How To Build Strong Customer Relationships For User Research

Nurturing connections with your customers is one of the most effective ways to gain valuable insight into their experiences with your product and make informed decisions that fuel growth and success. A really great way to build customer relationships is by regularly involving them in user research. However, getting customers involved in user research...

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Creating A High-Contrast Design System With CSS Custom Properties

Design should never be a trade-off when it comes to creating an accessible web. There are many features coming to the web that will make creating contrast a lot easier. But even though CSS functions such as color-contrast() are only available in Safari behind a flag, we can already do a lot to create contrast in an easy way by using custom properties....

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Better ROI For Your Digital Products: Why Continuous Research Is Key

This article is a sponsored by Maze Although you might be able to map out the development of a new product with a definitive start and end date, there really is no end point. The most successful digital products are the ones continually being debugged, updated and enhanced. By extension, the most successful brands are ones that draw valuable lessons...

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Product Reviews And Ratings UX: A Designer’s Guide

When we make purchasing decisions, we often rely on expertise from people like us who happen to have purchased that item already. And so we seek user reviews, often looking for a high enough average score, a good number of these reviews, and a good number of ratings. In fact, 95% of users rely on reviews to make their decisions and learn more about...

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Copying Designs Doesn’t Work And Here’s Why

There’s a type of cognitive dissonance that haunts designers: the genuine desire to be truly innovative and original whilst simultaneously trawling the web for inspiration and design ideas. I doubt many designers sit down with the intention of copying Airbnb, Apple, or Stripe. But they’re such beautifully-designed experiences that it’s hard not to...

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Smashing Podcast Episode 55 With Tejas Kumar: Is Technology Making Us Redundant?

In this episode, we ask whether technology is making us redundant; will we all soon be replaced with AI? Vitaly Friedman talks to Tejas Kumar to find out. Show Notes Tejas Kumar on Twitter Tejas’s homepage Weekly Update Closed Captions And Subtitles UX written by Vitaly Friedman Top Front-End Tools Of 2022 written by Louis Lazaris Optimizing...

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Level Up Your CSS Skills With The :has() Selector

Using :has() gives us the ability to “look ahead” with CSS and style a parent or ancestor element. Then, we can broaden the selector to target one or more siblings or children. By considering element states or positions, we can style nearly any combination of elements as unique singles or ranges. Note: At present, support for :has() is rising, with...

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The Key To Good Component Design Is Selfishness

When developing a new feature, what determines whether an existing component will work or not? And when a component doesn’t work, what exactly does that mean? Does the component functionally not do what it’s expected to do, like a tab system that doesn’t switch to the correct panel? Or is it too rigid to support the designed content, such as a button...

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Introverted Design: Building Better UX Experiences

Living in a highly extroverted world, everyone is expected to outshine the rest to succeed and grow. Meeting people, talking, and generally being an outspoken person will be noticeable. However, we all tend to reflect on our inner worlds when we need to disconnect and be with ourselves. It helps us refocus or be safe from external factors affecting...

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A Guide To Designing For Introverts

Living in a highly extroverted world, everyone is expected to outshine the rest to succeed and grow. Meeting people, talking, and generally being an outspoken person will be noticeable. However, we all tend to reflect on our inner worlds when we need to disconnect and be with ourselves. It helps us refocus or be safe from external factors affecting...

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