Personas have been in use since the mid-’90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community. Once Shlomo Goltz understood why personas were valuable and how they could be put into action, he started using them in his own work, and then his process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of his labor became more impactful and useful to others. Personas will supercharge your work and help you take your designs to the next level.
Read more…
New tools have emerged to address the challenges of responsive web design. And there is that’s been a leap forward in productivity for the team that Richard Knight works with. Its name is Webflow, and it could be the solution to the problems you face with static design comps produced in Photoshop and Fireworks. In this article, Richard will explore the advantages of Webflow and how you can use it to build responsive websites today. He will take you step by step through the process of creating a responsive website layout for a real project, and identify Webflow’s advantages and where it comes up short.
Read more…
Email is one of the most important tools for reaching your customer base. But with the ever-growing number of emails to send, getting them all out the door can seem a little overwhelming. By putting in place a solid email design workflow, you’ll be able to regularly ship engaging and mobile-friendly emails with ease. Incorporating a modular approach and a custom framework into your email workflow can lead to increased productivity and make it easier for you to iterate on your designs. You will have to make an initial investment of time to get everything up and running, but the result will improve your designs, the customer experience and your engagement rates, leading to happier customers and increased revenue.
Read more…
The simplicity of Jekyll’s theming layer and writing workflow is fantastic; however, setting up the website takes a lot longer than expected. It isn’t for every project. The biggest disadvantage of a static website generator is that incorporating dynamic server-side functionality becomes difficult. Jekyll’s strength is its simplicity and minimalism, giving you just what you need to create a content-focused website that doesn’t need much dynamic user interaction — and no more. This makes it perfect for your blog and portfolio and also worth considering for a simple client website. In this article, Barry Clark will walk you through the quickest way to set up a Jekyll powered blog, how to avoid common problems with using Jekyll, and much more.
Read more…
As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for August 2014. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
Read more…
The process of telling a computer how to perform a task, such as generating a web page, is what web developers commonly call “programming,” but it’s only a subset of programming: imperative programming. There’s another type: declarative programming. With it, you tell a computer what, not how. This subtle shift in approach to programming has broad effects on how you build software, especially how you build the future web. So, let’s take a moment to investigate declarative programming and the web you can build with it.
Read more…
One of the most important things Trevan Hetzel has learned is how to sell the value of the web. Many of his clients needed to be convinced that a website would actually be good for their business. He started from a blank canvas after having moved to this town and building a clientele that now includes over 80 small businesses, mostly in southwest Iowa. He has gotten to the point that most new businesses around here are referred to his company, on the strength of my successful track record and portfolio. In this article, He’ll share with you, his experience with selling to small-town clients.
Read more…
“Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. In this article, Ben Johnson will show you how it came to be and what his team ultimately learned in the process. Also he’ll give you some advice for when you build your next great idea. This is the story of how limitations led to his biggest success in the App Store — and his biggest failure.
Read more…
Knowing how groups influence people can help you to move from being a common designer to a strategic influencer of your target audience with relative ease, and social influence, particularly social identity theory, provides key concepts for you to address through UX design. You can influence people by thoughtfully incorporating social identity concepts into your design. In this article, Victor Yocco will focus on how concepts related to social identity theory can help UX professionals to more effectively incorporate social influence in their work.
Read more…
To bring order into projects, a new product manager is appointed, under huge expectation, and with unclear responsibilities and big goals defined within a very short timeframe. Making It Right is a book about just that: what product management is and how to approach it strategically and meaningfully to get things done well. If your company has to address these issues or you’re looking for a hands-on book to guide you through product management, this is the book for you!
Read more…
