Modern websites aren’t inseparable from screens any more. Between phone assistants, home speakers, and screen readers, more and more people are using the web without even looking at it. Websites need to evolve in kind. In the article, Frederickk O’Brien will try to break down what that means for websites going forward, what designers can do about it, and why this might finally be a leap forward to accessibility. More than two thirds of the web is inaccessible to those with visual impairments, after all. It’s time to make websites easy to talk to.
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Research is an essential part of creating good UX. We are often in roles where we interact with our users in order to collect data to inform our UX. We need to ensure our UX research is compliant with ethical standards of research conducted with humans. To do this, we need to have an awareness of potential ethical issues in research, training on how to conduct ethical research, and a systematic review of our research protocols to avoid potential ethical pitfalls.
In this article, Victor Yocco discusses some areas of ethical consideration for UX practitioners when conducting UX research, and explores potential solutions to preventing research from venturing into unethical territory.
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Do you like building relationships and exploring creative options? At Smashing, we are looking for a team member who’ll take good care of advertising and sponsorships across the range of everything we do at Smashing — from the magazine to our conferences. Interested? We’d love you to join us.
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Copy docs is a framework that allows product designers and writers to manage their in-product copy in a smart way. In this article, Valeriia Panina shares her experience in how the copy docs technique turned out to be a game changer for her workflow. The copy docs technique was a game changer for Valeriia’s workflow and she’d be happy if it boosts yours, too!
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In the product-focused world of development, it can be easy to forget the joy of making for the sake of making. By dropping the ‘Why’ and ‘How’, and focusing instead on the ‘What’ of weird, wonderful ideas, you can nurture a totally different side to your skill sets. You can read the docs, you can follow the tutorials, but wouldn’t you be more motivated by trying to make something unique, something no one else has seen before? Here’s how having fun can supercharge your learning. Throw a record on, pick a mood, and let’s get to it.
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Do you have a hard time throwing away mockups, logos and other content you’ve created for clients? The good news is that you don’t have to see rejected or unused designs as a sign of failure or waste. You can actually repurpose them and give them new life on other projects, for other customers, and even within your own business. I’ll explain four ways to do this in this post.
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There are hundreds of Figma plugins available as of today, yet the Figma plugin search functionality is pretty basic and at times it can be very difficult to find the right plugin for a certain task. Today, Abel Hancock will take you into an in-depth look at several plugins that can speed up your design workflow.
Note: This article is aimed at user interface designers who use Figma on a daily basis.Read more…
The dream of a machine-readable Internet is as old as the Internet itself, but only in recent years has it really seemed possible. The benefits of developing for the Semantic Web are not always immediate, or visible, but every site that does strengthens the foundations of an open, transparent, decentralized internet. As major websites take strides towards data-fying their content, now’s the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.
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Digital content (eBooks, stock media and courses) can easily be advertised and sold through online marketplaces. But your clients won’t make as much money that way and really can’t control how their products are marketed. By designing digital product pages for smartphone users who are in that early discovery and research phase, your clients can make more money off of their products. Today, Suzanne Scacca will look at how this is done.
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“Intuitive design” is one of those overused phrases that we as designers hear all too often from stakeholders and their requirements. In this article, Carrie Webster explores what intuitive design actually means, why it doesn’t make sense, how we can better approach design solutions, and what the future of interfaces might look like. It is aimed at user experience designers and anyone interested exploring these concepts in greater detail.
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