January 27, 2014 — The debate about what a “User Experience Design” exactly is, is as old as the discipline itself, and while sitting back and watching the drama is sometimes fun, let’s try to figure out which user experience techniques are useful for startups, in-house teams, big corporations and anyone who wants to improve their website, product or service. Read more…

January 24, 2014 — Today, we’re honored to present to you a set of 60 vector round icons, Released exclusively for Smashing Magazine! Crafted with great attention to detail and cleverly designed by the creative trio at Roundicons, this icon set is extremely easy to use and will most probably be the next ultimate resource for any one of your design projects. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required. However, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not allowed. Read more…

January 23, 2014 — Function binding is probably your least concern when beginning with JavaScript, but when you realize that you need a solution to the problem of how to keep the context of “this” within another function, then you might not realize that what you actually need is Function.prototype.bind(). Read more…

January 20, 2014 — A “workaholic” is someone who is addicted to work. Soon, they neglect their family, friends, health, sometimes damaging them all irrevocably. Some people who work on the Web seem not only to disregard the dangers of workaholism, but to actively promote it. They see it as a badge of honor—but it’s a serious issue that can damage Web teams. In contrast, people who simply “work hard” do not expose themselves to such dangers. Read more…

January 17, 2014 — In this interview of the “How I Work” series, Jacob Cook is speaking with Andres Glusman, of Meetup, a company that uses the efficiency of the Internet to conveniently connect people offline. Andres works as the VP of Strategy, Product and Community in Meetup’s New York City office. In this piece, he tells us how the company uses User Experience, Lean Startup methods and innovative ways of organizing teams to fuel the company’s growth. Read more…

January 16, 2014 — As a designer, the value you bring to any project isn’t only your ability to execute tasks. Good clients will appreciate the guidance and opinions that come with your experience, and it’s up to you to base your recommendations on more than subjective opinion. In this article, Jonathan Kochis will refer to specific mobile research projects he has conducted and build a case for audience surveys and review of analytics data. Read more…

January 15, 2014 — In this article, Matthew Haworth will use Magento’s shipping-method code abstraction to create a shipping carrier. He will be covering topics such as extending the abstract shipping class and implement the required methods, allowing tracking codes to be set against an order, work with promotions to allow for free shipping, and much more! Read more…

January 14, 2014 — 92,000 new articles are posted online every day. Companies are spending billions on content marketing to enhance credibility and build brand awareness. Google has always tried to reward great content with high rankings, but today, thanks to improvements in its algorithm, Google is better able to actually do it. Read more…

January 13, 2014 — Lately, Maksim Chemerisuk has started to see more and more problems with jQuery’s core and can’t be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. He, like many others, continued using the library for a while, navigating all of the pesky quirks every day. Then, Daniel Buchner created SelectorListener, and he started to think about creating a set of functions that would enable the possibility of building unobtrusive DOM components using a better approach. Read more…

January 10, 2014 — This is the second in a series of four articles covering four ways to develop mobile applications. Today, Peter Traeg will look at how to build the same sort of application using native Android tools. This simple tip calculator contains two screens: a main view and a settings view. The settings view persists the default tip percentage to local storage using Android’s SDK support. Read more…