UX

Google is handing out bucks for CSS-related projects, so you might as well know about it! Nicole Sullivan: All of us who work on the web regularly benefit from the work of people who create specifications, tools, demos, tutorials, and polyfills. Many of these resources are side projects, made avail..

AR (Augmented Reality) continues to build as one of the most exciting technology innovations to appear in recent years. More accessible than virtual reality experiences, since no specialist headset is required, AR has quickly emerged as a crucial tool for building unique experiences. Although inter..

When’s the last time you read your website? Like out loud in the lobby of a Starbucks on a weekday afternoon, over the phone to your parents, or perhaps even as a bedtime story for your kids. No worries, this isn’t a trick question or anything—just a gut check. If there’s only one thing you can do..

Ain’t this the truth: It’s like when you’re learning a new language. At some point your brain goes from translating from your mother tongue into the other language, and instead starts thinking in that other language. I don’t speak any other language besides English, but I’ve heard that’s true. Wit..

Not all teams build products in highly uncertain environments or try to create cutting-edge new features. Many incrementally improve existing products and try to do so in a way that doesn’t alienate large existing user bases. Neither of these tasks is particularly easy, and they often require very different approaches to research and design. Let’s take a look at how things differ depending on a team’s goals. Often, product teams, regardless of how agile they are, don’t have a very good distinction between “how to do research for a brand new, innovative product” vs “how to do research for an existing, successful product with customers.” You’ll notice we said “product teams” don’t have that di...

Research on siloed teams is often the responsibility of a small number of people. On agile teams, we often involve more decision makers in research, which is a little trickier than it sounds. In this video we’ll discuss the idea of team research and talk about some ways to make it easier and less disruptive. [[video:1038]]The Take AwayCollaborating with team members, especially engineers, can drastically improve the types of research you can do in a short period of time. Involving other folks helps to develop a deep customer understanding throughout the team, and it can avoid technical delays by surfacing potential issues early in the design process. It obviously won’t work for every single...

Each year, the web is full of new ideas, tools, and trends. But for WordPress, 2021 may be looked upon as one of great foundational shifts. Changes that, while still in their early stages, promise to have a lasting impact on how we work with the content management system (CMS). That applies not onl..

Agile teams are not great places to be perfectionists, mostly because we rarely know what makes something perfect. And, frankly, what designers think of as “perfect” is almost never the same as what a user would consider “perfect.” Instead of aiming for some nebulous version of a perfect design, aim for getting things good enough to learn from and iterate.In this video, Laura Klein uses the analogy of a familiar household activity to explain how you can train yourself to think in terms of good enough, instead of “perfect.”[[video:1049]]The Take AwayTeams that can learn from user feedback and iterate on features tend to stress less about making a product “perfect” before it gets released. The...

Ya know, I used to do one of these posts after making a few podcast appearances I hadn’t had a chance to link up yet, so I could share them. As fate would have it, I haven’t been on many podcasts (other than my own) lately. One exception! I was on Episode 33 of That Tech Show a few months back where..

Josh’s Shadow Palette Generator is a fantastic tool. The premise is that box-shadow pretty much always looks better when there are multiple layered shadows that are a bit tinted. It reminds me of how gradients almost always look better when eased. The generator does that, but also does three levels ..