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 “Paste Special” feature that will strip those tags out for you to maintain the current style, but what do you do if that’s unavailable? Same goes for converting plain text into formatted HTML. One of the closest ways we can convert plain text into HTML is writing in Markdown as an abstraction. You may have seen examples of this in many comment forms in articles just like this one. Write the comment in Markdown and it is ..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 users have poor experiences on your website, and poor UX also has a bigger impact on SEO. That means you need to test your website to identify optimizations. Beyond that, monitoring ensures that you can stay ahead of your Core Web Vitals scores for the long term. Let’s find out how to work with different types of Core Web Vitals data and how monitoring can help you gain a deeper insight into user experiences and ..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 <img> tag as our markup. In this article, pick up where we left off by “revealing” the image from behind a sliding door sort of thing — like opening up a box and finding a photograph in it. This is because the padding has a transition that goes from s - 2*b to 0. Meanwhile, the background transitions from 100% (equivalent to --s) to 0. There’s a difference equal to 2*b. The background covers the entire area, while the padding covers less of it. We need to account ..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 haven’t yet seen before — a modern, open-source tool for everyone. In the world of technology, that might not sound groundbreaking. After all, open-source tools and software are being taken for granted as a cornerstone of modern web development. But for some reason, not for design — until now. Penpot’s approach to building design software comes with a lot of good arguments. And it gathered a strong community ..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 digital product teams benefit from understanding principles of communication and their application to our craft. Treating our UX processes as a mode of communication between users and the digital environment can help unveil in-depth, actionable insights. In this article, I’ll focus on UX research. Communication is a core component of UX research, as it serves to bridge the gap between research insights, desi ..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 “mobile-first” approach treats small screens as first-class citizens. There’s a reduced amount of real estate, certainly less than the number of pixels we get from the viewport of Firefox expanded fullscreen on a 27-inch studio monitor. The constraint is a challenge to make sure that whatever is sent to mobile devices is directly relevant to what users should need; nothing more, nothing less. Anything more additive to the UI can be res ..read more

When I was asked to make an auto-scrolling logo farm, I had to ask myself: “You mean, like a <marquee>?” It’s not the weirdest request, but the thought of a <marquee> conjures up the “old” web days when Geocities ruled. What was next, a repeating sparkling unicorn GIF background? If you’re tempted to reach for the <marquee> element, don’t. MDN has a stern warning about it right at the top of the page: “Deprecated: This feature is no longer recommended. Though some browsers might still support it, it may have already been removed from the relevant web standards, may be in 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 occasion for creatives to put their artistic skills to the test, indulge in a little project just for fun, or tell the story they’ve always wanted to tell. Of course, it wasn’t any different this time around. In this post, you’ll find beautiful, unique, and inspiring wallpapers for April 2024. Created with love by artists and designers from across the globe, they come in versions with and without a calendar and c ..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 I’m not unique that way; sometimes, my work makes me feel like a rock star and other times, I question whether I should be a developer at all. Some projects test you — like really test you. In the first week of December 2023, I got a contract to rebuild an entire web app from the ground-up using a new technology designed to be launched alongside a “new year, new system” initiative heading into 2024. I thin ..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 does AI play? To learn more about the current state of user research and uncover the trends that will shape the user research landscape in 2024 and beyond, Maze surveyed over 1,200 product professionals between December 2023 and January 2024. The Future of User Research Report summarized the data into three key trends that provide precious insights into an industry undergoing significant changes. Let’s take ..read more