Let’s face it: it’s never easy to deal with client feedback. Requests may be vague (“the form is broken”), too subjective (“the page doesn’t load fast enough”), or difficult to assess without seeing it yourself (“the page still isn’t updated”). You could schedule some time to walk through the issues or bugs with your client, but a better solution to this often disruptive and frustrating process is to create a fool-proof system that’s easy for clients to leave feedback and even easier for you to implement and resolve it. In this article, Suzanne Scacca brings you great suggestions.
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The feast or famine merry-go-round of freelancing can certainly be damaging to our bank accounts but more importantly it can deeply affect our self worth and mental health. This happens to everyone at some point or another. Even people who we assume are constantly over booked with work. Speak to people and be open and honest. It’s important to let people know you’re available for work. In this article, Liz Elcoate brings you some strategies she learnt the hard way to combat the quiet times.
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Until now, the designer-developer handoff has been fraught with inefficiencies. It’s not that software teams don’t know how to collaborate or communicate well with one another. It’s just that disparate platforms (namely, Sketch and Visual Studio Code) and incompatible workflows created tons of issues in how design was translated into code. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you Indigo.Design, which offers a simple solution to fix this costly and time-consuming problem for software teams.
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Developers are known to usually be the last ones who leave their fingerprints before a website or any sort of web product gets shipped. Obviously, a lot of responsibility is involved and the quality of their work can either make a project excel or go down the drain. In this article, Stefan Kaltenegger gives suggestions about what frontend developers can do on their end to better bridge the gap between designers and developers.
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Designing apps for mental health is one area where UX designers can have a huge impact. You might assume that there are already dozens of wonderful digital therapies available for people struggling with mental health disorders. Bu most apps are useless at best, and harmful at worst, due primarily to a disconnect between the designers building the apps and the patients and providers in the field of mental health. In this article, Marli Mesibov will look at the issues with current apps, and guidelines to ensure UX practitioners are using clinically proven methods for improving mental health treatment.
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Looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team? It’s not as difficult as you may think. If you’re a team manager who is looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team, then this article for you. Here Nick Babich brings you seven of the most common challenges distributed product teams should overcome and how a team-management tool called “monday” can help.
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We all learn lessons as we make our way through life and work. Ricky Onsman thought it might be useful to find out what kind of advice folks in the community have found to be particularly valuable. Some of the following advice focused exclusively on web work, some on work in general, and some on life in general.
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How do you get the most out of both your career and your personal life? The most important thing to note when thinking about work-life balance is that it is different for everyone. While there may a perfect solution for an individual in any given time, place and work situation, it is almost certain to be different for another individual – by a degree that can be tiny or enormous. Ricky Onsman asked the community to share their tips and advice on achieving a healthy work-life balance, and this is what they had to say.
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Productivity tips always make for a popular topic for an article, as everyone is looking for the silver bullet, that one weird trick that turns you into a productivity machine. So, we asked the community on Twitter and Facebook to share their best productivity tips, and in this article Racheal Andrew is going to round these up alongside some things she’s learned that work well for her. Let us know your own advice in the comments, or tell us the popular tip that would never work for you!
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The world is a stressful place. That’s probably why if you search for articles about dealing with stress you’ll find lots of great advice. But the problem is that most of it is pretty generic. Is there anything more specific to the profession of design? In this article Ollie Campbell takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day. If you’re a designer who feels stressed from time to time, then this article is for you. It takes some of the academic research on stress and applies it to the challenges designers face every day.
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