Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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PWAs take advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. Think of it as a website built using web technologies but that acts and feels like an app. In this article, Kevin Farrugia will look into recent advancements in the browser and the opportunities you, as developers, have to build a new generation of web apps. This is merely an appetizer for progressive web apps. You could do a lot more to create that app-like experience users are looking for, whether by supporting push notifications with the Push API, making the app re-engageable, or using IndexedDB and background syncing to improve the offline experience.
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Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. As Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Every element of the design matters. Details make your app stand out from the competition because they can be either practical and forgettable or impressive, useful and unforgettable.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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In the previous article, Clayton Anderson showed you how React Native can help you make iOS and Android apps with a shared code base, without sacrifices in quality. But what about the web? React Native for Web is intended to let you write a single app that runs in a browser using standard web technologies, or on iOS and Android as a real native mobile app. While I don’t think the project is ready for production use yet, its potential success could mark a massive change in how large multi-platform applications are built. Let’s jump in!
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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We publish articles because we love sharing what we learn and what others learn, too; we love discovering unique points of view and surprising design strategies, as well as just understanding how our colleagues out there solve difficult UX and front-end problems. Every single Smashing article goes through a thorough editorial review, including multiple passes for editing and refinement, before being published. In this series dedicated to our upcoming 10th anniversary we will explain our workflow and introduce the people behind the scenes!
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Holiday or no holiday, our need for some fresh inspiration never stops! This month, Vitaly Friedman has found some real treasures! As a designer, Vitaly feels that there is so much that he can learn from the techniques and color combinations in these little gems. Let’s dive in, and get inspired to leave your comfort zones for your next designs!
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In this article, Filip Bartos will share his notes about installing and configuring a critical-path performance optimization using Express and Handlebars for an isomorphic React website. This website was developed using React, running on an Express server, and it was going well, but Filip still wasn’t satisfied with a load-blocking CSS bundle. So, he started to think about options for how to implement the critical-path technique on an Express server. Throughout this article, Filip will be using Node.js and Express. Familiarity with them will help you understand the examples.
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