How Does The Internet Work? - #infographic

The internet all started back in the 1970s when the government was trying to create a way for computers to talk to each other. That’s right, there was once a time when computers were not connected to the internet! Back then, computers were also the size of a room and rarely had a screen. With the...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

How to Supercharge Your Product Design Workflow with CloudApp

This article was sponsored by CloudApp. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

When you’re creating some of the best products and services in the world, collaboration and speed to market are essential. You need to bring together distributed teams, communicate effectively, and work on a consistent version of the product.

Wherever you are in the roadmap or product development lifecycle — concept, business analysis, prototyping, testing, building, UX and UI, delivery, or support, you need the right platform to keep everyone on the same page. That product is CloudApp.

This tutorial will teach you how to use CloudApp to enhance product development across your organization.

CloudApp: What It Is and What It Does

CloudApp is a tool that lets you easily create, annotate, and share screenshots, GIFs, video snippets, and screen recordings with others. It works as follows:

1. You identify something you need to share visually with others.
2. You capture the image in the most appropriate way — as a static screenshot, a short GIF, or an extended screen recording. These are known in CloudApp as "drops."
3. You annotate the image with text, arrows, emojis, lines, and other shapes to add context and information.
4. You upload the image and annotation (drop) to CloudApp’s service and get a link to the image.
5. You forward the link to others — they can then access and review the information, make comments, and act on it.

CloudApp: Other Features

CloudApp has several other useful features.

You can drag, drop, organize and work with many different file types including large files, documents, code snippets, audio, zip archives, and more. Searching is easy — you can search and filter by image, color, and other visual attributes to quickly locate specific image files.

Sharing and integration is built into the core of the product. Share securely and control who has access to image files and enjoy integration with Trello (productivity tool), JIRA (bug tracking and development), Slack (communications), and ZenDesk (customer support).

The tool lets you capture from browser tabs (for SaaS products) or native Windows and Mac software. It also works across multiple environments — staging, development, testing, production, and more.

How CloudApp Can Help You and Your Team Develop Amazing Products

Easy collaboration on shared screenshots, GIFs, and videos is a great way to ensure a consistent approach to product development. There are several areas where CloudApp can empower your team to develop products in a faster, easier, more effective way.

• Create and share early mockups of business requirements and process flows.
• Speed up prototyping using annotations and screenshots.
• Design and develop schematics and other features through the build process.
• Replicate and identify product bugs during testing.
• Test products with end users and let them provide feedback using CloudApp.
• Continue to support products after launch and give engineers easy sight of problems.

CloudApp Is Used Across Many Industries

CloudApp is suitable for many different types of business and product development too. In software and coding, it’s ideal for sharing screenshots, workflows, UX, UI, prototyping, and more. Architecture and construction employees can use it to get agreement on schematics and project management.

Product design for real world products is an excellent use case, including designing for usability, accessibility, durability, and more. Creative work also lends itself well to CloudApp including marketing collateral, art, illustrations, videos, and any other visual medium. Workflows for business processes and business improvement can easily be tweaked and refined.

For the rest of this guide we’re going to show how CloudApp can easily be integrated into your product design workflow, giving you a step-by-step guide and several ideas to optimize your development practices.

Step 1: Get Your Conceptualization Right

From the start, CloudApp can help with product development. As you’re conceptualizing the product you can use CloudApp to share rough drafts, mockups, early screenshots, or design concepts. CloudApp can be used for "broad strokes" or fine-tuning work, and if it’s true that “a picture is worth a thousand words” then CloudApp becomes very valuable.

Begin by engaging with your conceptualization team — key stakeholders, early-stage designers, high-level engineers, and business analysts. Define what the project is going to deliver and start using CloudApp to share your earliest concepts. As you start to firm up those initial ideas, create a common language and collaborate on rough sketches and mockups.

Build your product concept through using CloudApp to review, refine, amend, and discard design ideas until you come up with one or two fleshed-out concepts that everyone agrees on. You should end this stage by having a common agreement on the design that needs to be developed, and establish a cohesive way forward.

Step 2: Build In Business Needs and Analysis

It’s vital to ensure your product concepts align with business and customer needs. If you’re running an Agile project, rapid feedback and high-quality user stories are vital to effective product development. CloudApp empowers that exchange of ideas and helps you sanity-check that you’ve properly understood what the business needs. Here’s how to make that happen.

Take your concepts and designs, and create early-stage mockups and artifacts that you can share with business stakeholders and users through CloudApp. Demonstrate how the early-stage product might work in practice. It’s important to have a centralized, agreed-upon "version of the truth" and CloudApp will help you share this with multiple users.

Refine requirements gathering and analysis by ensuring you understand business needs, context, examples, use cases, and user stories. You can power up your user stories by getting annotated screenshots and commentary. At the end of this stage you’ll have ensured that your early designs and business needs are properly aligned.

Step 3: Prototype the Product

One of the most important parts of development, prototyping gets much easier with CloudApp. Easily create and share wireframes and mockups, screen flows, navigation, early-stage UX / UI, and more. Use videos and GIFs to show prototypes in action and simulate typical use cases. Add notes and annotations to draw attention to specific functions and features.

As you start the prototyping process, get all of your team into the same CloudApp ecosystem — designers, UI and UX artists, engineers, technicians, and the project team. Create a process for collaborative wireframing and mockups over your distributed teams.

Next, create effective feedback loops that void duplication and rework. Ensure that it’s easy to get detailed prototype feedback from designers, developers, project teams, the business, and stakeholders. Use the recording function of CloudApp to clarify how products are used through sharing navigation, screen flows, and UX elements as they are being used.

Ultimately, you want to get rapid agreement on features and functions that need to be changed, enhanced, or discarded. Ideally, you will end up with an MVP that performs all of the basic functions, and that everyone can agree on.

Step 4: Gather Customer Research and Reaction

In addition to capturing business needs, it’s vital to understand the marketplace and how customers will use the product or service. With CloudApp you can provide visuals of how the product is going to look and easily gather qualified feedback from potential customers for analysis and feeding into your next sprint.

Continue reading %How to Supercharge Your Product Design Workflow with CloudApp%

by Paul Maplesden via SitePoint

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

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The key to success for most – if not all - businesses is consistency. Whether it’s responding to a customer or stocking supplies - without consistency, you become less reliable to your customers. And soon after, they're going to start looking for other alternatives. The same concept applies...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #298

Headlines

Colour management and gamut

A great introduction to colour management for software designers and developers. (bjango.com)

HTML Web Component using Vanilla JavaScript (ayushgp.github.io)

Sponsor Web Design Weekly and reach over 26,434 passionate designers and developers

Articles

How to structure components in React?

How we structure our components has a great impact on how we maintain a system and how expandable it is. Of course it all depends on the context but thankfully we have plenty of options and we can pick and choose as Bartek Witczak explains. (reallifeprogramming.com)

Emulating CSS Timing Functions with JavaScript

Ana Tudor explains how to smoothly go from one state to another in a similar fashion to that of common CSS timing functions using just a little bit of JavaScript. (css-tricks.com)

Impress Your Friends With Code Splitting in React

If code splitting your React app has been on your todo list for a while this post is for you. (hackernoon.com)

Netflix functions without client-side React (jakearchibald.com)

Tools / Resources

Apollo Client 2.0

Apollo Client is the ultra-flexible, community-driven GraphQL client for React, Vue.js, Angular, and other JavaScript platforms. You just describe your data requirements with a GraphQL query, and Apollo Client fetches and manages the data for you. (dev-blog.apollodata.com)

Unlocking the Benefits of CSS Variables

Jonathan Harrell takes a quick look at the benefits of CSS custom properties and then goes over some lesser known features that may come in handy while using them. (jonathan-harrell.com)

The Art of Comments

An article that digs into some of the many beneficial types of comments that might all serve a different purpose, followed by patterns that are best to avoid. (css-tricks.com)

Tachyons Generator

Generate a custom Tachyons build from a JSON configuration. (github.com)

Storybook vs. Styleguidist for a component library (spectrum.chat)

End-to-end Tests that Don’t Suck with Puppeteer (ropig.com)

Sharpen Up Your Text with The Power of Three (webdirections.org)

A list of development podcasts (stackforest.com)

Little UI Details (twitter.com)

Inspiration

I watched all of the Chrome Dev Summit videos so you don’t have to (redfin.engineering)

Anyone need side project ideas? (adrienjoly.com)

Jobs

Senior WordPress Frontend Developer

Do you have a dog eared copy of ‘Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja’ beside your bed? Would you be excited to work on large scale WordPress projects that actually require your JavaScript skills? Would you be stoked to push the limits of where JavaScript and WordPress can play nicely together? (tri.be)

Product Designer at Trello

We’re looking for a savvy product designer to join the Product Team at Trello. Your work will have an impact on how millions of people all over the world collaborate and organize their lives. (trello.com)

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

Last but not least…

What are the Most Disliked Programming Languages? (stackoverflow.blog)

The post Web Design Weekly #298 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Concurrency and Coroutines in Kotlin

Doberman Culture

Wonderfully unique One Pager sharing the company culture over at Doberman. The site features neat interactive elements and images while you scroll in multiple directions. There is loads of personality in the copy too and a great reference to capturing company culture with style.

Full Review | Direct Link

by Rob Hope @robhope via One Page Love