By focusing almost exclusively on the user insights that each test is designed to yield, prototype testing can be an impressively efficient method for product teams to run experiments. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it. In this article, Michelle Chu gives six tips for designers to consider when creating prototypes specifically to generate user testing insight.
Read more…
User reaction to a wait online is no different from that in the offline world. Studies based on the analysis of more than a thousand cases identify 14 distinct types of waiting situations on the web. Being dependent on your users’ loyalty, you cannot leave them facing a passive wait. In this final part, Denys Mishunov discusses pure passive waiting on the web, how you can deal with it and what can be done to keep user satisfaction high even when the service cannot be delivered fast enough. In addition to the studies on waiting online, your analysis will employ the psychology of waiting lines, customer satisfaction and other tools applicable to offline waiting.
Read more…
Because digital products and services play an increasingly important role in the day-to-day operations of normal businesses, it no longer makes strategic sense to outsource these activities wholesale. As a result, we’re seeing companies move away from the old way of engaging with agencies and towards something much more collaborative. Working as part of an integrated team helps to prevent projects from being thrown over the fence, breaking the three-to-five-year cycle of redesign and stagnation. However, finding and retaining digital talent is still a major problem, and only getting worse. Here are seven simple techniques that traditional companies can adopt to help them find the talent they need to thrive in today’s digital marketplace.
Read more…
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues and offering solutions. In this article, Scott McGregor will help you become more informed about the impact that noise has on your life. He’ll discuss the good and bad sides of noise and sound, so that you can use both to benefit your personal well-being.
Read more…
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues. We’ve all experienced that burnout moment. It’s that moment when we’ve got nothing left to give but keep trying anyway, when we’re left without much more than a shell to live in and motions to go through.
In such moments all we want is for our work to feel like our work and not like torture.
Read more…
From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML.
In this article, Sebastian Metzger will show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components.
Read more…
Nicholas C. Zakas started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. He couldn’t get the idea of a linter with pluggable runtime rules out of his head. He had just spent a bunch of time learning about Esprima and abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and he thought to himself, “It can’t be all that hard to create a pluggable JavaScript linter using an AST.” It was from those initial thoughts that ESLint was born. ESLint is a JavaScript linter that has learned from our collective past of JavaScript development. It is committed to not only being a great linter out of the box, but also to being the center of a great and growing ecosystem of plugins, shareable configs and parsers.
Read more…
If you work on the web, your superpower is side projects. Unlike your regular job, a side project lets you take on an alternate identity, one of which you are in charge and no one can stop you. And the best part: If your impact is big enough, the whole world will soon know your name. Side projects are underused by the vast majority of designers and developers out there. In this article, Sacha Greif will give you a play-by-play account of the process of building and launching one such side project.
Read more…
WordPress provides a graphical user interface for every administrative task, and this has helped to make it the most popular content management system on the web. But in terms of productivity, working with the command line enables you to accomplish many such tasks more efficiently and quickly. In this tutorial, Konstantinos Kouratoras will describe the benefits of using and extending WP-CLI, and he will present several advanced commands to make your life easier when working with WordPress.
Read more…
There is no such thing as a project that goes off well without some level of planning. You’re just not the one doing it. You can keep complaining, or you can change it. You’re a designer, which means you’re capable of imagining a better version of the world than the one you’re living in. And yet there you are, stuck at the back. In this article, Robert Hoekman Jr. will share some of the reasons it happens. And how to stop being an afterthought.
Read more…
