Users skip or otherwise ignore dialogs, tours, video demos and transparencies. At best, users find them a minor inconvenience. At worst, the patterns significantly aggravate new users who are trying to get into the app. In this article, Theresa Neil and Rick Malley will look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement.
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The best writers often work with an editor (or two), who will help them coalesce their words into something more compelling or easier to understand. Having worked with several editors, Paul Lloyd really came to appreciate this aspect of the writing process. Refinement is an essential aspect of any creative process. As refactoring code can make a program more logical and efficient, editing a text can allow an underlying idea to be more clearly stated, or make a piece more enjoyable to read. And when he heard about Editorially, a collaborative writing tool designed with Web writers in mind, he immediately signed up.
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You are about to experience truly hair-raising excitement as you get to grips with the intricacies of the hugely interesting CSS timing function, which is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to CSS animation, and you could well be surprised by just how much you can do with it. For example, they define where an animation accelerates and decelerates, you can break an animation into any number of steps, rather than tweened motion, and much more!
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We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. In a borderless world where people are increasingly doing their research and purchases online,companies that don’t take their branding seriously face imminent demise. Enter emotional branding. It’s a highly effective way to cause reaction, sentiments and moods, ultimately forming experience, connection and loyalty with a company or product on an irrational level.
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If you are building a product, you should always speak with customers and test your idea before. But you probably don’t know that *you *might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. In this article, Grace Ng will show you a guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.
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As mobile browsers continue to improve, offering new features and enhancing performance, new opportunities like this will arise. It’s always important to question whether you should build a native app or a Web app, and keep in mind the pros and cons of each, especially because the differences in their capabilities are narrowing rapidly. In this article, Nick Jonas and Francis Villanueva Will discuss a few of the biggest challenges here: detecting user activity, achieving performant animations, and building an API integrated with Google Analytics.
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In this article Mark McDonnell will go through all of the steps he took to write an open-source gem named Sinderella (available on GitHub) and how he prepared it for release as a gem via RubyGems. He’ll also show you how to set up your tests to run through a continuous integration (CI) server using the popular Travis CI service, and how to use Coveralls to measure the code coverage of your tests and to obtain a statistical history of your commits.
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A lot of mobile-minded talented folks often mention feeling isolated and not truly understanding what the client really needed. While involving clients in your mobile workflow can be challenging, really working together will make a big difference. In this article, Thomas Joos will share some important things he has learned about involving clients in his mobile workflow. Let’s dive into some tips and tricks that he uses every day.
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Khajag Apelian not only is a talented type and graphic designer, unsurprisingly, but also counts Disney as a client, as well as a number of local and not-for-profit organizations throughout the Middle East. Designing a quality typeface is a daunting task when it’s only in the Latin alphabet. Khajag goes deeper still, having designed a Latin-Armenian dual-script typeface in four weights, named “Arek”, as well as an Arabic adaptation of Typotheque’s Fedra Display.
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The way we access the Web has changed a lot in the last couple of years. We no longer rely solely on our desktop computers to navigate the Web. Rather, we use a wide and quickly growing array of devices to get our daily dose of information. With the device landscape going all fuzzy, the time of building fixed width desktop sites has definitely come to an end. ConditionerJS will help you combine all of this contextual information to pinpoint the right moment to load the functionality you need. It tells your JavaScript when to act up and when to tune down a bit, and it will help you combine all of this contextual information to pinpoint the right moment to load the functionality you need.
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