From competitive SEO research and monitoring prices to training AI and parsing local geographic data, real-time search results power smarter apps. Tools like SerpApi make it easy to pull, customize, and integrate this data directly into your app or website.

For too long, personas have been created with considerable effort, only to offer limited value. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way.

Elastic and bounce effects have long been among the most desirable but time-consuming techniques in motion design. Expressive Animator streamlines the process, making it possible to produce lively animations in seconds, bypassing the tedious work of manual keyframe editing.

Real-time dashboards are decision assistants, not passive displays. In environments like fleet management, healthcare, and operations, the cost of a delay or misstep is high. Karan Rawal explores strategic UX patterns that shorten time-to-decision, reduce cognitive overload, and make live systems trustworthy.

The idea behind this is to share a full, unfiltered look at integrating CSS Cascade Layers into an existing legacy codebase. In practice, it’s about refactoring existing CSS to use cascade layers without breaking anything.

After covering in detail the underlying interaction paradigms of TV experiences in [Part 1](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/designing-tv-evergreen-pattern-shapes-tv-experiences/), it’s time to get practical. In the second part of the series, you’ll explore the building blocks of the “10-foot experience” and how to best utilise them in your designs.

Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a new collection of desktop wallpapers? We’ve got some eye-catching designs to make your September just a bit more colorful. Enjoy!

Prompting is more than giving AI some instructions. You could think of it as a design act, part creative brief and part conversation design. This second article on AI augmenting design work introduces a designerly approach to prompting: one that blends creative briefing, interaction design, and structural clarity.

TV interface design is a unique, fascinating, and often overlooked field. It’s been guided by decades of evolution and innovation, yet still firmly constrained by its legacy. Follow Milan into the history, quirks, and unshakable rules that dictate how we control these devices.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a great way to make apps built for the web feel native, but in moving away from a browser environment, we can introduce usability issues. This article covers how we can modify our app depending on what display mode is applied to mitigate these issues.

If you are new to using AI in design or curious about integrating AI into your UX process without losing your human touch, this article offers a grounded, day-by-day look at introducing AI into your design workflow.

AI has introduced huge efficiencies for web designers and is frequently being touted as the key to unlocking sustainable design and development. But do these gains outweigh the environmental cost of using energy-hungry AI tools?

AI tools are improving fast, but it’s still not clear how they fit into a real product design workflow. Nikita Samutin walks through four core stages — from analytics and ideation to prototyping and visual design — to show where AI fits and where it doesn’t, illustrated with real-world examples.

Rodolpho Henrique guides you through the essential aspects of color in digital design and user experience, from the practical steps of creating effective and scalable color palettes to critical accessibility considerations.

Your past shapes who you are as a designer, no matter where your career began or how unexpected your career path may have been. Stephanie Campbell shows how those lessons can sharpen your instincts, strengthen collaboration, and help you become a better designer today.

Prompting isn’t just about writing better instructions, but about designing better thinking. Ilia and Marina explore how advanced prompting can empower different product & design use cases, speeding up your workflow and improving results, from research and brainstorming to testing and beyond. Let’s dive in.

Internationalization isn’t just translation. It’s about formatting dates, pluralizing words, sorting names, and more, all according to specific locales. Instead of relying on heavy third-party libraries, modern JavaScript offers the Intl API — a powerful, native way to handle i18n. A quiet reminder that the web truly is worldwide.

Design systems are more than style guides: they’re made up of workflows, tokens, components, and documentation — all the stuff teams rely on to build consistent products. As projects grow, keeping everything in sync gets tricky fast. In this article, we’ll look at how smart tooling, combined with automation where it makes sense, can speed things up, reduce errors, and help your team focus on design over maintenance.

Talking points. Smart questions. A compelling story. This guide helps you prepare for your UX job interview. And remember: no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.

Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of desktop wallpapers might be for you. The wallpapers are designed with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free! Enjoy!

The Core Model is a practical methodology that flips traditional digital development on its head. Instead of starting with solutions or structure, we begin with a hypothesis about what users need and follow a simple framework that brings diverse teams together to create more effective digital experiences. By asking six good questions in the right order, teams align around user tasks and business objectives, creating clarity that transcends organizational boundaries.

Web Components are more than just Custom Elements. Shadow DOM, HTML Templates, and Custom Elements each play a role. In this article, Russell Beswick demonstrates how Shadow DOM fits into the broader picture, explaining why it matters, when to use it, and how to apply it effectively.

Today, roughly 10% of people are left-handed. Yet most products — digital and physical — aren’t designed with it in mind. Let’s change that. More design patterns in Smart Interface Design Patterns, a **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

Event listeners are essential for interactivity in JavaScript, but they can quietly cause memory leaks if not removed properly. And what if your event listener needs parameters? That’s where things get interesting. Amejimaobari Ollornwi shares which JavaScript features make handling parameters with event handlers both possible and well-supported.

Ensuring your product communicates clearly to a global audience is not just about localisation. Even for products that have a proper localisation process, English often remains the default language for UI and communications. This article focuses on how you can make English content clear and inclusive for non-native users. Oleksii offers a practical guide based on his own experience as a non-native English-speaking content designer, defining the user experience for international companies.

Learn why flip phones still matter in 2025, and how you can build and launch web apps for these tiny devices.

Designing a new AI feature? Where do you even begin? Here’s a simple, practical overview with useful design patterns for better AI experiences.

The Wizard of Oz method is a proven UX research tool that simulates real interactions to uncover authentic user behavior. Victor Yocco unpacks the core principles of the WOZ method, explores advanced real-world applications, and highlights its unique value, including its relevance in the emerging field of agentic AI.

Traditional page builders have shaped how we build WordPress sites for years. Let’s take a closer look at [Droip](https://droip.com/), a modern, no-code visual builder, and explore how it redefines the experience with cleaner performance, full design freedom, and zero plugin dependency.

As always in design, timing matters, and so do timely notifications. Let’s explore how we might improve the notifications UX. More design patterns in our Smart Interface Design Patterns, a friendly video course on UX and design patterns by Vitaly — from complex data tables and nested filters to FAQs and error messages.

CSS has evolved from a purely presentational language into one with growing logical powers — thanks to features like container queries, relational pseudo-classes, and the `if()` function. Is it still just for styling, or is it becoming something more? Gabriel Shoyombo explores how smart CSS has become over the years, where it is heading, the challenges it addresses, whether it is becoming too complex, and how developers are reacting to this shift.

Bridging the gap between user research insights and actual organizational action — with a clear roadmap for impact.

July is just around the corner, and that means it’s time for a new collection of desktop wallpapers. Created with love by artists and designers from across the globe, they are bound to bring some good vibes to your screen. Enjoy!

As online scams become more sophisticated, Carrie Webster explores whether good UX can serve as a frontline defense, particularly for non-tech-savvy older users navigating today’s digital world.

On her quest to teach you how to code vectors by hand, Myriam Frisano’s second installment of a `path` deep dive explores the most complex aspects of SVG’s most powerful element. She’ll help you understand the underlying rules and function of how curves and arcs are constructed. By the end of it, your toolkit is ready to tackle all types of tasks required to draw with code — even if some of the lines twist and turn.

Meet “Accessible UX Research,” our upcoming book to make your UX research inclusive. Learn how to recruit, plan, and design with disabled participants in mind. Print edition shipping Fall 2025. eBook also available for download in Fall 2025. Pre-order the book.

CSS can be unpredictable — and specificity is often the culprit. Victor Ayomipo breaks down how and why your styles might not behave as expected, and why understanding specificity is better than relying on `!important`.

[Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)](https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/aria/) is an inevitability when working on web accessibility. That said, it’s everyone’s first time learning about ARIA at some point.

In this tutorial, Blake Lundquist walks us through two methods of creating the “moving-highlight” navigation pattern using only plain JavaScript and CSS. The first technique uses the `getBoundingClientRect` method to explicitly animate the border between navigation bar items when they are clicked. The second approach achieves the same functionality using the new View Transition API.

SVG is easy — until you meet `path`. However, it’s not as confusing as it initially looks. In this first installment of a pair of articles, Myriam Frisano aims to teach you the basics of `` and its sometimes mystifying commands. With simple examples and visualizations, she’ll help you understand the easy syntax and underlying rules of SVG’s most powerful element so that by the end, you’re fully able to translate SVG semantic tags into a language `path` understands.