Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
14 results shown.
Ranked Choice Voting: The Mobile Challenge
November 19, 2024While working on VoteHub, a mobile absentee ballot solution for U.S. elections, I was tasked with designing and prototyping an interface for a relatively new election contest type, rapidly gaining attention and adoption, called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).When and Why to Use Micro Frontend Architecture
November 12, 2024As businesses grow and their technical stacks evolve, micro frontends have emerged as a practical architectural strategy for managing complexity and improving scalability. Deciding when and why to adopt micro frontends isn't just an engineering conversation; it’s one that should involve product and business stakeholders as well. Is it the right choice for your organization? What benefits, risks, and tradeoffs should you weigh before committing?Serverless Event-Driven APIs with AWS Kinesis
October 24, 2024Everything that happens in an application or a software system is triggered by something. Whether it’s a user action, a sensor output, a periodic trigger, an event loop, an API call, or something else entirely — our software is governed by events. Sometimes those events are implicit, like a server that handles an HTTP request and updates a database row without ever explicitly defining it as an “entity updated” event or recording the details.Generics in Go and Effective Abstraction
October 16, 2024In the quest for better performance and easier concurrency, many backend server engineering teams are turning to Go to power their APIs and build tools. According to the Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey, Go is the 12th most popular language used extensively by professional developers — behind the heavy-hitters like JavaScript and Python, slightly ahead of Rust, and well ahead of languages like Ruby, Scala, or Elixir.Config 2024
September 5, 2024Four of our designers and design engineers had the opportunity to attend Config 2024 — here are a few of the things we took away from the experience, and more importantly the talks we’d recommend watching because we’re still thinking about them!Rust vs Go: Which Is Right For My Team?
August 29, 2024In recent years, the shift away from dynamic, high-level programming languages back towards statically typed languages with low-level operating system access has been gaining momentum as engineers seek to more effectively solve problems with scaling and reliability. Demands on our infrastructure and devices are increasing every day and downtime seems to lurk around every corner.Timing and Talking: Lessons from Working with Screen Readers
August 15, 2024Often as digital product designers we consider our job to be entirely tied to the visual medium, and spend most of our time gauging the proportions of elements on the screen, what kinds of tactile actions a user can or should be able to perform, and how best to optimize our product’s intended function, look and feel.Keep It Simple: Language as a Tool for Designers and Users
August 8, 2024Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how the presentation of accessibility settings to users is as important as having them in the first place. Here, we’ll talk about the importance of simple language for designers and users both.Please Don’t Make Me Guess: A Design System Guide for Designers and Developers
August 6, 2024Vague feedback often adds a lot of frustration to the software creation process. By reducing the number of these blind spots, we could collectively stop thinking, “please don’t make me guess”.Settings and Trust: Accessible Settings Design
August 1, 2024Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how we created a custom component library for a new mobile voting app named VoteHub. Here, we’ll talk a bit about the importance of trusting one’s users, and how our team created and iterated on the design for VoteHub’s accessibility settings interface.New Standards For A New Paradigm: Resolving Conflicts in Accessible Practices
July 23, 2024Voting has a robust set of best practices that do not all translate cleanly to a mobile interface. Our team resolved these conflicts with care and worked these best practices into the foundations of the VoteHub mobile voting app by way of a custom component library.Empowering Users: Developing Accessible Mobile Apps using React Native
July 2, 2024Robust technical accessibility strategies and best practices we implemented for a mobile voting application using React Native.What to Watch Out for When Improving an Existing Sanity Instance
June 27, 2024At Nearform, we understand that software development does not end at the initial launch. Requirements change and the team’s initial assumptions are tested. Enhancing a system in production demands a nuanced approach to implementation that is distinct from an initial build.Tailored Touches: Elevating Mobile User Engagement
June 26, 2024In today's digital landscape, personalization is not just a luxury but an expectation. Mobile apps that deliver tailored experiences see significantly higher engagement and conversion rates. Recent studies indicate that 76% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations, while 60% of consumers say they’ll become repeat customers after a personalized shopping experience (Exploding Topics)
