Interruptions, administrative tasks, and too many meetings are among the common complaints voiced by today’s professionals. When was the last time someone complained about a canceled meeting? In other words, everyone understands what hinders productivity, right?
Not so fast, says computer scientist Cal Newport. While we all realize that interruptions and fragmented time are troublesome, we fail to recognize:
The frequency of interruptions: We convince ourselves that we are focusing on one task at a time, such as a complex interaction design problem.

The formal notion of the Agile software development method is about as old as I am (the Agile Manifesto was published in February 2001). I point this out not to make you feel old, but instead to demonstrate that Agile has had a long time to infiltrate software development. While the methodology advocates for “co-located, dedicated teams,” in its ubiquity Agile is frequently applied to teams partially or fully composed of part-time workers.

We love running our event in New York, and given that it sold out a long way in advance we think that you do too. If you didn’t manage to get a ticket, this post should give you a feel for what happened. We also have the video of the presentations to share with you.
Enjoy this roundup, and if you want to be there in person for one of our events next year, tickets are on sale right now!

As a web designer, you do your best to remove friction from the decision-making process. You place only one CTA above the fold. You keep interactive elements to a minimum. You make the menu only as large as it needs to be.
But what happens when the content itself causes analysis paralysis?
There’s an overabundance of choice all around the web, from e-commerce stores with thousands of products to content generation machines pushing out new posts every day.

It’s easy to get caught up in the latest trends in web design. Web technology is constantly improving, and today developers have a formidable range of features at their disposal. This makes for a forward-thinking, innovative space — as it should — but also one at risk of being unrooted. Every art has its ancient masters. In the case of websites, it’s newspapers.
When you dig into the basic principles of news design, overlaps with the web are frequent and oftentimes indistinguishable.

The web is full of interfaces that leave people out. Of course, it’s not designers’ malicious intent or developers’ lack of empathy that bring us there. It’s just really difficult to foresee a wide range of situations in which our users might find themselves in. We need to build robust and reliable solutions in a world that’s inherently chaotic and unpredictable. Where do we even start?
Because we often build and deploy under tough deadlines, we tend to break accessibility without even noticing it.

Accessibility can sometimes become an unfortunate afterthought as we race to meet deadlines and search for tips and tricks to meet client demands. We can cause problems for keyboard or screenreader users, and leave our products fragile and potentially vulnerable to legal action from people who find themselves locked out due to their accessibility needs. How can we get better?
One way to find out would be by joining our live stream with Heydon Pickering who will be sharing insights about the relationship between accessibility and design systems, and exploring how to build accessible components, and why he decided to write a book on accessible interface design patterns.

The combination of WordPress’ versatility for managing data (since its database model supports the creation of different content models, easily extensible through meta attributes) and Gutenberg’s rich user interactions provide a powerful mechanism to create, edit and manage content.
In this article, I want to shine some light on these upgraded capabilities, exploring the new tools at our disposition and presenting several new ones to be released sometime in the future.

Any platform that allows for collaborative play between people will be required to have one very particular characteristic: the ability for players to (somehow) talk to each other. That is exactly why our text-adventure engine built in Node.js would not be complete without a way for the party members to be able to communicate with each other. And because this is indeed a text adventure, that form of communication will be presented in the form of a chat window.

(This is a sponsored post.) If you’ve ever attempted to build a CSV importer before, you know how frustrating it is to dedicate valuable engineering time to this feature, only to watch your customers struggle with it.
In some cases, developers try to improve this experience by providing users with FAQs and tutorials that show them how to correctly use their importer. However, this merely shifts the burden from the product onto the user.

Building “magazine-style layouts” by using CSS Grid has become something of a pastime of CSS fans, keen to play with the capabilities of new Grid Layout. It’s something I’ve done myself as well as with people who’ve attended my workshops. However, I always have to pick the layouts carefully because, in truth, there are a number of very common print layout patterns that we can’t currently do on the web.

When building a website or PWA, no one ever thinks, “I really hope my visitors run away in fear!” Yet, one wrong move could make a visit to your website seem like a nightmarish walk through a haunted house instead of an awe-inspiring tour of a new home.
To be clear, I’m not talking about dark color palettes or blood-red typography that might remind someone of something they’d seen in a horror movie.

The fascinating world of aviation, classic movies, sweet childhood memories — these are just some of the things that inspired artists and designers from across the globe to participate in our wallpapers challenge this time around.
The monthly challenge has been going on for more than nine years already and we are very thankful to everyone who tickles their creativity each month anew to keep the steady stream of wallpapers flowing and caters for some colorful inspiration with their artwork — no matter how gray the weather outside might be.

I first showed you how to define a project such as this one, and gave you the basics of the architecture as well as the mechanics behind the game engine. Then, I showed you the basic implementation of the engine — a basic REST API that allows you to traverse a JSON-defined world.
Today, I’m going to be showing you how to create an old-school text client for our API by using nothing other than Node.