Frictionless UX: How to Create Smooth User Flows

Let’s face it: The web design industry is very competitive. The barriers of entry are low, the technology (platforms, coding languages and DIY services) are always ever changing and with search engine optimization always keeping us on our toes, the ability to offer exceptional web design at competitive prices is a becoming an increasing challenge. Our company recently “decentralized” our office location and made all our employees...

Every industry has its jargon, and almost its own language, in some cases. God knows web design has a lot of jargon, even if half of our made up phrases are fancy and nonsensical job titles. But for all of the silliness that comes with having to invent our own words and acronyms for things, jargon plays an important role: it allows us to communicate more efficiently with other designers and devs. Sometimes, the person who (more or less) comes up with...

Do you ever get bogged down with some of your tools? They work, but you know there’s got to be a better way to do something. Hopefully, this month’s collection has the solution. It’s packed with design tools that are lightweight and functional. If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Web design is a process of carefully planned and researched steps. You have a job to do, and users to satisfy. Ideally, everything you do has a purpose. There is a point to it all. But life is weird, complex, and even fun sometimes. Sometimes, you end up doing something that might seem a bit excessive, a bit “out there”, or even downright silly. But you do it just because it makes you feel good to have accomplished it, or because it looked fun. In...

The 17th May 2018 is Global Accessibility Awareness day, which makes today the ideal time to consider how inclusive our experiences are for those users who may be disabled, differently-abled, or temporarily inconvenienced. 2017 was a big year for website accessibility lawsuits. Seyfarth and Shaw reported that, by year’s end, there were 814 ADA Title III federal lawsuits filed against websites in the United States alone. Perhaps the...

Elementor 2.0 is an innovative approach to site building in WordPress that lets you customize any part of your site, with absolutely zero coding knowledge. A plugin rather than a theme, this flexible approach means that you can use Elementor 2.0 to manage your site design, and unlike some WordPress site builders, you won’t be tied to a particular theme; Elementor 2.0 works with almost any WordPress theme from any vendor, as well as custom...

In a step clearly intended to maintain dominance in an increasingly competitive market, Adobe have announced that XD CC (eXperience Design) is being released to the community as a free application. XD is amongst the most well-rounded, reliable, and innovative UX design applications available; by making it free of charge to both Mac and Windows users, Adobe are hoping to make it the de facto choice. Intriguingly Adobe executives are now openly...

Welcome back, readers. It’s May, and that means the weather’s getting hotter. Stay inside, away from the evil, evil sunshine. Relax, grab a lemonade, and browse through this month’s collection of portfolios. This time around, we have a whole lot of grid-based minimalism with black borders, and some other stuff, too. Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny...

It’s been three years since Google spent $25 million on the rights to the .app domain. Finally, the company is making this top-level domain available for purchase. Early access ended May 8th. And the domain is now up for public purchase. Why is this so important? For obvious reasons, .app will be ideal for all app developers. The .app domain allows for new domain names that might have previously been taken, as well as makes it easier to remember....

When you think about social media marketing for your web design business, you may be inclined to focus on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Dribbble. After all, visuals play a major part in the conversations that take place there and you are in the business of creating engaging visual content. That said, I would argue that Twitter is the best social media marketing platform for a web designer. This is especially so if you’re...

Material Design came into the world in 2014, announced at the Google I/O conference. It combined and reinforced many of the concepts of flat design that designers at large had already embraced; it also enhanced it a bit. Material Design was also one of the first major design systems to stray back into skeuomorphic territory with its subtle drop shadows, and emphasis on approximating a tactile or “material” interface. Nowadays, we just...

First let’s define what we mean by “Monolith” and “Microservice”. A monolithic architecture is built as one large system and is usually one code-base. A monolith is often deployed all at once, both front and end code together, regardless of what was changed. A microservices architecture however is where an app is built as a suite of small services, each with their own code-base. These services are built around specific capabilities...

On the 18th of March, one of Uber’s autonomous cars in Tempe, Arizona struck and killed a woman in the street in what is the first pedestrian death caused by a driverless car in America. No doubt, the (rightful) media interest around this will create the perception that driverless cars are unsafe. Public sentiment toward driverless cars will be affected, and increased regulatory scrutiny may follow. This is despite the fact that autonomous...

Attention grabbing designs are a goal for almost any project. But there are some techniques that draw users in faster than others. Those are just the elements that this month’s trends are all about. From funky, tiny navigation, to fun cut out and layers, to fast movement that you can’t look away from, here’s what’s trending in design this month: 1. Funky, Tiny Nav For a while designers pushed mega navigation, then hamburger-style navigation...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

No matter how much we might wish otherwise, money is integral to our society and our lives. It’s a powerful motivator, and it can tempt even the most morally upright and ethically-concerned among us. And let’s be very clear: I try to be a decent person, but I would not call myself the “most” anything. For all that I once dreamed of being a superhero as a child, I can’t claim superiority now. And so when Satan (I’ll explain…) came and...

You can build some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript. And you can build most of that stuff with plugins to save yourself the trouble of coding from scratch. One of the toughest features to build is an image cropping UI. This has to support image uploading from the user, then it has to take that image into the frontend and let the user perfect their crop. After that it passes image crop data to the backend so the image can be cropped and saved. That’s...

Wix Code is a powerful new tool from cloud-based site builder Wix, released in December 2017. Using Wix Code you can build scaleable applications and webpages. Pages can even pull data from the built-in database collections, to be fully dynamic. Plus you can add JavaScript to customise your front-end entirely. Wix Code gives designers the kind of granular control that until now has been out of reach without hiring a developer to script a bespoke...

Your portfolio is often a company or client’s first impression of you. Yet while we would dress up and prepare our talking points for an interview, we tend to neglect our portfolio or follow design trends that don’t represent us well. In my work with Semplice, a portfolio system for designers, I’ve seen hundreds of design portfolios over the years. And I continue to see common trends that could be holding designers back from their dream...