The problem with brainstorming is, even if there are great ideas in the room, there is often no clear-cut way to decide on what ideas to take action on. But there is a technique that Jonathan Courtney has been using with all his clients over the past year to release or enhance many successful products. Over the last year he’s found that applied USM is not just a fantastic way to get ideas that nobody would have come up with on their own, it’s also the perfect alignment tool for your client or stakeholders. Let Jonathan show you exactly how it’s done.
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The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
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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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Every professional has a comfort zone. The first sign you’re in it is when you see no challenge on the horizon. You know pretty much everything you need to perform well, and if anything unfamiliar comes your way it can be solved fairly quickly. It can take a while to realize you’ve stopped moving, and working on freelance projects seems like the only way to keep your brain busy. Do you have a dream project, application, big or small idea? You can do it. You just need to start.
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Today’s icon set, designed by Manuela Langella, is dedicated to both lovers and haters of… football! A big Thank You to Manuela Langella for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, though reselling bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. Clink! Clink! Let the games begin!
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The theremin’s unique sound proves perfect for sci-fi soundtracks and Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. The world is a better place. With this tutorial, Stuart Memo hopes you could see how simple getting something musical up and running fairly quickly can be. You can even use the following techniques to make a synthesizer. Stuart created a little HTML keyboard called Qwerty Hancock to help you do this very thing. Feel free to show off your own creation!
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Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. From 3D illustrations to artwork created with ink and watercolors, Vitaly is sure there’s something that’ll spark your inspiration. Be warned though, some of them may even give you wanderlust from just looking at them.
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Passwords are written off as inconvenient and unavoidable, but due to a combination of sensors, encryption and seasoned technology users, authentication is taking on new (and exciting) forms. In this article, Drew Thomas will show you that it’s OK to rethink common password habits, and it’s acceptable to use common sense and due diligence to create usable, secure and error-free authentication – passwords or otherwise. Most other interaction patterns have been updated over time, but no one wants to mess with password authentication. It’s time to change that!
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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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In this article, Luca Leone and Anders Schmidt Hansen will investigate an alternative to the classic “pages and links” paradigm, a model dubbed “zoom navigation.” Perhaps the reason why zooming interfaces are rare is that traditional HTML linking quickly became the dominant navigation paradigm, and zooming navigation presented problems of implementation, but we have good reasons now in a multi-device world to give zooming navigation another chance and to experiment with ideas and implementations. At the end of the article, they will introduce some prototypes and discuss their technical implementations.
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