Audio descriptions involve narrating contextual visual information in images or videos, improving user experiences, especially for those who rely on audio cues. At the core of audio descript… Read More

There are many rumors and misconceptions about conforming to WCAG criteria for the minimum sizing of interactive elements. I’d like to use this post to demystify what is needed for bas… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Penpot If you’ve been following along with our Penpot series, you’re already familiar with this exciting open-source design tool and how it is chan… Read More

Conversational AI is revolutionizing information access, offering a personalized, intuitive search experience that delights users and empowers businesses. A well-designed conversational agen… Read More

As lavish influencer lifestyles, wealth flaunting, and hauls dominate social media feeds, we shouldn’t be surprised that excessive consumption has become the default way of living. We… Read More

User journey maps are a remarkably effective way to visualize the user’s experience for the entire team. Instead of pointing to documents scattered across remote fringes of Sharepoint… Read More

For many of us, July is the epitome of summer. The time for spending every free minute outside to enjoy the sun and those seemingly endless summer days, be it in a nearby park, by a lake, or… Read More

Throughout my UX writing career, I’ve held many different roles: a UX writer in a team of UX writers, a solo UX writer replacing someone who left, the first and only UX writer at a com… Read More

Getting support for accessibility efforts isn’t easy. There are many accessibility myths, wrong assumptions, and expectations that make accessibility look like a complex, expensive, an… Read More

Whether you’ve launched a redesign of your website or rolled out a new feature in your app, that is the point where people normally move on to the next project. But, that is a mistake… Read More

Prior to the World Wide Web, the act of writing remained consistent for centuries. Words were put on paper, and occasionally, people would read them. The tools might change — quills, p… Read More

A couple of years ago, four JavaScript APIs that landed at the bottom of awareness in the State of JavaScript survey. I took an interest in those APIs because they have so much potential to… Read More

Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be… Read More

Struggling to keep our inboxes under control and aim for that magical state of inbox zero, the notification announcing an incoming email isn’t the most appreciated sound for many of us… Read More

We’ve relied on media queries for a long time in the responsive world of CSS but they have their share of limitations and have shifted focus more towards accessibility than responsiven… Read More

Why do we see login forms split into multiple screens everywhere? Instead of typing email and password, we have to type email, move to the next page, and then type password there. This seems… Read More

Imagine that you could smell this page. The introduction would emit a subtle scent of sage and lavender to set the mood. Each paragraph would fill your room with the coconut oil aroma, helpi… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Sentry.io Google Lighthouse has been one of the most effective ways to gamify and promote web page performance among developers. Using Lighthouse, we can asses… Read More

If you’ve been in the web development game for longer, you might recall the days when CSS was utterly confusing and you had to come up with hacks and workarounds to make things work. L… Read More

For UX researchers and designers, our journey doesn’t end with meticulously gathered data or well-crafted design concepts saved on our laptops or in the cloud. Our true impact lies in… Read More

Building successful web products at scale is a multifaceted challenge that demands a combination of technical expertise, strategic decision-making, and a growth-oriented mindset. In Success… Read More

There’s an artist in everyone. Some bring their ideas to life with digital tools, others capture the perfect moment with a camera or love to grab pen and paper to create little doodles… Read More

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the basics of web development. Actually, I’ve been thinking about them for some time now, at least since I started teaching beginning web develop… Read More

How do you know what UI component to choose? Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we us… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Netlify In the past, the web ecosystem moved at a very slow pace. Developers would go years without a new language feature or working around a weird browser qu… Read More

The web is no stranger to taking HTML elements and transforming them to look, act, and feel like something completely different. A common example of this is the switch, or toggle, component… Read More

Naming is hard. As designers and developers, we often struggle finding the right name — for a design token, colors, UI components, HTML classes, and variables. Sometimes, the names we… Read More

Establishing layouts in CSS is something that we, as developers, often delegate to whatever framework we’re most comfortable using. And even though it’s possible to configure a f… Read More

Both hiding and disabling features can be utterly confusing to users. And for both, we need very, very good reasons. Let’s take a closer look at what we need to consider when it comes… Read More

Do you recognize this situation? The marketing and business teams talk about their customers, and each team thinks they have the same understanding of the problem and what needs to be done… Read More

Media queries have been around almost as long as CSS itself — and with no flex, no grid, no responsive units, and no math functions, media queries were the most pragmatic choice availa… Read More

In the forever-shifting landscape of design and technology, some rare artifacts surprisingly never change. Throughout the last two decades, we have witnessed the astonishing evolution of cre… Read More

As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated. It might feel like every single day you have to fight for your users, explain yourself… Read More

We generally use a CSS variable as a placeholder for some value we plan to reuse — to avoid repeating the same value and to easily update that value across the board if it needs to be… Read More

You have for sure googled “how to create [shape_name] with CSS” at least once in your front-end career if it’s not something you already have bookmarked. And the number of… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Sentry.io In this article, we’re going to look deeply at React Server Components (RSCs). They are the latest innovation in React’s ecosystem, lever… Read More

UX research without users isn’t research. We can shape design ideas with bias, assumptions, guesstimates, and even synthetic users, but it’s anything but UX research. Yet some of… Read More

Mouse data is a subcategory of interaction data, a broad family of data about users generated as the immediate result of human interaction with computers. Its siblings from the same data fam… Read More

Even though the CSS :has() pseudo-class is relatively new, we already know a lot about it, thanks to many, many articles and tutorials demonstrating its powerful ability to conditionally sel… Read More

Inspiration lies everywhere, and as a matter of fact, we discovered one of the best ways to spark new ideas: desktop wallpapers. Since more than 13 years already, we challenge you, our dear… Read More

August 2021 marks a milestone for me. That’s when we signed an acquisition agreement to sell Chatra, a profitable live chat platform. I co-founded it after shutting down my first start… Read More

I love free tiers, and I am not the only one. Everyone loves free things — they’re the best thing in life, after all. But maybe we have grown too accustomed to them, to the exten… Read More

Ensuring technology is accessible and inclusive relies heavily on receiving feedback directly from disabled users. You cannot rely solely on checklists, guidelines, and good-faith guesses to… Read More

In 1998, Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist working on biodiversity, coined the term “neurodiversity.” It means every individual is unique, but sometimes this uniqueness is c… Read More

We rarely read on the web. We mostly scan. That’s a reliable strategy to quickly find what we need in times when we’re confronted with more information than we can handle. But sc… Read More

Three years ago, I published “Making GraphQL Work In WordPress,” where I compared the two leading GraphQL servers available for WordPress at the time: WPGraphQL and Gato GraphQL… Read More

When copying text from a website to your device’s clipboard, there’s a good chance that you will get the formatted HTML when pasting it. Some apps and operating systems have a &l… Read More

This article is a sponsored by DebugBear Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has increased the attention website owners need to pay to user experience. You can now more easily see when… Read More

In a previous article, we played with CSS masks to create cool hover effects where the main challenge was to rely only on the tag as our markup. In this article, pick up where we left off b… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Penpot It was less than a year ago when I first had a chance to use Penpot and instantly got excited about it. They managed to build something that designers h… Read More

Communication is in everything we do. We communicate with users through our research, our design, and, ultimately, the products and services we offer. UX practitioners and those working on d… Read More

Remember the “mobile first” mantra? The idea was born out of the early days of responsive web design. Rather than design and build for the “desktop” up front, a &ldqu… Read More

We all have an inherent tendency to like aesthetic and approachable things. That’s why any designer strives to deliver an intuitive and comprehensive design. And any designer knows it… Read More

When I was asked to make an auto-scrolling logo farm, I had to ask myself: “You mean, like a ?” It’s not the weirdest request, but the thought of a conjures up the “… Read More

New month, new wallpapers! To cater for a fresh dose of colorful inspiration on a regular basis, we embarked on our monthly wallpapers journey more than 13 years ago. It’s the perfect… Read More

I have had my fair share of projects that have given me life because of what I accomplished, as well as those that have cost me life when I reflect on the terrible stress they caused. I know… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Maze How do product teams conduct user research today? How do they leverage user insights to make confident decisions and drive business growth? And what role… Read More

Many modern websites give users the power to set a site-specific color scheme preference. A basic implementation is straightforward with JavaScript: listen for when a user changes a checkbox… Read More

In today’s dynamic and highly competitive market, the concept of brand experience is a key aspect of customer engagement: designers, take note. Brand experience refers to all customer… Read More

Building at scale is hard. With legacy, fragile systems, large impact and complex front-end architecture, making big changes to an existing site or app might feel nothing short of daunting… Read More

I have been reading and following Smashing Magazine for years — I’ve read many of the articles and even some of the books published. I’ve also been able to attend several S… Read More

This article is a sponsored by Bryntum Need a full-fledged calendar for scheduling events on your website? Just download one of these and get started. We have curated a collection of some of… Read More

We love practical books that focus on failures and success stories. And we’ve finally sent our latest book, Addy Osmani’s Success at Scale is at the printer. That means you&rsquo… Read More

I hope you were able to spend time getting familiar with the techniques we used to create tooltips in Part 1 of this quick two-parter. Together, we were able to create a flexible tooltip pat… Read More

A fun fact about me is that my birthday is on Valentine’s Day. This year, I wanted to celebrate by launching a simple website that lets people receive anonymous letters through a perso… Read More

In a previous article, we explored ribbon shapes and different ways to approach them using clever combinations of CSS gradients and clip-path(). This time, I’d like to explore another… Read More

March is here! With the days getting noticeably longer in the northern hemisphere, the sun coming out, and the flowers blooming, we are fueled with fresh energy. And even if spring is far aw… Read More

This article is a sponsored by DebugBear There’s quite a buzz in the performance community with the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric becoming an official Core Web Vitals (CWV) me… Read More

Web accessibility can be challenging, particularly for clients unfamiliar with tech or compliance with The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). My role as a digital designer often involves… Read More

In his seminal piece “The Market For Lemons”, renowned web crank Alex Russell lays out the myriad failings of our industry, focusing on the disastrous consequences for end users… Read More

Too often, accessibility is seen as a checklist, but it’s much more complex than that. We might be using a good contrast for our colors, but then, if these colors are perceived very di… Read More

I often hear that native mobile app accessibility is more challenging than web accessibility. Teams don’t know where to start, where to find guidance on mobile accessibility, or how to… Read More

Data visualizations are graphics that leverage our visual system and innate capabilities to gather, accumulate, and process information in our environment, as shown in the animation in Figur… Read More

Children start interacting with the web when they are 3–5 years old. How do we design for children? What do we need to keep in mind while doing so? And how do we meet the expectations… Read More

I got to work with a new type of chart for data visualization called a radar chart when a project asked for it. It was new to me, but the idea is that there is a circular, two-dimensional ci… Read More

I felt uninspired for a spell in 2019 and decided to enroll in a beginning-level community college course on web development as a way to “spice” things up, sort of like going bac… Read More

Front-end development seemed simpler in the early 2000s, didn’t it? The standard website consisted mostly of static pages made of HTML and CSS seasoned with a pinch of JavaScript and j… Read More

Today, one billion people are 60 years or older. That’s 12% of the entire world population, and the age group is growing faster than any other group. Yet, online, the needs of older ad… Read More

Few technological innovations can completely change the way we interact with computers. Lucky for us, it seems we’ve won front-row seats to the unfolding of the next paradigm shift. T… Read More

What will you make of the extra day that February has in store for us this year? Call an old friend, explore a new place, or get stuff done you have put off for so long maybe? Whatever you m… Read More

Most product teams think in terms of features. Features are easy to brainstorm and write requirement docs for, and they fit nicely into our backlogs and ticketing systems. In short, thinking… Read More

Suppose you ask some AI-based chat app a reasonably simple, straightforward question. Let’s say that app is ChatGPT, and the question you ask is right in its wheelhouse, like, “W… Read More

Imagine box-shadow but for a blur effect, where the backdrop of an element is blurred around that element, gradually decreasing the blur’s strength. I came up with the idea while tryin… Read More

Imagine it’s 2028, and you’re at your projected, suped-up workstation. “Hey AI,” you say, “I need some type options for this page heading…” Before… Read More

The border-image property is nothing new. Even deprecated Internet Explorer supports it, so you know we’re treading well-charted territory. At the same time, it’s not exactly one… Read More

Over the past 12 months, I’ve shared hundreds of tools in my newsletter, Web Tools Weekly. I feature tons of practical libraries, helpers, and other useful things for front-end and ful… Read More

The current landscape of web tooling is increasingly more complex than ever before. We have libraries such as Solid, Vue, Svelte, Angular, React, and others that handle UI (User Interface) u… Read More

Last time we met, I introduced you to the View Transitions API. We started with a simple default crossfade transition and applied it to different use cases involving elements on a page trans… Read More

Maybe 2024 has already started as you’re reading this, maybe you’re still waiting for the big countdown to begin. Either way, it’s never too late or too early for some New… Read More

Why does JavaScript have so many eccentricities!? Like, why does 0.2 + 0.1 equals 0.30000000000000004? Or, why does "" == false evaluate to true? There are a lot of mind-boggling decisions i… Read More

Animations are an essential part of a website. They can draw attention, guide users on their journey, provide satisfying and meaningful feedback to interaction, add character and flair to ma… Read More

Browsers shipped a new set of CSS viewport units in 2022. These units make it easier to size elements in mobile browsers, where the browser’s retractable UI affects the height of the v… Read More

Welcome back to my long read about building better components — components that are more likely to be found, understood, modified, and updated in ways that promote adoption rather than… Read More

You know what’s perhaps the “cheapest” way to make a slider of images, right? You set up a container, drop a bunch of inline image elements in it, then set overflow-x: auto… Read More

Design systems are on the tip of every designer’s tongue, but the narrative in the industry mainly focuses on why you need a design system and its importance rather than the reality of… Read More

This article is a sponsored by DebugBear There’s a change coming to the Core Web Vitals lineup. If you’re reading this before March 2024 and fire up your favorite performance mon… Read More

In today’s world of shortening attention spans and omnipresent hustle, wasting even a second could mean losing the chance to earn more time from a person you want to impress. If your i… Read More

Even though JavaScript’s name was coined from the Java language, the two languages are worlds apart. JavaScript has more in common with Lisp>) and Scheme>), sharing features such… Read More

There are times when mistakes happen, and useful and important files are deleted by error or lost from your file system irrevocably (or seemingly, at least). Version control systems make it… Read More

As the year is coming to a close, many of us feel rushed, meeting deadlines, finishing off projects, or preparing for the upcoming holiday season. So how about some beautiful, wintery deskto… Read More