Perhaps the only thing worse than a fire that could happen to the office of a web development company would be losing connectivity to the web. This is why Google Mail inserts a warning whenever you go offline. As noted in Marco Zehe’s 2008 blog post, Google was an early adopter of ARIA live regions. In this article, Heydon Pickering is going to create a script which tests whether the user is online or off and uses ARIA to warn screen reader users of the change in this status so they know whether it’s worth staying at their desk or giving up and going for a beer.
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No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should. As an in-house UX professional, Robert Hoekman Jr has formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, he has worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. In this article, he will share what he learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.
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One of the best attributes of WordPress is its ease of use. It’s easy because there’s not a significant amount of bloat with endless bells and whistles that steepen the learning curve. On the flip side, some might find WordPress a little light. It does a lot, but not quite enough. In this article, Brian Onorio will explore the process of registering new data types in a fully compliant manner. Once you get the hang of it and you create a few of these, it’ll start to come naturally. Although this article is long and in-depth, it really is about a 10-minute process from concept to conclusion once you fully understand what’s going on.
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Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a server for an API. We’re now seeing a possible return or, rather, more of a combination of both architectures happening. Web architecture definitely goes through cycles. We started out rendering everything on the server and shipping it down to the client. Then, JavaScript came along, and we started using it for simple page interactions. At some point, JavaScript grew up and we realized it could be used to build large applications that render all on the client and that use the server to retrieve data through an API.
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Given the importance of filtering, Christian Holst and the entire team at the Baymard Institute spent the nine months researching how users browse, filter and evaluate products in e-commerce product lists. At the core of this research was a large-scale usability study testing 19 leading e-commerce websites with real end users, following the think-aloud protocol. In this article Christian will take a closer look at some of the research findings related to the users’ filtering experience. He’ll walk through each of some filtering insights, showing you the usability test findings, examining the benchmark data and presenting best practice examples for creating a good e-commerce filtering experience.
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Although it’s definitely still a work in progress, Sketch continues to be Ashley Bennent’s go-to web design program. Its tools and interface prioritize design for the web. Things like the premade artboard templates, symbols and simple exporting functionality have drastically sped up my workflow and made the design process a little easier. Sketch has also improved my entire workflow, from moodboards to the early stages of development, making it an optimal tool for responsive design. Plenty of other programs out there have similar features, and until the most recent update (Sketch 3.2), users were battling a lot of bugs in the app. So, why Sketch? Bugs or no bugs, it has become the best tool for UI design, including responsive web design.
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As great as WordPress is, the standard way in which it approaches the archive is far from user-friendly. Let’s fix that today! In this article, Karol K will build an archive page for WordPress that’s actually useful. The best part is that you will be able to use it with any modern WordPress theme installed on your website at the moment. This custom archive page will be based on a custom page template. The page will be responsive and will not depend on the current theme of the website it’s being used on.
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In the first part of this series, David Tucker walked through a messaging application demo powered by the Kinvey application. He explored how to leverage user management, file storage and the data store. To complete the demo, you need to leverage two key pieces of Kinvey functionality: the permissions provided by the data store, and push notifications, which are enabled through the business logic functionality. With this article, you will have seen ways that an MBaaS solution can help you to create compelling business- and consumer-focused mobile experiences. This certainly is a space with a lot of focus at the moment, and David expects rapid maturity and evolution of these services over the next year.
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Living style guides help front-end developers transform front-end codebases into well-described pattern libraries with the minimum of effort. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools — so let’s have a closer look at what our community has to offer. In this article, Robert Haritonov has arranged the tools by function, highlighting only the most powerful ones worth knowing about. You can find more tools, plus videos, articles and other material about style guides at styleguide.io.
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Designing mobile apps requires a deep knowledge of devices, and it often means changing the way we think — even if that means leaving behind much of what we’ve learned from designing for the web. Changing one’s mindset to adapt to apps comes from the inside. No one will force you to do it. If you don’t adjust, you run the risk of becoming little more than an icon factory, just a small step in a larger process of design. Designing apps requires a new way of thinking. It’s time to leave our web design boxes and to understand smartphones, tablets and even watches as separate and distinct devices.
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