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Design

Setting Up Push Notifications on iOS

Apple originally introduced push notifications to enable applications to respond to events if the application isn't running in the foreground. However, the operating system and iOS devices have changed significantly during the past few years and applications don't need to rely solely on push notifications to perform tasks in the background. This doesn't mean that push notifications are no longer useful though.

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Design

Six Common Problems With The UX Process

How robust is your user experience design process? We all have our favored methods and techniques, but the general process is similar: Conduct research, prototype, then present to stakeholders and users. We’ve delivered projects successfully, rectified problems and honed our ability to deliver in different scenarios. However, we all know that every project is unique, and every once in a while something will take you by surprise.

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Design

Collaborating With Adobe Fireworks On Large Design Teams

Working with people can be hard. But get it right, and you’ll be able to produce stunning work more smartly and quickly than ever before. With methodologies such as agile and lean influencing how design teams work, some interesting challenges lie ahead. Iterative and collaborative practices vary greatly across work environments and even projects, and they can, and most likely will, bring your time-honed workflow to its knees.

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Design

Responsive Design Begins With The URL

The BBC’s Programmes website is huge, and is intended to be a rolling archive of everything that the BBC broadcasts on television and radio. Originally released in 2007, it now has pages for over 1.6 million episodes, but that’s barely half of the story. Surrounding those episodes is a wealth of content, including clips, galleries, episode guides, character profiles and much more, plus Programme’s newly responsive home pages.

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Design

How To Plan Your Next Mobile E-Commerce Website

In this article, we’ll walk through all of the vital steps when planning a highly converting mobile e-commerce website. The most important questions you need to ask are:

  1. Who are we building this mobile website for?
  2. How will we measure conversion success?
  3. What design factors affect mobile e-commerce conversion rates?
  4. What is the ideal product page?


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Design

An Effective Style Guide With Adobe Fireworks

Joshua Mauldin started with style guides like any other obsessive-compulsive designer: with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. Plus, knowing which component to use in a given situation is nice, too, right? Since making this a regular practice, he has found it’s been like having a nice combination of a CSS class and a pattern library all in one.

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Design

Pragmatic UX Techniques For Smarter Websites

What is “User Experience Design” exactly? Should you not start it unless you are fully dedicated, or should you embrace it in the process as soon as possible? Are all designers also user experience designers, or is it a separate expertise? The debate is as old as the discipline itself, and while picking up a bucket of popcorn, sitting back and watching the drama is sometimes fun, let’s try to figure out which user experience techniques are useful for startups, in-house teams, big corporations and anyone who wants to improve their website, product or service.

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Design

Four Ways To Build A Mobile Application, Part 1: Native iOS

The mobile application development landscape is filled with many ways to build a mobile app. Among the most popular are: native iOS, native Android, PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. This article marks the start of a series of four articles covering the technologies above. The series will provide an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of these four approaches. Because few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, this series is intended to broaden your scope.

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Design

Blueprints For Web And Print

Have you ever submitted design files to a development team for production and a few weeks later gotten something back that looks nothing like your original work? Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage. A design is more than a simple drawing on a canvas in Illustrator, Fireworks or Photoshop; it is a representation of function. “Form follows function” is a well-known principle, first coined in 1896 by the architect Louis Sullivan. How will the website work? How will that section fold? What happens when you hover over this button? How does that menu function?

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Design

Killer Responsive Layouts With CSS Regions

As Web designers, we are largely constrained by the layout features available to us. Content placed inside a container will often naturally extend the container vertically, wrapping the content. If a design requires elements to remain a certain height, then our options are limited. In these cases, we can only add a scroll bar or hide the overflow. The CSS Regions specification provides a new option.

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