The hackers will get hacked. Recent data breaches have made it startlingly clear hacking tools used by governments really are at risk of being exposed. The actual value of the information included in each of these dumps varies, and some may not be all that helpful in and of themselves, but they…

Microinteractions guide a user through your application. They reinforce your user experience and provide delight. You may have seen some of the slick examples of microinteractions on Dribble or CodePen . But do you know how to build your own library of similar UI widgets? In this article, I’ll focus…

How to protect your online communications November 20th, 2016 The Draft Communications Data Bill , aka “Snoopers’ Charter”, has passed the House of Lords. There is nothing stopping it from becoming law in the UK. This legislation makes extremely invasive eavesdropping and data collection legal. It…

Despite rising concern among the public, social-media companies have had little success stemming the wave of online harassment. As part of research recently published in the journal Political Behavior , I conducted an experiment on Twitter to find out the best tactics people can use to discourage…

Espen Waldal Nov 18, 2016 · 5 min read Bakken & Bæck teamed up with news agency NTB to create Norway’s first robot journalist. The result was a digital football reporter that writes articles like a human. Automation and algorithms already play a big role in the media industry. Programmatic…

We just created a design system for a huge organization and established a CSS architecture we’re quite pleased with. It’s one of the first times I’ve ever gotten to a project’s finish line without wishing I’d done at least a few things differently. So I thought it would be great to share how we went…

The :target pseudo-class refers to an element within the document that the URL’s fragment points to. For example, this piece of text is wrapped in a element which has an ID of #target-test . If you went to the url, https://bitsofco.de/the-target-trick#target-test , then that element will be the…

There are dozens of ways to achieve animations on the web. For example, the filmstrip is an approach has been around since before the internet, with slightly different hand-drawn frame being swapped out many times a second to create the illusion of motion. Twitter recently used this simple approach…

phantom underlines . isn't this amaaaaaazing. i love waiting for 8 seconds and seeing this. look at it. srsly. looooook at it. I spent a week traveling around Taiwan, on my awesome free roaming 2G data plan, and friends,we need to talk about your web fonts. Also cats. They really love cats…

One idea that has lodged itself into my brain recently (largely from this panel discussion ) is how a front end developer needs to be aware . In a general sense, the front end developer is positioned in the middle of lots of other jobs. Everybody involved in a web team ends up talking with the front…

If two hours go by and no one interrupts you, consider yourself lucky. According to an article by Game Developer Magazine’s Chris Parnin, developers lose more time going back to a task after they’ve been interrupted than people working in other industries and the time spent away from their tasks is…

A history of web standards’ claim to “help our users” when they are actually putting them and developers in danger Jenn Schiffer Aug 30, 2016 · 5 min read Believe it or not, there was a time when all computer screens were the same size and building interfaces for all devices was an efficient task —…

Loading... Communication Comment 8.95 Buy Copies Loading... Executive Summary What makes a good listener? Most people think is comes down to three components: not interrupting the speaker, following along with facial expressions, and being able to repeat back almost verbatim what the speaker has…

A friendly robot greets me on Facebook. He’s dressed like a doctor, stethoscope and all, here to do a security checkup. So for the next 5 to 10 seconds, I wait as he pokes and prods my account. “He’s really taking good care of me!” I think, when I start to wonder: Are Facebook’s servers really…

Harry Brignull Jul 10, 2016 · 8 min read Onboarding is a fashionable topic at the moment. You see lots of onboarding articles and tear-downs shared these days. But onboarding is just the first date. If someone installs your app or registers on your site, you’re not guaranteed a long term…

I gave the closing talk at the Render conference in Oxford a few weeks back. It was a very smoothly-run event, the spiritual successor to jQuery UK. In amongst the mix of talks there were a few emerging themes. Animation was covered from a few different angles by Val and Sara . Bruce , Jake , Ola ,…

“[The Amazon Echo] is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future,” writes Farhad Manjoo in the Times. Manjoo, like others,

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. At the time, the victory was widely described as a milestone in artificial intelligence. But Deep Blue’s technology turned out to be useful for chess and not much else. Computer science did not undergo a revolution.…

Right now, millions of consumers are facing a simple problem. Or rather, they're facing a problem with simplicity, as both the number of smart products and the functions of those products multiply. I was recently reminded of this when I tried to quickly snap a picture at a recent Apple event. I…

As many of us move away from designing pages toward designing systems , one concept keeps cropping up: modularity. We often hear about the benefits of a modular approach; modules are scalable, replaceable, reusable, easy to test, quick to put together—“They’re just like LEGO!” Modularity might…

Two unrelated things happened recently: A few high profile open source maintainer burnouts1 I've been reading a lot of philosophy2 I was first introduced to Stoicism by a friend who recommended the bo

Most of SuperFriendly ’s work over the last few years has been with organizations that need specific help with crafting design systems that enable them to extend the work long after we’ve handed off initial work. It’s not uncommon to receive initial inquiries containing sentences like these: We are…

Professionalism has become a destructive myth. You don't have to leave your conscience behind when you head to work. My all-time favourite columnist line is this. "You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue." The columnist is agony aunt Dear Sugar, the more…

You’ve successfully created a PR and it’s in the queue to be merged. A maintainer looks at the code and asks you to rebase your PR so that they can merge it. Say what? The maintainer means that there

TL;DR: WebPagetest will now expose any User Timing marks that a page records so you can use the same custom events for your synthetic test measurement as well as your Real User Measurement (and you can use WebPagetest to validate your RUM measurement points). Before kicking off an optimization…

Quite a few people have been linking to an article on The Verge with the inflammatory title The Mobile web sucks . In it, Nilay Patel heaps blame upon mobile browsers, Safari in particular: But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor…

If you want to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World. Then, reserve a meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest, using the Disney World app to…

The other day I was watching Alex Schultz, the VP Growth at Facebook, give a lecture on Growth for the CS183B class. He made a lot of great points, but the last 60 seconds I thought were the best: “Mark [Zuckerberg] has said he thinks we won because we wanted it more, and I really believe that. We…