At Typeform, David Okuniev was inspired to simplify online forms by a movie that’s decidedly a blast from the past: the 1983 film WarGames, which centers around a student who remotely logs into a research computer and, through its terminal interface, nearly sparks a nuclear war. Stripping forms down to their basics and building them back up into something better took four years of work, but that core idea guided the team all along: questions are better than lists. In this article you will find David Okuniev’s story of how he turned that idea into a product that’s helped companies of all sizes get a 55% completion rate on their forms.
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The last step of this series is to efficiently simplify the navigation experience — specifically, by carefully designing interaction with the navigation menu. When designing interaction with any type of navigation menu, we have to consider aspects sush as symbols, levels, target areas and functional context. It is possible to design these aspects in different ways. Designers often experiment with new techniques to create a more exciting navigation experience. However, most users just want to get to the content with as little fuss as possible. For those users, designing the aforementioned aspects to be as simple, predictable and comfortable as possible is important.
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JavaScript-based animation is often as fast as CSS-based animation — sometimes even faster. CSS animation only appears to have a leg up because it’s typically compared to jQuery’s $.animate(), which is, in fact, very slow. However, JavaScript animation libraries that bypass jQuery deliver incredible performance by avoiding DOM manipulation as much as possible. In this article, Julian Shapiro will smash some myths, dive into some real-world animation examples and improve your design skills in the process. If you love designing practical UI animations for your projects, this article is for you!
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With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. To put it bluntly, these hacks don’t work. If you’re recreating issues on the desktop, then you can’t be certain that any of your fixes will work. In this article, Jon Raasch will explore a variety of emulators and simulators that you can use for quick and easy testing. Then, he’ll look at remote debugging tools, which enable you to connect a desktop computer to a mobile device and leverage a rich debugging interface.
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In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. You’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Matthew will also be running a “Making It Work Offline workshop” at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014.
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The vast majority of practices from the world of manufacturing have come to influence how things are done when designing and building software products as well. Lean thinking is one of the latest approaches software development companies have adopted to maximize value and reduce wasted effort and resources by breaking down an objective into a series of experiments. Approaches like design thinking tend to be lean by nature. There is a huge opportunity, however, to take this notion even further and align design to the new ways digital products are being built and improved on. Let’s look first at the current approach towards design and how it has an impact on the product.
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In this article, Mattan Griffel will share best practices that he has discovered from using spaced repetition to learn and master a programming language. Some great articles on this topic are already out there, including “Memorizing a Programming Language Using Spaced Repetition Software” by Derek Sivers and “Janki Method” by Jack Kinsella. But because you’re busy, he’ll quickly summarize some of the best practices that I’ve learned along the way.
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Displaying onboarding screens to first-time users has become a common practice in mobile apps. Given that these are often the first set of screens with which users interact, they also set the users’ expectations of the app. Therefore, it is essential that those involved in creating the product take the time to evaluate whether onboarding is necessary for the app and, if so, to determine the best way to implement it. In this article, Germaine Satia will provide some good tips on how to approach onboarding, some common implementations, alternative techniques, as well as resources to help you provide the best experience for users.
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New tools have emerged to address the challenges of responsive web design. And there is that’s been a leap forward in productivity for the team that Richard Knight works with. Its name is Webflow, and it could be the solution to the problems you face with static design comps produced in Photoshop and Fireworks. In this article, Richard will explore the advantages of Webflow and how you can use it to build responsive websites today. He will take you step by step through the process of creating a responsive website layout for a real project, and identify Webflow’s advantages and where it comes up short.
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To make the right choices for your project, you need to start with a general approach, or methodology. You probably already know of BEM, one of those methodologies developed by a big company, but Maxim Shirshin decided to try BEM on a smaller scale. He wanted the same benefits that Yandex gets from BEM: code sharing, a live style guide, scalability, faster development. He is now convinced that BEM applies to small projects as well. Maxim has written down his findings, in case you find them useful!
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