What happened in the web community in the last few weeks? The web is developing and changing so fast, and we need to acknowledge that we as individual persons can’t know and understand everything. And that’s fine. Choose what you want to do, set your priorities, and, most importantly of all, don’t hesitate to hire someone else for the things you can’t do on your own. In this article, Anselm has summarized the most important happenings in the web community that have taken place over the past few weeks in one handy list for you. Enjoy!
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It’s an exciting time when your mobile app is ready to launch, but be careful. No matter how high you see those app store downloads go, don’t go rushing to celebrate just yet. There’s a more meaningful metric you should be paying attention to in order to determine the success of your app, and that’s the mobile app retention rate. Suzanne Scacca will explore what a good retention rate looks like for mobile apps. Let’s start with the basics.
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At SmashingConf Toronto, attendees got to participate in live performance and accessibility audits with our speakers Marcy Sutton and Tim Kadlec. Marcy took two example components, built using React, and walked us through how these components could be made more accessible with some straightforward changes, and Tim demonstrates how to test the performance of a site, and find bottlenecks leading to poor experiences for visitors. Watching an expert assess these critical areas can help you to perform your own audits.
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Photoshop is what many digital artists, photographers, graphic designers, and even some web developers have in common. What sets us apart is how we use the tool. In this tutorial, Yoanna Victorova shares her most often used Photoshop shortcuts and a few key parts of her creative process. To profit the most from this tutorial, some familiarity with Photoshop would be required, but you should be able to follow along because every technique will be explained in detail. For this article, she decided to use one of her most famous Photoshop artworks named “Regret”.
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While effective bundling of resources on the web has received a great deal of mindshare in recent times, how we ship front-end resources to our users has remained pretty much the same. The average weight of JavaScript and style resources that a website ships with is rising — even though build tooling to optimize the website has never been better. With the marketshare of evergreen browsers rising fast and browsers launching support for new features in lockstep, is it time we rethink asset delivery for the modern web? Today, Shubham Kanodia will give you some answers.
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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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When creating mobile apps, you have to create and maintain the user interface and app logic for both iOS and Android separately: Objective-C/Swift with XCode and Java with Android Studio. That can quickly turn into a pain. With Xamarin.Forms, however, the UI and app logic for your app resides in a single codebase and you get to use a single IDE to maintain it all — saving time and headaches. In this article, take a lap around Xamarin.Forms to see what it can do for you.
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Forms are at the center of every meaningful interaction, so they’re worth getting a firm handle on. That’s why we published Form Design Patterns, a new printed book about accessible and well-designed web forms. With the new Form Design Patterns book, you will go through common real-world problems step by step, and learn how to design simple, robust, lightweight, responsive, accessible, progressively enhanced, interoperable and intuitive forms that let users get stuff done no matter what. And by the end of the book you’ll have a close-to exhaustive list of components delivered as a design system that you can use immediately in your own projects. Jump to table of contents or get the book right away.
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We’re happy to announce Adam Silver’s new book Form Design Patterns. In this excerpt from the book, Adam takes a look at the foundational qualities of a well-designed form and how to think about them.
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Good functional animation makes a landing page not just more appealing, but also more usable. When done correctly, animation can turn a landing page from a sequence of sections into a carefully choreographed, memorable experience. Today, Nick Babich brings you Slides, a framework that will help you use animation to communicate clearly. In this article, Nick will provide the best examples of animation created using the Slides framework.
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