Wednesday, August 31, 2016

5 Ways to Enhance YouTube Videos for Marketers

mf-enhance-youtube-videos-600

Do you use YouTube for your business? Looking for ways to create more visibility for your videos? YouTube offers a number of helpful features to optimize your videos for more views, subscribers, or conversions. In this article, you’ll discover five ways to improve the performance of your YouTube videos. #1: Add a Watermark to Your [...]

This post 5 Ways to Enhance YouTube Videos for Marketers first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle


by Mohammad Farooq via

“I use my strengths and weaknesses to add value to my team : Ask Me Anything.”

In today’s diverse landscape of work places and situations, finding a team that is a good cultural fit is as important as finding a job.

Being able to define achievable team goals that work for every member is key to moving forward in a cohesive, productive, and fulfilling way – it’s how we make meaningful work.

Understanding your personal strengths and weaknesses and learning how to harness those in a way that adds value to your team can go a long way towards making you all happier and more efficient.

Natalie Eustace embarked on a personal journey of discovery to overcome challenges and bring her best to the dispersed team with which she works.

The Details

Meet Natalie Eustace

Natalie Eustace

Natalie is a UX Designer with Wynyard Group – a market leader in serious crime fighting software used by governments and financial institutions.

Starting in the role as a graduate and working her way up, Natalie works in a geographically widespread team who have to work hard to find ways to work cohesively together, with ideation and communication proving to be ongoing challenges.

How to Ask Your Questions

If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and we’ll ask Natalie on your behalf. You can submit your questions here. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.

How does Ask Me Anything work?

These sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent. We run them in our dedicated public Slack channel. That means that there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session. If you’re not familiar with Slack, you’ll need to request an invite to our channel the first time only – from then on you’re part of the family and you’ll have automatic access to new sessions.

The post “I use my strengths and weaknesses to add value to my team : Ask Me Anything.” appeared first on UX Mastery.


by Sarah Hawk via UX Mastery

Femme Fatale Studio

Femme Fatale is a creative studio focusing on culture, luxury, editorial & art. Somewhere between sophistication and simplicity.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

How to create Shareable Content Using Infographics

How to create Shareable Content Using Infographics

We are becoming more used to be served business statistics on an eye-catching infographic design rather than listed monotonously in a word document. We don’t mind the colours and imagery which comes along with infographics because it is in our nature to be captured by visuals!

Infographics come in all shapes and sizes, however, if you have missed them they tend to be super long graphics that are easy to scroll through and understand no matter what your background in the relevant subject is.

Infographics can be extremely valuable to your company and they may even boost the reach of your business through social media sharing and blogs! If you are a small business looking to adapt to big business trends infographics are an excellent start.

Let’s look at how you can create shareable content through infographics, that will grab your target audience’s attention.

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #250

Articles

Writing Less Damn Code

I’m a bit of a fan of Heydon Pickering’s thinking to be honest but it is a fine line. In this post Heydon shares a few use cases of why we should all aim to write less code and passes on few tips and ideas that might help us achieve the desired result. (heydonworks.com)

The target=”_blank” vulnerability by example

Quite an eye opener… You may have read about this over the last few months but seeing an example sure does get you thinking. (dev.to)

How To Use WebPageTest and its API

This article looks into using the WebPageTest RESTful API to extract vital information so you can optimise the performance of your site via a build script or the likes. (css-tricks.com)

The cost of small modules

Including countless little modules throughout a codebase is becoming increasingly popular in todays JavaScript landscape, but is that the best for performance? Nolan Lawson gets his testing hat on and explores some interesting stats. (nolanlawson.com)

How Spotify’s website UX has changed

Sean Hervo looks into how Spotify’s website design has changed over the last decade (a lot!). A good trip down memory lane. (blog.prototypr.io)

Design Better Data Tables(medium.com)

Tools / Resources

Offline Content with Service Workers

If you are thinking about implementing service workers this post offers some great advice in an easy digestible manner. (madebymike.com.au)

Using Feature Queries in CSS

Jen Simmons explains how you can go about writing your CSS with the latest features by utilising the simple @supports rule. (hacks.mozilla.org)

Visualization with React

A 7 part series put together by Jerome Cukier that looks into creating visualizations with React. The series starts off quite basic but ends up dissecting a complex visualization with live data and several components interacting with one another. (jeromecukier.net)

Great list of React/JSX patterns with examples (reactpatterns.com)

Initial release of Jekyll Admin is out (github.com)

Remote retrospectives with Retrobot (remysharp.com)

Inspiration

React Game- Elephant Taco Hunt (codepen.io)

Faster and More Accessible Digital Ocean (digitalocean.com)

CascadiaFest 2016 Videos (youtube.com)

Jobs

Product Designer at Zapier

We’re looking for a Product Designer to join the design team at Zapier. Want to create meaningful experiences that help people automate their tedious, everyday tasks so they spend less time working extra hours, and more time enjoying what matters most to them? (zapier.com)

Head of Design at Vimeo

If you are keen to oversee all product design and user experience, achieving both business and product goals. Take ownership of the look and feel for the web and all native Vimeo apps on mobile phones, tablets, televisions we want to hear from you. (vimeo.com)

Need to find passionate developers or designers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter

Last but not least…

Front End Center — Screencasts for Web Professionals (frontend.center)

The State of JavaScript (stateofjs.com)

The post Web Design Weekly #250 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.


by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Versioning Show, Episode 6, with Jen Simmons

In this episode, Tim and David are joined by Jen Simmons, Designer Advocate at Mozilla, award-winning podcaster and regular conference presenter. They discuss the future of CSS layouts with grids, regions and @supports, being a rebel with a cause in the workplace, and inventing French fry cheeseburgers with Houdini.

Continue reading %Versioning Show, Episode 6, with Jen Simmons%


by M. David Green via SitePoint

4 Agile Ways to Handle Bugs in Production

A bug

In a perfect world, every time we rolled out code at the end of a sprint, it would work perfectly in production. There would never be any bugs, and there would never be any issues that forced us to roll back code that has already been deployed.

Of course, we don't live in a perfect world. That's one of the reasons why we have agile in the first place. Agile isn't about pretending that your world is perfect. It's about adapting to reality, and iterating to improve your processes and your flexibility so that when problems arise you're able to deal with them.

One of the problems that comes up frequently for teams is the discovery of a new bug in production right in the middle of a sprint. Your team has finished deploying, all the tests passed, and everything has been pushed out to production so customers can start using it.

But maybe an edge case that wasn't considered comes up. Maybe some aspect of the code that wasn't fully tested comes to the surface, and starts causing problems for users. How's your agile team supposed to respond to that?

There are many different approaches to dealing with bugs in production that come up during a sprint. Choosing the one that works best for your team is dependent on how your company is structured, how critical the bug is, and what matters most to your product owner and your customer.

The Minimal Impact Option

If a bug in production is the result of a previous sprint's work, and it's having a negative effect on users, the simplest thing to do whenever possible is to roll back the production server to the state that it was in before it was updated after the last sprint. At the very least, this will minimize the impact of the bug on new users.

Doing this requires having a production deployment system setup that supports clean rollbacks. An agile team with the ability to push code into production should ideally be working in an environment that supports continuous deployment, or at the very least deployment tags that allow you to roll back your production servers to a previous state. It's times like this that you really appreciate having strong deployment or devops engineers on the team.

If it's possible to solve the problem that simply, the product owner may choose to write a bug story to be worked on in the next sprint. That will prevent this current sprint from being interrupted, and reduce the impact on the team's velocity. Handling bugs this way also allows the team to consider more carefully the potential impact of the bug, and the best way to fix it.

The Deep Exploration Option

Sometimes fixing a bug in production isn't as simple as it sounds. For example, the bug could have had an effect on the data being entered into the application, or the bug may actually exist in the data layer. In this case, database recovery may be necessary, which introduces a whole range of other difficulties.

Recognizing the potential scope of a bug is the responsibility of the product owner in concert with the engineering team. When a bug is discovered, it may be necessary for the product owner to pull one or more engineers into meetings to discuss the depth of the impact and make a plan of action. Of course, the team's velocity in the sprint will likely be reduced merely because of the need to assess the extent of the damage and propose a viable solution.

If the bug is urgent enough and the prognosis is uncertain, it may be necessary to introduce a new spike within the current sprint, and have somebody on the engineering team start looking ahead toward what's going to be necessary to fix the bug in the next sprint. Bugs can be difficult to estimate because of their unknown nature, and it's usually a good idea not to assign points to a bug for that reason. However, having one engineer take away a little bit of effort from the current sprint can pay off in the long run, without holding back the whole team.

The Urgent Effort Option

More bugs

It's not always possible to put off a bug fix until the next sprint. Sometimes a bug is so critical, and affects such an important aspect of the product, that it's necessary to implement a fix during the current sprint. Ideally, this effort won't require the entire development team. It's the product owner's responsibility to assess the scope of the damage, and decide whether it's worth introducing a new story in the middle of a sprint to address a critical bug.

Introducing new stories in the middle of a sprint is never a good idea. A good scrum master should work with the product owner to try to limit changes to a sprint that's in progress. But that doesn't mean that it's never necessary, and a good scrum master should also be able to communicate clearly to the team when and why it's important to adjust the backlog if that's the best option.

The goal in this case is to have as small an impact on the sprint as possible. Perhaps the developers who worked on the section of code that is causing the problems can be pulled off of the stories they're working on, and temporarily assigned to fix the bug. Of course, any stories they're working on will suffer, and there won't be any points earned in the sprint for work done on a bug from a previous sprint.

The Nuclear Option

If a critical bug is discovered in production code, the presence of the bug is causing serious problems, and more than half of the development team is needed to work in concert to fix it, sometimes the only thing to do is to stop the sprint and start a new one.

Continue reading %4 Agile Ways to Handle Bugs in Production%


by M. David Green via SitePoint