Back to News Here are a few of the things our team found useful or interesting this past week.
Design
Calculating ROI for design projects in 4 steps
nngroup.com
A good article written from a UX practitioner standpoint about ROI for a design project, including an important point to transparently present the path you took to get a number and not confuse it with the financial projection directly.
— Junta
Principles of great design: Craftsmanship
smashingmagazine.com
As someone who struggles a lot with polish and refinement, this article felt like validation for the immense amount of time I put into this part of design.
— Anne
Tree testing: Fast, iterative evaluation of menu labels and categories
nngroup.com
This article includes references to useful services to test your navigation tree. This is a good article that explains a niche topic in detail, including limitations of the methodology with a fair viewpoint.
— Junta
What is brand identity? And how to design and develop a great one
99designs.com
Here is a brief explanation of brand identity and how to develop one. Although there are a lot of basics, I found the color, typography, and form associations a good reminder of what people think when they see these things.
— Anne
Tech
A new gem to build higher-level data structures built on Reddis
A new gem to build higher-level data structures built on Redis
The Basecamp team have extracted another library from Hey.com into the Rails ecosystem. This time it’s to make working with Reddis and your ruby objects easier. As the docs describe it: “Kredis (Keyed Redis) encapsulates higher-level types and data structures around a single key, so you can interact with them as coherent objects rather than isolated procedural commands.”
— Adam A
On death and dying: Ruby on Rails
On Death and Dying: Ruby on Rails
I’m sure anyone who regularly uses Rails is sick unto death of hearing the perennial “So, is Rails dead yet?” With that in mind, this first comment got a chuckle out of me.
— Ian
Why Tailwind isn’t for me
dev.to
An interesting argument against the utility class-based CSS framework Tailwind, authored by the same guy who gave us the webpack-aware static site builder Bridgetown (which is named after the US city of Portland, Oregon, trivia fans). I don’t necessarily agree with him, but he makes a well-reasoned argument. What do you think?
— Ian