July 27, 2015 — Research should always influence our work. Not every project has a content strategist, but that’s no excuse for copywriters to write blindly. If you have the opportunity, seek out a content strategist or a user researcher; if research has already been conducted, they’ll be happy to walk you through it, and if it hasn’t, then now is the time to get involved. Even just one or two of these research processes and tools will help you learn a great deal about your users, and ultimately it will improve your final content. Read more…

July 24, 2015 — All too often we forget that applications are built by real people with opinions, ideals and fears. When a whole company is formed around a single product that’s about to get relaunched, there’s a lot of tension — after all, these people rely on that product’s success for their own financial security. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calendar tool on Android: Business Calendar. Günther Beyer & Nino Rapin are sharing this story because everyone’s standing on the shoulders of giants and this is their small contribution to better information design thinking. They hope they’ve learned enough in this project to make you a little smarter, so that you can make us smarter in turn. Thank you. Read more…

July 21, 2015 — A lab environment can never replicate the natural environment of the participant, and the mere presence of a research facilitator or moderator creates a dimension of artificiality that can thwart the research goals. How you moderate will have a significant impact on the quality of your research findings. The goal, of course, is to get realistic findings. An effective moderator understands how the nature and timing of questions can influence — and sometimes even drive — the outcome. A skillful moderator is adept at managing these potentially conflicting goals in order to ensure the integrity of the research and equally adept at ensuring that their findings appropriately inform their business partners’ decisions. Read more…

July 20, 2015 — This article provides a small taste of what is possible with a Sass-based grid framework named “Susy”. Once you’ve spent a little time getting the hang of it, you’ll see how easy and fast it is to create simple or complex layouts without a huge amount of code. Read more…

July 17, 2015 — In this second part, Yury Vetrov will show you how he made his “Bootstrap on steroids” more powerful. A framework like this has many benefits, but the main result is a transition from large redesigns every couple of years to constantly updated designs. We can spend more time evolving a product rather than doing endless design maintenance. Moreover, product designers stop thinking in screens and become less like “Photoshop/Sketch people”. Read more…

July 15, 2015 — In this article, we release a set of 60 lovely workspace illustrations of items that many web and graphic designers use every day. The set has been designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko, from Minsk, Belarus, and released for free for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all these elements and others for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything. Thanks to Anastasia Kolisnichenko for releasing the illustrations — we’re very grateful for your talent and generosity! Read more…

July 15, 2015 — Quantity queries and quantity ordering are advanced concepts and might be scary for beginners. However, as we move presentational styling away from programming languages and into CSS, we should use these tools more and more. Even as many members of our industry explore content queries, we can now use quantity queries to modify the order of content simply by counting. If you had to create a table of items, you might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone? Read more…

July 13, 2015 — Now is a great time to start a podcast. It’s an authentic and intimate way to demonstrate authority in your niche and to grow your client base. Kyle Racki recently started his first podcast, Agencies Drinking Beer, with his cofounder, Kevin Springer. When starting out, he was a bit lost with the technical logistics of actually setting up the podcast. Here is all of the best advice, information and resources Kyle can offer you. This way, you can spend less time on the technical side of setting up your podcast and more time creating killer content. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to regularly deliver new content, but the reward is more than worth the effort. Ready to start? Let’s go! Read more…

July 11, 2015 — As developers, we know how important it is to sharpen our tools and continually add new ones to our workflow. The command line is one of the best tools you can master as a developer. With tools like Grunt, Gulp and Bower leveraging the increase in productivity that comes with working in the command line, we are seeing it become a much more friendly and comfortable place for beginners and experts alike. In this article, Wes Bos provides insight into some of the best tools to use in your day-to-day workflow in the command line and gets you started with a totally customized setup. Read more…

July 9, 2015 — Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting! Read more…