Archive for month: January, 2022

Original Source: https://tympanus.net/codrops/collective/collective-695/

Inspirational Website of the Week: re_

This design got us howling! Beautiful typography and colors make it a true gem. Our pick this week.

Get inspired

This content is sponsored via BuySellAds
Put the “Flow” in Your Workflows with Shortcut

Shortcut is fast and intuitive project management built for developers. We put the “can” in Kanban. Delight the scrum gods and try it for free!

Try it free

CSS Speedrun

A small fun app to test your CSS knowledge. Find the correct CSS selectors for the 10 puzzles as fast as possible.

Play it

Building UI Components With SVG and CSS

Ahmad Shadeed shows how to use SVG and CSS to build UI components.

Read it

Faker

Generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and node.js. Initially deleted by its owner, the project is again available on npm under new management.

Check it out

Boolean attributes in HTML and ARIA: what’s the difference?

Some attributes in ARIA are boolean(-like) and may seem a lot like boolean attributes in HTML. Hidde de Vries explains some important differences to be aware of.

Read it

How to Make a Pure CSS 3D Package Toggle

A fantastic tutorial by Jhey Tompkins on how to rock CSS and create a 3D package toggle.

Read it

State of the Web: Deno

What is Deno, why does it matter, and how is it currently used for server-side JavaScript?

Read it

A Guide to Building a Blog in Eleventy

A guide that walks folks through the process of building a blog with Eleventy. By Raymond Camden.

Read it

Essence

A desktop operating system built from scratch, for control and simplicity.

Check it out

Designing a modern UI theme with Open Props

A tutorial on Open Props, the open source, color scheme-optimized CSS library that provides fast, consistent, customized design options.

Read it

Time to say goodbye to Webpack?

Gaurav Behere writes about Vite and how it could be an interesting alternative to Webpack.

Read it

Tidy Free: HTML, React and Vue template

Tidy is the free version of the namesake premium template built by Cruip, available in HTML, React and Vue.js.

Check it out

Simple.css

A classless CSS framework that makes semantic HTML look good.

Check it out

How not to learn TypeScript

A great article by Stefan Baumgartner on how not to approach TypeScript learning.

Read it

Comparing CSS Specificity values

Kilian Valkhof writes how to go about comparing CSS specificity values.

Read it

CSS Cascade Layers: An overview of the new @layer and layer() CSS primitives

A great video by Una Kravets on CSS cascade layers and the @layer property, coming to browsers soon.

Watch it

Turning a GitHub page into a Progressive Web App

Christian Heilmann explains how to turn a GitHub page into a PWA.

Read it

Magical Reflections: a virtual art experience

Visit our virtual gallery and discover the world inside a painting. Made by the folks of makemepulse.

Check it out

Form Validation Using JavaScript’s Constraint Validation API

Learn how to use JavaScript’s Constraint Validation API to perform form validations in this article by
Craig Buckler.

Read it

The breakpoints we tested in 2021, and the ones to test in 2022

Learn which screen sizes to design for with different approaches all updated to be relevant in 2022.

Check it out

From Our Blog
Case Study: Anatole Touvron’s Portfolio

A practical case study of Anatole Touvron’s Portfolio where you’ll get some insight on the process and some valuable tips.

Check it out

From Our Blog
Animate Anything Along an SVG Path

Learn how to code creative animations with JavaScript using SVG paths and the getPointAtLength() function.

Check it out

From Our Blog
Inspirational Websites Roundup #33

A very special selection of the most inspiring website designs from the past couple of weeks to keep you up-to-date with the latest trends.

Check it out

The post Collective #695 appeared first on Codrops.

Original Source: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/ipad-air-iphone-se

Apple is making moves.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2022/01/the-case-against-ux-testing/

Picture a dark office, blinds drawn. Picture a UX designer smoking a cigar. See the light filtered through the smoke whipped to fog by a spinning ceiling fan. Watch as the UX designer sits at a desk and considers the website.

The UX designer has devised a series of tests to determine if a green button is better than a red button. One of them involves tipping a tortoise onto its back. He looks the website over carefully and says, “Describe in single words, only the good things that come to mind about your mother.”

The website pauses, sweating under pressure, then replies, “Let me tell you about my mother…”

BLAM! The website pulls the trigger of an unseen gun, and the UX designer collapses, leaving the project to be rebuilt from scratch in Material by Harrison Ford, with overuse of Post-its delegated to Edward James Olmos.

Who Does UX Testing Actually Serve?

In the past’s bleak dystopian future (1982’s Blade Runner was set in 2019) no one benefitted from asking the wrong questions. And little has changed.

Designing any test to verify UX is fraught with as many complications as administering the test. Questions are skewed by bias, conscious or otherwise, and competing agendas. Even with something as apparently simple as a split test, the potential for distortion is immense.

When planned by a designer, a UX test offers little benefit to a client; the benefit is to the designer, who can then say their ideas are validated (or not).

Imagine hiring a developer to code a website, only to discover that the developer didn’t know CSS and expected to be paid to learn it before completing the work. You would hire someone else because that developer isn’t qualified.

From a client’s perspective, a UX designer should know, through experience, whether a green button is better than a red button. Designing an elaborate test to split-test the button color serves little purpose other than indemnifying the designer against mistakes.

The ROI of UX Testing

It’s widely accepted that there is substantial ROI (Return On Investment) from UX testing. We’ve all heard apocryphal stories about sites that split-tested their checkout and improved retention by 5%.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that without user testing, that site could have improved its checkout retention by 4.9% simply by hiring a competent, experienced designer. But what about the remaining 0.1%? Well, for most sites, 0.1% represents very little profit. And the cost of recovering it via testing far exceeds the benefits.

When a company the size of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google split tests a website, it can afford to allocate $25k for user testing because it stands to gain 0.1%, and that represents far more than $25k. To meet the same 0.1% improvement, a small business has to design and run the same tests, incurring the same costs. But in the case of a small business, $25k could eat up all of its profits.

UX testing almost always works. But it is only profitable at scale.

If a good UI designer with a grounding in UX can improve checkout retention by 4.9%, tripling the project budget for just 0.1% more is a tough sell. Bluntly, that $25k is better spent on advertising.

What UX Designers Can Learn From Psychiatry

We all have the tendency to think we’re unique. It’s a survival trait attributed to our prehistoric brain. That belief in uniqueness is particularly strong in highly competitive people. We all think our site, our side-project, our approach are original. And we’re all wrong.

When a psychiatrist sits down with a patient, they have two immediate goals: categorize that patient into an established diagnosis, and assess the severity of the condition. It may be that the patient is depressed or anxious or even suffering from a potentially more debilitating condition like schizophrenia. What the psychiatrist is not trying to do, is define a new illness.

Occasionally — perhaps once per decade — a genuinely unusual patient will present themselves, and a new form of illness is considered. New treatments are found and tested. These treatments are rarely developed on behalf of individual patients; doctors work with grants from governments, medical schools, or the pharmaceutical industry and publish their results.

The vast majority of websites face similar problems. They deal with similar demographics, work within a similar culture, and deal with similar technology. As such, they can be categorized in the same manner a psychiatrist categorizes patients.

The key to delivering successful UX solutions is not UX testing in individual cases, but rather UX research, examining similar projects, and cribbing their solutions. If you categorize a project accurately, you’ll find a solution readily available.

Replacing User Testing With UX Best Practices

Your client doesn’t need to pay for UX testing to benefit from it. Enterprise sites, government sites, and even personal projects will test UX patterns. Sites like Shopify or Stripe will user-test their checkout processes at scale and enable companies to benefit from the results by adopting their platforms.

If you’re currently testing designs for small business, one of two things is true: either you’re wasting your client’s money investigating a problem someone else has already solved, or you’re designing something so original that it has no precedent (and you probably shouldn’t be).

Designers should be opinionated. Designers should know UX best practices and how they apply to a range of scenarios. Designers should be capable of making an educated guess. Designers should be self-validating.

Once or twice in your career, you may find a legitimate need to test something. However, the vast majority of the time, the correct answer is to tip the tortoise back onto its feet and choose whichever color button has the higher contrast.

 

Featured image: Still of Brion James in Blade Runner. Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment

Source

p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

The post The Case Against UX Testing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Original Source: https://designrfix.com/reviews/best-watercolor-paper

Choosing the best watercolour paper is critical when you are experimenting with painting. The ideal water colour paper able to handle moist substances and offers multiple vibrant colors. Papers are normally substantial, weighing roughly within 300gsm/140lbs, however, the student pages are thin. A plenty of water reduces colour materials, particularly ones that are just too…

The post Best Watercolor Paper Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.

Original Source: https://designrfix.com/reviews/best-graphics-card-for-photo-editing

If you are a professional photo editor, you need the best graphics card for photo editing. You’ll need to work with different programs like Photoshop, Paint Shop, photo director, and many more. However, if you want to know the best model to use on your PC, we have highlighted 10 graphics cards for photo editing…

The post Best Graphics Card for Photo Editing Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.