development for every project I have worked on since.

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Universal Principles Of User Experience Design

(This is a sponsored article.) As designers working in an ever-changing field, it’s important that we develop an understanding of the timeless design principles that underpin everything we do. In the second article in my series for Adobe XD, I’ll explore the foundations that enable us to establish some universal principles of UX. These principles, which should sit at the heart of everything we design and build, are critical and will stand the test of time:

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Learning Elm From A Drum Sequencer (Part 1)

If you’re a front-end developer following the evolution of single page applications (SPA), it’s likely you’ve heard of Elm, the functional language that inspired Redux. If you haven’t, it’s a compile-to-JavaScript language comparable with SPA projects like React, Angular, and Vue. Like those, it manages state changes through its virtual dom aiming to make the code more maintainable and performant. It focuses on developer happiness, high-quality tooling, and simple, repeatable patterns.

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Designing Friction For A Better User Experience

In experience design, friction is anything that prevents users from accomplishing their goals or getting things done. It’s the newsletter signup overlay covering the actual content, the difficult wording on a landing page, or the needless optional questions in a checkout flow. It’s the opposite of intuitive and effortless, the opposite of “Don’t make me think.” Having said that, friction can still be a good thing sometimes. In game design, for example, friction is actually required.

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Visual Studio Code Can Do That?

About two years ago, I begrudgingly opened Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for the first time. The only reason I even did so is that I was working on a TypeScript project (also quite begrudgingly) and I was tired of fighting with the editor and the compiler and all of the settings that I needed to make a TypeScript project work. Someone mentioned to me that TypeScript “just works” in VS Code and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were right.

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Ghost Button Design: Is This Really Still A Thing (And Why)?

For such a small design element, buttons sure are a complicated one to tackle. It makes sense, what with call-to-action buttons serving as the next step in your visitors’ path to conversion. Mess that up and you might as well say “bye-bye” to business. Though we have a good understanding of the types of button design rules that universally work, there will be times when you’re surprised by a rogue element that performs well.

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Dwelling On The Past: The Importance Of Self Reflection (Part 2)

Current and aspiring web professionals must continually grow in order to stay relevant. Our field doesn’t allow for stagnation. In part one of this series, I discussed the importance of project retrospectives in facilitating and documenting team growth. We don’t always have the luxury of engaging in team retrospectives, or even of working on teams. Personal reflection provides similar benefits, while focusing on your individual experiences. 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.

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The Rise Of The State Machines

It’s 2018 already, and countless front-end developers are still leading a battle against complexity and immobility. Month after month, they’ve searched for the holy grail: a bug-free application architecture that will help them deliver quickly and with high quality. I am one of those developers, and I’ve found something interesting that might help. We have taken a good step forward with tools such as React and Redux. However, they’re not enough on their own in large-scale applications.

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The Front-End Performance Challenge: Winners And Results

A few weeks ago, we asked our readers and the community to use everything they could to make their websites and projects perform blazingly fast. Today, we’re thrilled to show off the results of this challenge and announce the winner who will be awarded with some smashing prizes indeed! What prizes, you ask? The winner wins a roundtrip flight to London, full accommodation in a fancy hotel, a ticket to SmashingConf London 2018, and last but not least, a Smashing workshop of their choice.

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Front-End Performance Checklist 2018 [PDF, Apple Pages]

Performance matters — we all know it. However, do we actually always know what our performance bottlenecks exactly are? Is it expensive JavaScript, slow web font delivery, heavy images, or sluggish rendering? Is it worth exploring tree-shaking, scope hoisting, code-splitting, and all the fancy loading patterns with intersection observer, clients hints, CSS containment, HTTP/2 and service workers? And, most importantly, where do we even start improving performance and how do we establish a performance culture long-term?

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Introducing Web Payments: Easier Online Purchases With The Payment Request API

Buying things online can be a frustrating process, especially on mobile. Even if the pages are well designed, there’s a lot of information required: Our contact information, shipping and billing addresses, shipping option and card details. If you’ve ever just given up sometimes, you’re in the majority. The Baymard Institute took an average across 37 different studies and found that 69% of shopping carts are abandoned. A typical, long checkout form on mobile.

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