3 Key UX questions to ask before (and while) designing any product (Diego Mendes)

Designing a product, is in many ways much like writing a novel. It is very hard to get it right the first time. It requires iterations, improvements and adjustments. (medium.com)

How To Debug Website In IPad (Thoriq Firdaus)

With billions of mobile users nowadays, building websites that are viewable on mobile devices is indispensable. Luckily, we’ve got many tools and options for debugging websites on mobile platforms. You can use Adobe Edge Inspect, Google Chrome Emulation, or XIP.io to name a few. (hongkiat.com)

Twitter Study: Which Tweets Get the Most Engagement? (Jessica Lee)

We’ve seen third-party studies on what makes a tweet succeed, like this one, for example. But Twitter went ahead and did a study of its own, looking at more than 2 million tweets from verified accounts in the US. What it found was that adding video, links and photos all result in “an impressive boost in the number of retweets,” Twitter said. (clickz.com)

Have you got what it takes to grow from freelancer to studio boss? (Speider Schneider)

There may come a time you get too successful as a freelancer and must decide if you prefer sleep, money, or headaches. The step up to becoming a studio with more than one person can be a nightmare… or very rewarding. Not everyone can do it and not everyone wants to do it. So, what happens if you are forced into expanding your business? (webdesignerdepot.com)

A Beginner’s Guide to Lead Conversion with Social Media (Chloe Mason Gray)

So, you’ve been publishing on Facebook, Twitter and maybe a few other social media platforms, and you’ve built up a decent following in each channel. Your audience is starting to engage more and more with your content. Maybe you’re wondering, “Okay, what’s next? How can I take this to the next level? How can I use social media to drive leads for my business?” (kissmetrics.com)

8 Brilliant Landing Page Examples You Need to See (Ginny Soskey)

Learning how to put together an A+ landing page is tricky. There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the "best" they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are. (hubspot.com)

Understanding cash flow for a design business (marie)

As a graphic design business owner, cash flow is your lifeline. It’s the equivalent of the caloric intake for your body. A proper balance of in and out is needed to avoid getting yourself into financial trouble. Treating your income like fuel for your business is the key to getting to a proper income balance. Just as with many things, too much going in or coming out can be a sign of trouble. (designreviver.com)

Visualizing Progress with Agile Storymapping (David Peter Simon)

Kanban walls, status reports, risk logs … with so many project management tools, it's easy to fall into the complacent feeling that a project is staying on track. But keeping a project on-track in terms of enhanced user experience goes beyond just hitting that next release deadline: it’s also about adding value to the business and building features that matter to end users. It’s also important not forget the UX debt we may have built up thanks to shoddy software practices. (uxmag.com)

Apple Designer Jonathan Ive Talks About Steve Jobs and New Products (John Arlidge)

We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. Some of us like his screens more than our families. For years, Ive’s natural shyness, coupled with the secrecy bordering on paranoia of his employer, Apple, has meant we have known little about the man who shapes the future, with such innovations as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. But last month, he invited me to Cupertino in Silicon Valley where Apple is based, for his first in-depth interview since he became head of design almost 20 years ago. (time.com)

Why “The Fold” Is A Myth – And Where To Actually Put Your Calls To Action (D Bnonn Tennant)

If you’ve spent any time at all learning about web design, online marketing, or conversion-rate optimization, you’ll have heard to never put calls to action below the fold. Indeed, in industries where web designers know enough about marketing to use calls to action in the first place, you see an awful lot of “templati­fication”—websites all starting to look suspiciously alike. Here’s an obvious example: tech startup websites. Don’t they all look a little like this? (kissmetrics.com)

9 lessons learned from redesigning an e-commerce app for growth (Tomas Dirvonskas)

Just recently, Baltic-based startup Vinted – a marketplace for girls to buy and swap pre-loved clothes – raised $27M from Insight Venture Partners. A year ago, they did not have any mobile presence; today more than 50 percent of its traffic comes from apps. (thenextweb.com)

Why people focus on the right-hand side of a design (Chris Da Sie)

Website users instinctively have greater trust for content on the right-hand side, says UX designer Chris Da Sie. In Western culture, we've always been told to design left to right to help guide users. We read left to right so we should position the most important content and elements in our designs to where a user's eye is going to look first. But let me ask you: by designing this way are users trusting the information you are providing? Are we getting the most interaction out of our users that we possibly can? (creativebloq.com)

German IA Summit (IA Konferenz) Early Bird tickets END tonight

German IA Summit (IA Konferenz) Early Bird tickets END tonight MIDNIGHT (March 19), Berlin time. #iak

Hide from your friends with Cloak app (Nicholas Tufnell)

Are you incredibly popular but sick of bumping into your "friends" all the time? Then you should check out Cloak, a newly released app and one of the first self-proclaimed "anti-social networks", which is hoping to provide you with an "incognito mode for real life". (wired.co.uk)

10 Things To Know About Variability In The User Experience (Jeff Sauro)

Most people are comfortable with the concept of an average or percentage as a measure of quality. An equally important component of measuring the user experience is to understand variability. Here are 10 things to know about measuring variability in the user experience. (measuringusability.com)

Eat, design, sleep, repeat. Or how to be a poor designer. (Kristofer Layon)

I came across this t-shirt design this morning on Twitter. (source: http://www.creativebloq.com/design/shirt-sums-life-31411057) What a sad commentary for some designers if this is how they really work! (kristoferlayon.com)

New Time-Spent Metric Seeks to Move Marketers Away From Clicks (Mary Lisbeth D'Amico)

The viewability of digital ads remains somewhat of a sore point for the online ad industry. Market participants recognize advertisers' needs for a more satisfying metric than click-throughs and impressions, which provide no evidence of whether users actually saw and engaged with an ad, but the industry has been slow to change. (clickz.com)

6 Tactics That Turn a Blog Into a Business Engine (Stanford Smith)

Somewhere, a business owner is writing a blog post. She writes the headline first, pens a killer introduction, and makes her point with 892 carefully crafted words. (copyblogger.com)

Crazy Egg Review: Is Your Website Hot Enough? (Rean John Uehara)

So, you have a website. Probably you are selling something or you want to collect people’s email addresses and it works. Or does it? As a marketer, are you satisfied with your current conversions? As a designer, do you feel like you made the right decision when you placed the search bar on the sidebar? But there is one tool that we at 1stwebdesigner.com is crazy about- Crazy Egg. Don’t search high and low about the Crazy Egg review when you can have that here! (1stwebdesigner.com)

4 Design Patterns That Violate Back-Button Expectations (Christian Holst)

During all our usability studies we’ve observed how users, both novice and expert, rely extensively on the browser back button. Often this has severe usability implications in these modern days where we design webpages with overlays, toggled states, accordion checkouts and one page applications. These new-fangled web design patterns often have a default technical structure which break user expectations and clash with the user’s mental model for how the decades-old browser “back” button functions. (baymard.com)