Explainable AI isn’t just a challenge for data scientists. It’s also a design challenge and a core pillar of trustworthy, effective AI products. Victor Yocco offers practical guidance and design patterns for building explainability into real products. In my last piece, we established a foundational truth: for users to adopt and rely on AI, they…
CSS Masonry is almost here! Patrick Brosset takes a deep dive into what this long-awaited feature means for web developers and how you could make use of it in your own work. About 15 years ago, I was working at a company where we built apps for travel agents, airport workers, and airline companies. We…
With December just around the corner, how about some new desktop wallpapers to welcome the last month of the year — and the holiday season, if you’re celebrating? Our latest edition of monthly wallpapers has got you covered. Enjoy! As the year winds down, many of us are busy wrapping up projects, meeting deadlines, or…
CAPTCHAs were meant to keep bots out, but too often, they lock people with disabilities out, too. From image classification to click-based tests, many “human checks” are anything but inclusive. There’s no universal solution, but understanding real user needs is where accessibility truly starts. The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans…
We’re so happy to announce that “Maturing Design Systems”—a Smashing book by Ben Callahan — will soon be joining the Smashing Library! Ben’s insights and advice are so powerful, we thought you might like to read an excerpt from the book. Subscribe to our Smashing newsletter to be notified when orders are open. Design systems…
Practical guidelines on designing time-critical products that prevent errors and improve accuracy. Part of the Measure UX & Design Impact (use the code 🎟 IMPACT to save 20% off today). With a live UX training starting next week. No design exists in isolation. As designers, we often imagine specific situations in which people will use…
Animations can be one of the most joyful parts of building interfaces, but without structure, they can also become one of the biggest sources of frustration. By consolidating and standardizing keyframes, you take something that is usually messy and hard to manage and turn it into a clear, predictable system. Picture this: you join a…
Server chaos doesn’t have to be the norm. AI-ready infrastructure and automation can bring clarity, performance, and focus back to your web work. If you build or manage websites for a living, you know the feeling. Your day is a constant juggle; one moment you’re fine-tuning a design, the next you’re troubleshooting a slow server…
Debugging controllers can be a real pain. Here’s a deep dive into how CSS helps clean it up and how to build a reusable visual debugger for your own projects. When you plug in a controller, you mash buttons, move the sticks, pull the triggers… and as a developer, you see none of it. The…
There are many existing web features and technologies in the wild that you may never touch directly in your day-to-day work. Perhaps you’re fairly new to web development and are simply unaware of them because you’re steeped in the abstraction of a specific framework that doesn’t require you to know it deeply, or even at…