UX

Feedback on an enterprise web app prompted an experiment. Could a WhatsApp chatbot replace it? Would people like it better? Would it be more useful?

There's no question that user experience is impacted by perceived load times. With today's heavier front ends, client-side rendering doesn't feel very fast. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Guillaume Breux compares client-side, server-side, and pre-rendering strategies to help you choose the best option for your own app.

Navigation in mobile applications, when done right, can have tremendous positive impact on overall user experience. Android offers application developers multiple ways of implementing navigation in their application. However, not all navigation patterns are created equal. In this article, Toptal engineer Becze Szabolcs shows us how to implement fragment-based navigation and how it stacks up against Android's traditional navigation philosophy.

Force Touch is not a new idea. BlackBerry experimented with the concept back in 2008, and a few Android phone makers also examined the possibility of using Force Touch on their products. In fact, Force Touch support has been a part of Android for years; it was introduced in Android 1.0.

Mastering CSS is an absolute necessity for any solid web designer or developer. This tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of CSS layout principles, from classic CSS2 techniques to the latest approaches in CSS3. Learn more about how to leverage all that CSS has to offer in order to optimize both the user’s experience and the quality of your code.

For some people, front-end design and development can sometimes start to seem like a chore, and can be monotonous and time consuming. Through a modular design approach, it is possible to both save time and streamline the design and development process.

Bootstrap is a powerful toolkit. It comes bundled with basic HTML and CSS design templates that include many common UI components. Most of the important pitfalls are mentioned in the Bootstrap documentation, but still some mistakes are pretty subtle, or have ambiguous causes. This article outlines some of the most common mistakes, problems, and misconceptions when using Bootstrap.

Data Driven Documents, or D3.js, is an awesome data visualization library. In this article, I'll discuss one particularly compelling application of D3.js: map making. We'll go through the common challenges of building a useful and informative web map, and show how in each case, D3.js gives you everything you need to make your map look and feel beautiful.