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The Sustainable Web Design Community Group has just launched a draft set of guidelines for designing and developing sustainable web applications. Covering design, UX, front and back-end development, and business strategies, these guidelines have been months in the making, with contributions from experts and breakout groups from across the industry.
Creators can now chat with their Patreon supporters in a Discord-like chat. The company is also releasing Commerce, which allows creators to sell one-off digital goods and offer free subscriptions. The app redesign is based on a new logo and wordmark and includes changes to members' profiles and an updated home feed.
Microsoft has moved to the React JavaScript library and improved the Microsoft Teams design with the Fluent Design language system. The updated version is up to two times faster and uses 50 percent less memory.
Google has announced a new personal assistant to make conversations with artificial intelligence more natural, intuitive, and valuable. The Assistant with Bard will be able to help users with various tasks, such as planning trips, finding emails, creating lists, or writing social posts. Users will also be able to interact with it through text, voice, or images, and the assistant will be able to take actions for them, such as booking flights, ordering groceries, or sending messages.
Research suggests that scarcity cues like countdown timers and limited quantity messages are techniques that might negatively impact user experience and erode consumer trust. A recent study provides additional evidence that scarcity cues negatively impact user experience. Designers should avoid using these tactics as they're perceived as manipulative and deceptive. Where used, scarcity claims should be specific and verifiable to build trust.
Effective UX writing enhances the user experience, boosts engagement, and improves conversion. Considering how often some UI elements are displayed to users, minor enhancements can make a huge difference. The nine tips outlined in the article include avoiding prepositions, using lists, making text more scalable, adopting and descriptive links.
Making neon buttons look great is a challenging task. This practical tutorial shows you how to assemble astonishing neon buttons using three guidelines and neat CSS properties.
WebWave AI Builder, a tool for generating a multipage website from a description, is now in Open Beta. WebWave’s drag-and-drop interface is inspired by graphic design tools and allows users to completely change and customize the AI-generated website.
Squarespace's latest refresh brings new features for creating and selling online courses, Squarespace payments, client invoicing, and Acuity scheduling. In terms of commercial tools, it introduces different fulfillment options, product variant buttons, mobile optimizations, and checkout improvements.
UserStock is a collection of people's faces organized by gender, age group, and background style. All images are free for personal and commercial use.
The reason we struggle to come up with original ideas is not a lack of creativity but a lack of curiosity. Creativity is limited to what we already know, it is only the recombination of available information and experience. We need to shift our focus from creativity to insights and questions - experimentation is a low-hanging fruit and one of the fastest tracks we can use to get us there.
Adopting light and dark modes impacts usability, accessibility, and even business metrics. Each method has its peculiarities - knowing its pros and cons is crucial for better design decisions. Dark mode tends to be easier on the eyes, while Light mode offers superior readability and less visual fatigue in bright environments. That's just one of many differences explained in this comprehensive guide.
A touching story of a grandpa, his passion for the craft, the value of cadence, and how it relates to the current way most software teams work.
An example of improving sign-up rate from 65% to 90% with the use of friendlier, more natural, and personal language, easing user concerns, anticipating and answering possible questions, repeating important information, and identifying and clarifying potential confusion.
The Master’s Pupil is a video game inspired by the biography of Claude Monet. Players are placed inside the eye of the Father of Impressionism through a character that needs to solve a series of puzzles. Game developer Pat Naoum spent seven years perfecting the Monet-esque atmosphere that details the game.
Many funny and awful date stories are swirling around nowadays - there's an enormous appetite for them. Illustrator and author Tess Smith-Roberts has been taking inspiration from the modern dating world with a series of dating comics that have now become a full-length graphic novel, Disaster Dates and Lucky Escapes.
Framer is rolling out new features that allow users to tailor website content to many languages and regions. Its AI-powered Localization covers text, UI controls, images, and CMS Variables. A video summarizing the new functionality is available.
Google is launching emoji reactions on its Gmail service. The feature can be accessed via a new button next to Reply, Reply All, and Forward. It will first be available to Android users and come to web and iOS users over the next few months.
Canva, as part of its 10th-anniversary celebration, has launched Magic Studio, an AI-powered design suite aiming to make content creation more accessible for everyone. The suite includes features like Magic Switch for effortless design format transformations, Magic Media for text-to-video conversion, and various photo editing tools.
It costs energy to capture and store every email we send. The way to climate-friendly emails is to send less of them, optimize static assets, use AI sparingly, design emails for dark mode, use content delivery networks (CDNs), and measure the carbon footprint of each email.
How information is presented shapes people's perceptions and decisions. Most pricing psychology principles rely on the Framing Effect and its related cognitive biases — anchoring, social proof, default bias, and loss aversion. The same price in a different context can lead to different purchase behaviors.
Although it can be done, text editing on mobile isn't ok. The mobile user experience of manipulating text overloads the tap gesture with a wide range of actions, making it overly complicated and prone to errors. There are workarounds like text handles, magnifiers, text selectors, and popup menus, but none of them offers an equivalent desktop experience.
Charts CSS uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts. This open-source framework follows a semantic structure, is highly customizable, and is built for responsiveness. Several chart elements are available, like percentage columns, stacked columns, bar charts, and more.
EmojiGen is an AI open-source emoji generator. Type what you need and download a PNG version ready to be used as an emoji.
Higher UX maturity increases customer satisfaction. Loyalty drives higher ROI on digital products, enhances brand reputation, streamlines the decision-making process, attracts and retains talent, increases the time-to-market, improves collaboration, establishes a proactive approach to problem-solving, and future-proofs the organization.
Understanding where automated tests fall short is the first step for planning your efforts to truly cover accessibility. Some of the jobs that need to be handled by humans include focus states, autocomplete, tap target areas, zoomed-in interfaces, animations, and overall confusing UX.
DesignOps lives in the intersection between creativity and scalability. Design operations strategically coordinate people and processes to improve design outcomes while providing the necessary tools, techniques, and collaboration frameworks.
Katie Smith is a master at bringing unique and bold characters to life. In this interview, she shares her process, how to find inspiration, and why illustration is the perfect medium for communicating joy and fun.
Robin Stummvoll, an industrial designer and luthier, just released his newest creation, a Cosmo electric guitar with an innovative, adaptable pickup system. These magnetic pickups effortlessly attach to the guitar's steel body, giving guitar players a whole universe of sonic options as they position them how they prefer.
A practical guide to building sophisticated animations for the web and overcoming three main challenges when doing so.
The Design Museum in London and Intuit Mailchimp’s in-house creative agency, Wink, collaborated to resurrect the look, feel, sound, and smell of emails in the digital age. The exhibition ‘Email is Dead’ ushers visitors into the obsolescence of the decades-old form of communication, which has dwindled with the advent of DMs and instant messaging apps.
Jony Ive, Apple's former design chief, has invested in Cruz, a company known for its USB-C-powered bottle cap with integrated blades that turn drink bottles into portable blenders. The $129 BlenderCap, which Cruz launched at CES, comes with a 32-ounce vacuum-insulated bottle and is designed to fit other wide-mouth bottles.
Annice Jumani has a unique condition called synesthesia where she associates colors with letters and numbers. Despite feeling isolated and different due to her condition, she found solace in sports and later embraced her synesthesia as a valuable tool in her career as a design director. Through her journey, she learned to celebrate her differences and encourage others to do the same, recognizing that what sets us apart can be our greatest strengths.
The 4-hour work week, tailored for the industrial age, misses the mark for today’s creative and knowledge-based jobs. It presumes a linear relationship between the hours put in and the output that results; that one more hour of “work” will create one more output of similar value. However, the truth is that quality creative work doesn't behave like an assembly line. Sound judgment is far more important than the mere capacity to create output.
For the first time in history, users of technology can now talk in natural language to a computer and simply get stuff done. The technology of today and tomorrow is going to be increasingly conversational. Language is deeply multifaceted and therefore requires a multidisciplinary design approach that combines knowledge of language, technology, and human psychology.
Components are built and presented in isolation, which simplifies the QA process by enabling focus on specific parts of the UI. Well-structured design systems will also facilitate testing activities by featuring various states and variations, comprehensive documentation, and clear visual guidelines.
Typeform announced the public beta of a new product called Formless. It’s an AI-driven way to create forms and collect data. The Pro plan will be free during the public beta.
Learn from real product user flow recordings and screenshots. Organized into types of flows, products, and industries, this website also includes specific recordings and screenshots for desktop and mobile devices.
Jrnylist is a simple, easy-to-use Midjourney prompt generator that combines medium types, styles, and formats. Based on examples, the website allows you to copy the original prompt and use it as a template for your creations.
On August 29th of this year, Xiaoyuan Gao from Not Your Type Foundry posted a statement on her Instagram addressing the unauthorized use of her font files by a font distribution website. The website in question is Fontesk.com, a platform where users can access and download numerous “high-quality free fonts for commercial use” and “open-source fonts.” When confronted, Fontesk.com refused to remove the font in question and even went so far as to block Gao’s IP address from accessing its website.
Two massive A-brands, both with legacy design systems in place with over 150 touchpoints including web, app, and TV, and over 7 million users. The challenge was to merge these two brands into one design system with zero actual customers to test on. Here’s what challenges the merger of T-Mobile and Tele2 into Odido presented to their design teams and a look at how the design systems were merged.
Design tools are constantly evolving, with new features being added all the time. It can be tempting to want to learn all of the latest features, but it’s important to be strategic about how designers invest their time. Whether they should focus on learning new design tool features or honing their soft skills depends on their current skill level, their career goals, and the company they work for.
For designers, done means "quality" or "delight." For engineers, it's mainly related to objective measures of done (unit tests, performance benchmarks, etc.), while PMs tend to look for speed and usage data. Although the definition of done differs, product teams need common ground, preferably before any real work starts.
Design System expert Dan Mall answers the most common design questions, including queries about grid systems, color palettes, how-to-start design systems, and portfolio tips.
Well-designed buttons are also about labels. There are three common traps you should avoid: prefer "Continue" instead of "Next", be careful with "Done", and avoid "OK".
Google is rolling out ChromeOS 117 to Chromebooks with several new features, including Material You design, a customizable window-switching panel, and the ability to join video calls directly from the calendar view. After selecting wallpaper and a color palette, Material You settings will be reflected in quick settings, desktop, and window head bars.
In late 2024, Google will wind down the Jamboard whiteboarding app and continue with the previously planned end of support for Google Jamboard devices. The device is a 55-inch digital whiteboard meant for education and work purposes. The tech giant has also started integrating third-party whiteboard tools such as Figjam by Figma, Lucidspark by Lucid Software, and visual workspace Miro across Google Workspace.
The unique collaboration initiative between the Pokémon Company and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, intended to promote the museum's 50th anniversary, included a limited-edition promo card for the Pokémon Trading Card Game featuring the art of Pikachu inspired by Van Gogh's Self-Portrait in Grey Felt Hat. The card's release unleashed chaos at the museum, overwhelming visitors and staff with crowds chasing the unique Pokémon merchandise. Online, the Pokémon x Van Gogh Museum collection sold out almost immediately as it went live in the U.S. and Canada.
Airbnb's co-founder Joe Gebbia reveals how design thinking saved the company from almost busting in 2009. The founding team's unusual approach included doing things that don't scale but add genuine value to customers, relying on observation and patience, letting the team run wild with creative hypotheses that are not backed up but post-evaluated by data, and motivating people to ship on day one.
Applying for senior roles can involve multiple rounds of interviews, take-home design challenges, and presentations. Prepare yourself with this practical guide based on a real-world scenario.