We’ve all dealt with analysis paralysis before. Do I choose vanilla, strawberry or one of the 30 other flavors? And do I go with the cone or cup? When it comes to putting our visitors on the spot, giving them too many options hurts their decision-making ability along with how they feel about the experience as a whole. While you can’t do anything about how much “stuff” is on your site, you can design it in a way that makes it easier for your visitors to make a choice. Today, Suzanne Scacca will look at what it is about the psychology of choice that can be detrimental for conversions and what you can do to keep your PWA visitors from succumbing to it.
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Before the home page, there was the front page. From the Gutenberg Principle to grid systems to above the fold, newspapers teach us much about the foundations of web design. In this article, Frederick O’Brien will examine several tenets of newspaper design and show their connection to best practice online. At the core of that connection is a principle childlike in its simplicity, one newspaper and web designers alike would do well to remember.
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Our products become slower, clunkier and more painful to use — often simply unbearable for keyboard- and screen reader users, and as such fragile and vulnerable for legal disputes. Let’s fix it. IToday, we bring you Heydon Pickering’s new book Inclusive Components, which explores more accessible and robust solutions for the UI patterns we author, plug in, and use every day. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away.Read more…
Today, Heydon will talk about the relationship between accessibility and design systems, and introduce his brand new book: Inclusive Components. During the session, he will explore how to create an accessible accordion using progressive enhancement, and answer your questions about inclusive interaction design.
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Gutenberg is reinventing the experience of creating content in WordPress, granting it new powers to create, edit and manage our content. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will shine some light on these upgraded capabilities, exploring the new tools at our disposition and presenting several new ones to be released sometime in the future.
Let’s see what these new powers are!
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This is the final part of a series on how to create your own multiplayer text adventure engine. Today, Fernando Dolgio will focus on adding chat support to the text client from part 3. He’ll go through the basic design of a chat server using Node.js and socket.io, the basic interaction with the UI, and how we’ve integrated the chat code into the existing UI.
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What does it mean to be a freelance designer or developer? In this second episode of the Smashing Podcast we take a look a freelancing. Today, Drew McLellan talks to experienced freelance brand designer Liz Elcoate to find out more.
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In this inaugural episode of the Smashing Podcast, Drew McLellan talks to Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be used in our web projects? Find out about the book Art Direction For The Web, and catch up on the latest from Smashing Magazine. In this inaugural episode, Drew McLellan talks to designer, author, and speaker Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be applied to our web design projects? We dig into the topic and see if we can get to the bottom of things.
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Data import has historically been a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially for products that depend on ingesting a lot of data from users. That’s why many developers include CSV importers in their apps — to spare users from having to manually copy data from a spreadsheet into their database. But let’s face it: traditional data import solutions haven’t always been great. That’s why, today, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at how Flatfile helps you create a better import experience for your users, team, and product.
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A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. In this article, Barry Rueger will show you why designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, “I can read it, so what’s the problem?”
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