We produced our tablet and mobile websites specifically with users of these devices in mind — performance was our top priority. We wanted to improve on the loading time of our “desktop” website dramatically; the desktop home page was 2.2 MB, with 84 HTTP requests, and the mobile home page was still quite large, at 700 KB, with 46 HTTP requests. We had also designed the interfaces specifically with touch in mind, using jQuery Mobile to enhance the user experience with touch gest

You have a much better chance of stopping the mistakes in advance than of identifying them after the fact. When you’re testing, how often do you think, “Hey, maybe we should change the label on the third field of this form?” You’re wrapped up in other UX mistakes that you know you’ve made. Unfortunately, a repeated pattern of noticeable failure is usually needed in order for microcopy to get updated or even tested.

Today we are pleased to feature a set of 200 useful and beautiful foodie icons. This freebie was created by the team behind Freepik, and at the time of writing it’s the largest set of food icons available on the web in one pack.

To really understand how user experience (UX) will change, we first have to consider the possibility that social and utilitarian UX will be taking place in different environments. In the future, people will use the desktop primarily for utilitarian purposes, while “social” UX will happen on a virtual layer, overlaying the real world (thanks to Glass). Early indicators of this are that Facebook anticipates its mobile growth to outpace its PC growth and that nearly one-seventh of the w

I’ve been experimenting with Meteor for the past six months, using it first to build Telescope (an open-source social news app), and then in turn using Telescope as a base to create Sidebar (a design links website), and I’ve just released a book about it. I believe that, more than any other framework, Meteor helps you get from idea to app in the shortest possible amount of time. So, if all of this has made you curious, I recommend you give it a try and follow along this short wa

We can think of a client-side application as a group of application modules that are built with low-level modules. As an example, we might have User and Message models and a MessageDetail view to compose an Inbox application module, which is part of an entire email client application. The details of implementation, such as the module format to be used (for example, AMD, CommonJS or the “revealing module” pattern), are not important here. Also, defining things this way doesn’t m

AirBnB could be a good option as well, but be fast — there aren’t many rooms available. Freiburg is known for being a vacation place, so perhaps you’d like to combine the conference with a relaxing family vacation in the skirts of the Black Forest? We’ve prepared some information about the location of Freiburg, so you don’t get lost in the suburbs of the Southern Germany while travelling here. Now if that isn’t an experience of a life-time, what is? (No, serio

A front-end operations engineer will be a master of the build tool chain. They’ll help run and set up the continuous integration (or similar) server but, more specifically, they’ll set up the testing instances that their application runs on and then, eventually, the deployment instances. They’ll integrate Git post-commit hooks into the application and run the tests (either in Node.js and PhantomJS or against something like Sauce Labs, Testling or BrowserStack) before anything g

Every time we scroll through a new row of images, this action bar gets painted on yet another pin, even though we don’t mean to hover over it. This comes down more to UX than anything else, but scrolling performance in this case might be more important than the hover effect during scrolling. Hovering amplifies jank during scrolling because the browser essentially pauses to go off and paint the effect (the same is true when we roll out of the element!). One option here is to use a setTimeou

The total value of all of the eBooks in the Smashing Library is around $270. While you would already save more than $170 with the regular price, the special discount this week will save you another $15 — but only from the 3rd until the 9th of June! Of course, more excellent eBooks are in the pipeline, including our long-awaited Smashing Book 4, which will be released in a few months. Now is the best time to take advantage of this offer because the Smashing Book 4 will also be discounted by

Another benefit of the clown car technique is that all of the logic remains in the SVG file. Similar to how we separate content from presentation from behavior, this method enables us to separate image logic from content. The or element is part of the content, but the logic that makes it all work can be made separate from the content layer: The logic is in the SVG image, instead of polluting the CSS and HTML. This benefit may make some choose the non-data-URI version of the method, in-spite o

“The Jagannath triad are usually worshiped in the sanctum of the temple at Puri, but once during the month of Rainy Season of Orissa, usually falling in month of June or July, they are brought out onto the main street of Puri (Bada Danda) and travel (3 km) to the Shri Gundicha Temple,in huge chariots (ratha), allowing the public to have Holy view (darsana). This festival is known as Rath Yatra, meaning the journey (yatra) of the chariots (ratha).” — Designed by The Dreamer Desi

CloudApp is a service that enables you to easily upload files. The reason I love it so is that it comes with a little app that can be configured to play nice with my screenshot-making procedure. On the Mac, I just press Shift + Control + Command + 4 to take a screenshot, and then immediately press Control + Option + C (this shortcut can be reconfigured) and wait for the “ping,” which means the screenshot has been uploaded. A link to the screenshot is already in my clipboard, so I can

From a technical perspective, there are still a lot of challenges in dealing with content at a global scale. The mobile-first method has been part of the development and design process for a little while now. We could, for example, serve to mobile devices the minimum data that is necessary, and then use JavaScript and AJAX to conditionally load more content and images for desktops and tablets. But to do this, we would also have to rethink how we deal with content and be able to prioritize in ord

Instead of every developer buying them all, what if there was a place where people could share devices for testing? If each person purchased a single device, you might already have enough to set up a device lab — which would save you a lot of money. The bigger the community of people contributing to this lab, the larger the variety of devices to test on. Even better, the community could even ask manufacturers to provide their devices to the lab, thus saving you even more money. Thus, acces