Keeping up with new innovations in the wide and wonderful world of web can be a pretty gargantuan task, but fortunately there are lots of great resources out there to help. We continually strive to stay abreast of new ideas and information to help us make evidence-based decisions about our work. It can sometimes be a difficult task to convince people that the way something has always been done is not necessarily the best way, and being able to point to research suggesting why certain methods, layouts and types of content may work better than others is vitally important.
This means reading; lots and lots of reading. Sifting through articles, blogs and websites, and using them to help develop and enhance our work. Twitter and Medium have both become invaluable in helping to find useful articles to keep us up to date with new ideas.
There are numerous Twitter accounts which collate recent UX articles and retweet links (eg @UXfeeder, @uxlinks, @UXforGood, @SmashingUXD) and browsing through these can provide a spark of inspiration, give us the evidence to support a specific way of doing things, or introduce us to some interesting and challenging new ideas.
Medium can send a daily digest email, with links to recent articles tagged with the categories you have chosen, written by people you follow, and other similar writers. You can then decide whether to read more articles in the same category and follow people who have written something of interest. There are so many people writing about their experiences, their work, and their research that there's always something new and interesting to discover.
Some of the websites and forums we find useful include:
- https://www.nngroup.com/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/userexperience/
- Stackoverflow/Stackexchange subdomains e.g. http://ux.stackexchange.com/ ,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/UI_Design/
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/
- http://tympanus.net/codrops/
- http://codepen.io/
- http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
- http://tympanus.net/codrops/
- http://www.creativebloq.com/
Web design is a fast moving world, with new technologies and new techniques constantly evolving – how do you keep up with current ideas about best practice? If you have any ideas, blogs or sites that help you, we’d love to hear about them!