This tutorial gives you hands-on access to my journey of creating a digital assistant capable of connecting with any system via a RESTful API to perform various tasks. Here, I’ll be demonstrating how to save a user’s basic information and create a new project on their behalf via natural language processing (NLP). The post Developing…
For the holidays, the owner of (and my boss at) thirteen23 gave each employee a Google Home device. If you don’t already know, Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by Google Assistant and is a competing product to Amazon’s line of Alexa products. I already have the Amazon Echo, and as Director of Technology…
How about an icon set that gives your UI designs just that finishing touch they need? One that stands out while keeping the design clear and legible? Vincent Le Moign spent two years on designing such a set, and we are very happy to feature part of it as a freebie today. The EGO icon…
Websites with long or infinite scrolling are becoming more and more common lately, and it’s no mere trend or coincidence. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page. Infinite scrolling is a variety of…
As designers, we often use imagery that resonates with our audience. Yet, often we also end up with stock photos and generic icons that come across as mere decoration. Or we bypass imagery altogether. But custom images are a powerful design tool. They can tell a story and convey a distinct personality. Custom illustrations can…
Imagine that it’s a hot day. The sun is out, and the temperature is rising. Perhaps, every now and then, there’s a cool breeze. A good song is playing on the radio. At some point, you get up to get a glass of water, but the exact reason why you did that at that particular…
In 2008, I worked on Boots.com. They wanted a single-page checkout with the trendiest of techniques from that era, including accordions, AJAX and client-side validation. Each step (delivery address, delivery options and credit-card details) had an accordion panel. Each panel was submitted via AJAX. Upon successful submission, the panel collapsed and the next one opened,…
When was the last time you took some time to reflect? Constantly surrounded by news and notifications to keep up with and in a rush to get things done more efficiently, it’s important that we take a step back from time to time to reflect our actions and opinions. Reflect if you are working the…
As a front-end developer, for each and every application I work on, I need to decide how to manage the data. The problem can be broken down into the following three subproblems: Fetch data from the back end, store it somewhere locally in the front-end application, retrieve the data from the local store and format…
Good UX is what separates successful apps from unsuccessful ones. Customers are won and lost every day because of good or bad user experience design. The most important thing to keep in mind when designing a mobile app is to make sure it is both useful and intuitive. Obviously, if an app is not useful,…
