March 27, 2015 — Bugs erode trust, which in turn loses customers. So when Ben Gremillion began updating Foundation, a responsive CSS framework, he wanted to ensure everything worked. In this article Ben will teach you his methodology for testing responsively, not just on a case by case, page-from-PSD comp. He developed a certain system to make sure that nothing’s broken at launch on different devices. It’s not enough to look for blatant bugs. You have to be thorough: in execution, in accountability, and in direction. Read more…

March 25, 2015 — Toward the end of 2014, a Google spokesperson hinted that the mobile user experience would become a ranking factor. In January 2015, a number of website owners received messages warning about mobile usability issues on their websites, linking to a section of Webmaster Tools where they could review the problems. In this article, Tim Jensen will review how to flag mobile issues in Webmaster Tools, explain the most common issues and show you how to assess mobile usability problems on your website based on these flags. Read more…

March 24, 2015 — While you might have created the best content in the world, you don’t get to choose how users access it. That’s why it’s important to make sure your content works beautifully on every platform and device. While there’s no magic bullet to make sure your content is publishable and useful on every device, you can change the way you think about, plan for and create content so that it can go anywhere it needs to go. In this article, Kerry Crawford will cover some of the things you can do to make your content more flexible and accessible. Read more…

March 20, 2015 — You have likely experienced the 300-millisecond delay in mobile browsers or wrestled with touchmove versus scrolling. Certain events that used to be very clear are now filled with ambiguity. The click event used to mean one thing and one thing only, but touchscreens have complicated it by needing to discern whether the action is a double-click, scroll, event or some other OS-level gesture. In this article Dustan Kasten will introduce the event cascade and use this knowledge to implement a demo of a tap event that supports the many input methods while not breaking in proxy browsers such as Opera Mini. Read more…

March 19, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release a quite unique icon set. The goodie contains 92 icons in three editable variants: outlined, filled & colored, covering 15 wide categories. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is prohibited. Read more…

March 17, 2015 — Using SVGs can reduce the number of HTTP requests for image replacement. it’s also easy to make an SVG scalable to its container for responsive development. In this article Sarah Drasner will cover a few ways of using SVG sprites to describe motion on the web. She’ll show some techniques for using SVG sprites in complex animation that takes advantage of these factors. All examples shown will assume the use of an auto-prefixer and some basic knowledge of CSS animations. Read more…

March 16, 2015 — Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information. Armed with this understanding, accessibility becomes a cold, hard technical challenge. How do assistive technologies present a web application to make it accessible for their users? Where do they get the information they need? One of the keys is a technology known as the accessibility API. Read more…

March 13, 2015 — Claire Carlson had the opportunity to conduct in-home user interviews in São Paulo on behalf of a Brazilian real estate company called Zap Imóveis. This project provided her with invaluable insider knowledge on how to best conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil and, more broadly, how to conduct field research in foreign countries using the same underlying principles. This article presents her tips for foreigners planning to conduct in-home user interviews in Brazil, including parallels with research in India, China, and Spain. Read more…

March 11, 2015 — A quick query of “mobile navigation” returns thousands of opinions on navigation patterns, including the “hamburger” menu, front-end plugins, frameworks and plenty of other tools. Despite this changing landscape of tools and design trends, a successful navigation system sends users on the path to the exact content they need at the right time. In this article, Patrick Marsceill will explore the beginnings of the design process, as well as techniques specific to mobile ideation, and a unique idea for building a prototype navigation system in Keynote. Read more…

March 10, 2015 — In this article, Igor Fastovski invites UX designers and usability experts to look at the user experience of continuous input. He will detail the process of continuous input and weigh its gains against its pain points. Igor will then apply usability heuristics and basic empathy considerations in an attempt to remove pain points and tweak the design, helping developers improve usability of continuous input apps. Read more…