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Which websites have the best onboarding process and why. The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience Strategy - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement I was a competitive road cyclist for four years.

The S.M.A.R.T. User Experience Strategy - Smashing UX Design

My bikes were good, but my race results were much less impressive. Instead of medals and trophies, all I had to show for it were shaved legs and a farmer’s tan. Regardless, on the road to becoming a competitive athlete, I followed a rigorous training plan with concrete goals. These goals were specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Improving The Online Shopping Experience, Part 1: Getting Customers To Your Products - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement Amazon turned sweet sixteen this year, and, by extension, so did online shopping as we know it.

Improving The Online Shopping Experience, Part 1: Getting Customers To Your Products - Smashing UX Design

As online shopping has grown over the past 16 years, so have user needs and expectations related to the online shopping experience. Setting up shop online is easy, but creating an experience that satisfies target users is a different story altogether. In the traditional journey of a purchase, commonly depicted as a funnel, a business loses potential customers as they move closer to the purchasing stage. How Metrics Can Make You A Better Designer - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement.

How Metrics Can Make You A Better Designer - Smashing UX Design

Improving The Online Shopping Experience, Part 2: Guiding Customers Through The Buying Process - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement Part 1 of “Improving the Online Shopping Experience”1 focused on the upper part of the purchase funnel and on ways to get customers to your website and to find your products.

Improving The Online Shopping Experience, Part 2: Guiding Customers Through The Buying Process - Smashing UX Design

Today, we move down the funnel, looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and to guide them through the check-out process. Ways to improve the online shopping experience and to reduce the drop in the purchase funnel. Part 1 covered points 1 to 3. Enable The Customer To Decide Inform and reinforce the customer’s buying decisions by offering in-depth product information. Product name Product names should contain relevant keywords to help customers find and identify the right product. The key elements of product pages on Zappos.com are highlighted.

Kohl’s offers a visual way to identify color and size combinations that are in stock. Social shopping on Buy.com includes: (1) friends who are currently shopping together, (2) a chat window. Reduce Shopping-Cart Abandonment. Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors - Smashing UX Design. Not Your Parent's Mobile Phone: UX Design Guidelines For Smartphones - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement In your pocket right now is the most powerful “remote control” (as Drew Diskin put it1) that has ever existed.

Not Your Parent's Mobile Phone: UX Design Guidelines For Smartphones - Smashing UX Design

It is no ordinary remote control. It can harness everything that all of the previous mass media2 (television, radio, Internet, etc.) can do. People aren’t using them just for simple entertainment or for phone calls. They have become the hub of our personal lives. Getting Started With PHP Templating - Smashing Coding. Advertisement In this article, we’ll cover how to separate the view of your PHP application from its other components.

Getting Started With PHP Templating - Smashing Coding

We’ll look at why using such an architecture is useful and what tools we can use to accomplish this. Here’s what we’ll cover: Learn some basic MVC concepts,Review some popular templating libraries,Play around with a small custom-made view class.Explore the basics of using the Twig library. To fully benefit from this article, you should already know how to write and run your own PHP scripts on a Web server (i.e. using Apache).

A Quick Introduction To The MVC Pattern. UX UI. Graphic Design. The Role Of Design In The Kingdom Of Content - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement If content sits at the top of the food chain, why do we spend so much time talking about the finer points of design?

The Role Of Design In The Kingdom Of Content - Smashing UX Design

The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement. Free Icon Set For Web Designers: Aroma (250+ PNG Icons) - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Today we are delighted to release another freebie for our design community.

Free Icon Set For Web Designers: Aroma (250+ PNG Icons) - Smashing Magazine

There are many free icon sets out there, and there are quite many commercial ones as well. Yet a good, consistently designed icon set is always a welcome addition to any designer’s toolbox. Oliver Twardowski had released the Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set (750 icons, including PSD sources) in the past, and this time he has prepared a fresh, new icon set which contains over 250 original high quality PNGs.

Please notice that some icons may be similar to the ones released in the previous set. Download the Collection for Free! The elements contained in this collection are free for personal and commercial use. HTML5 Semantics - Smashing Coding. Designing for the Mind - Design Informer. Advertisement Editor’s Note: Please note that this article is one of the previously published articles on our new subsite, Smashing Design Informer.

Designing for the Mind - Design Informer

The Big Think: Breaking The Deliverables Habit - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement.

The Big Think: Breaking The Deliverables Habit - Smashing UX Design

A Guide To PHP Error Messages For Designers - Smashing Coding. Advertisement PHP is widely available with inexpensive hosting plans, which makes it a popular choice for developers who write software for the Web. From big platforms, such as WordPress, down to small scripts, such as ones to display image galleries or to send forms to email, thousands of script and products are out there written in PHP that can be installed and used even if you don’t know much about PHP yourself. I have been a PHP developer for 10 years, and my company has developed a content management system, written in PHP, that is intended to be very simple to install and get started with.

So, I spend a lot of time working with designers who are installing a PHP script for the first time. If you are installing a script and something goes wrong, PHP can be incredibly infuriating. Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. Content Strategy Within The Design Process - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition.

A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows: “Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.” Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g.