UX In Contact Forms: Essentials To Turn Leads Into Conversions

Building A UX Team

How To Use Heatmaps To Track Clicks On Your WordPress Website

There are lots of ways to measure the performance of a web page and the most popular one is by far Google Analytics. But knowing exactly what images, words, or elements on your site catch your site visitor’s specific attention is not possible with these tools alone. Sometimes, you simply want to know what makes […]

Why Web Application Maintenance Should Be More Of A Thing

Traditional software developers have been hiding a secret from us in plain sight. It’s not even a disputed fact. It’s part of their business model. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about high-end enterprise software vendors or smaller software houses that write the tools that we all use day to day in our jobs or […]

The Nomadic Designer: Tips And Tricks To Work On The Road

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel the world while working as a designer? It might sound like a dream, but all that glitters is not gold, and it might not be the right choice for you. In this article, I’ll share some insights from my four years of travel and […]

Creating A UX Strategy

(This is a sponsored article.) As designers working primarily on screen, we often think of user experience design as being primarily a screen-focused activity. In fact, user experience affects the entirety of what we build and that often includes activities that are undertaken off-screen. To design truly memorable experiences, we need to widen our frame […]

Using Ethics In Web Design

Every design decision is a decision made on behalf of other people, those we often refer to as “end-users.” As the creators of designed experiences used by people all over the world, it is our responsibility to think carefully about how our decisions impact the person on the other end of the conversation. Even small […]

The Current State Of Email Marketing Programming: What Can And Can’t Be Used

Many people want to create the best email campaigns possible, and this goal can be realized by following best practices for email design and coding and by implementing advanced techniques correctly. This comprehensive guide, for novices and pros alike, delves deep into the nitty gritty of email marketing. Here’s what you’ll learn: best practices for […]

Lazy Loading JavaScript Modules With ConditionerJS

Linking JavaScript functionality to the DOM can be a repetitive and tedious task. You add a class to an element, find all the elements on the page, and attach the matching JavaScript functionality to the element. Conditioner is here to not only take this work of your hands but supercharge it as well! In this […]

Prototyping An App’s Design From Photoshop To Adobe XD

(This is a sponsored article.) Designing mobile apps means going through different stages: pre-planning, visual concepts, designing, prototyping, development. After defining your project, you need to test how it will work before you begin to develop it. This stage is captured by prototyping. Prototyping allows designers to get a feel for the functionality and flow […]

Copyright Law Basics For UK Software Developers

Software developers all over the world can benefit from an increased understanding of intellectual property (IP) laws and how those laws may affect their work. Software programs are often complex works that include both functional and artistic elements and may be covered by a variety of different types of IP laws. This can be very […]

Getting Started With The Web MIDI API

As the web continues to evolve and new browser technologies continue to emerge, the line between native and web development becomes more and more blurred. New APIs are unlocking the ability to code entirely new categories of software in the browser. Until recently, the ability to interact with digital musical instruments has been limited to […]

Monthly Web Development Update 3/2018: Service Workers, Building A CDN, And Cheating At Design

Service Worker is probably one of the most misrepresented technologies we currently have. When I hear people talking about it, the topic almost always revolves around serving an app when a user is offline. However, Service Worker can do so much more than that, and every week I come across new articles that show how […]

Ethical Design: The Practical Getting-Started Guide

By now, most people working in tech know and feel the deep concerns related to surveillance capitalism fostered and upheld by the tech giants. We understand that the root of the problem lies within the business model of capitalising and monetising user data. Stories of how people are being exploited surface on a daily basis, […]

How BBC Interactive Content Works Across AMP, Apps, And The Web

In the Visual Journalism team at the BBC, we produce exciting visual, engaging and interactive content, ranging from calculators to visualizations new storytelling formats. Each application is a unique challenge to produce in its own right, but even more so when you consider that we have to deploy most projects in many different languages. Our […]

How To Make A WordPress Plugin Extensible

Have you ever used a plugin and wished it did something a bit differently? Perhaps you needed something unique that was beyond the scope of the settings page of the plugin. I have personally encountered this, and I’m betting you have, too. If you’re a WordPress plugin developer, most likely some of your users have […]

Moving From Flash To HTML, CSS, And JavaScript

Back in the 2000s, it was commonplace to see websites that were built using Flash. By viewing the source of a website, you’d often see very little HTML and an embedded SWF file. This meant a few things. First, the browser didn’t natively support Flash, so you had to download the Flash plugin. Browsers found […]

Building A Static Site With Components Using Nunjucks

It’s quite popular these days, and dare I say a damn fine idea, to build sites with components. Rather than building out entire pages one by one, we build a system of components (think: a search form, an article card, a menu, a footer) and then piece together the site with those components. JavaScript frameworks […]

Tips For Conducting Usability Studies With Participants With Disabilities

Over the last few years, I ran several usability studies with participants with various disabilities. I thought it would help others if I shared some of my experiences. In this article, I provide lessons learned or tips to consider in planning and executing usability testing with participants with disabilities. The lessons learned are divided into […]

The Future Of Mobile Web Design: Video Game Design And Storytelling

As technologies change and design techniques evolve, it’s inevitable that we’d experience massive growth in terms of design quality. There are similar parallels we can see within video game design as well. For instance: This was CERN, the very first website back in 1991. Just some basic HTML and ample white space: The very first […]