Design Guidelines For Better Notifications UX
In many products, setting notification channels on mute is a default, rather than an exception. The reason for that is their high frequency, which creates disruptions and eventually notification fatigue, when any popping messages get dismissed instantly. There is a good reason for it: high frequency of notifications. In usability testing, it’s the most frequent […]
CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language
Once upon a time, CSS was purely presentational. It imperatively handled the fonts, colors, backgrounds, spacing, and layouts, among other styles, for markup languages. It was a language for looks, doing what it was asked to, never thinking or making decisions. At least, that was what it was made for when Håkon Wium Lie proposed […]
Turning User Research Into Real Organizational Change
This article is a sponsored by Lyssna We’ve all been there: you pour your heart and soul into conducting meticulous user research. You gather insightful data, create detailed reports, and confidently deliver your findings. Yet, months later, little has changed. Your research sits idle on someone’s desk, gathering digital dust. It feels frustrating, like carefully […]
Never Stop Exploring (July 2025 Wallpapers Edition)
For many of us, July is the epitome of summer. The time for spending every free minute outside to enjoy the sun and those seemingly endless summer days, whether it’s in a nearby park, by a lake, or on a trip exploring new places. So why not bring a bit of that summer joy to […]
Can Good UX Protect Older Users From Digital Scams?
A few years ago, my mum, who is in her 80s and not tech-savvy, almost got scammed. She received an email from what appeared to be her bank. It looked convincing, with a professional logo, clean formatting, and no obvious typos. The message said there was a suspicious charge on her account and presented a […]
Decoding The SVG path Element: Curve And Arc Commands
In the first part of decoding the SVG path pair, we mostly dealt with converting things from semantic tags (line, polyline, polygon) into the path command syntax, but the path element didn’t really offer us any new shape options. This will change in this article as we’re learning how to draw curves and arcs, which […]
CSS Cascade Layers Vs. BEM Vs. Utility Classes: Specificity Control
CSS is wild, really wild. And tricky. But let’s talk specifically about specificity. When writing CSS, it’s close to impossible that you haven’t faced the frustration of styles not applying as expected — that’s specificity. You applied a style, it worked, and later, you try to override it with a different style and… nothing, it […]
Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book
UX research can take so much of the guesswork out of the design process! But it’s easy to forget just how different people are and how their needs and preferences can vary. We can’t predict the needs of every user, but we shouldn’t expect different people using the product in roughly the same way. That’s […]
What I Wish Someone Told Me When I Was Getting Into ARIA
If you haven’t encountered ARIA before, great! It’s a chance to learn something new and exciting. If you have heard of ARIA before, this might help you better understand it or maybe even teach you something new! These are all things I wish someone had told me when I was getting started on my web […]
Creating The “Moving Highlight” Navigation Bar With JavaScript And CSS
I recently came across an old jQuery tutorial demonstrating a “moving highlight” navigation bar and decided the concept was due for a modern upgrade. With this pattern, the border around the active navigation item animates directly from one element to another as the user clicks on menu items. In 2025, we have much better tools […]