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7 tips to make video learning more effective

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time5 min
Views6.5K

While video-based learning continues to rank high in the latest trends, there are a few points that are regularly overlooked in the production of learning videos, with a focus on user experience (UX) and user interaction 

People really enjoy watching videos. According to a survey conducted among consumers worldwide, respondents watched an average of 19 hours of online video content per week in 2022. And nearly half of all internet users watch online videos at least once a week.

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Total votes 27: ↑27 and ↓0+27
Comments0

Designing for Success: Crafting Effective Learning Experiences

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time7 min
Views6.2K

The Challenge of Mandatory Learning
Once we had several mandatory learning courses designed to be passed successfully by all employees. Still, many of them struggled to do so. Reminder emails to all participants could not solve the issue. And that is when my team was summoned to develop a thorough plan to reduce the number of overdue courses to a minimum. Of course, we were asked to develop something fun and engaging.

Uncovering the Root Problems
While working on the project, we managed to uncover several problems with course assignments, including the fact that they were not offered just in time, there were too many of them, and all of them had different due dates, which made it impossible to remember when to complete them. Additionally, we found that the content itself was often dry and unengaging, further contributing to the lack of motivation among employees. Finally, we came up with a system of notifications that included clear explanatory reminder emails, an escalation system, and a redesign of the course content to make it more interactive and relevant to employees' daily work. The result was almost no overdue courses after system integration.

The Myth of Mandatory Fun
So the case first seemed to be about motivation and engagement, but it is actually about smart course design that allows people to worry about work tasks instead of worrying about course assignments. It's also about creating content that resonates with the learners and helps them see the value in the training.

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Total votes 27: ↑27 and ↓0+27
Comments0

Levelord, an Ordinary Moscow Resident: Interview with the Creator of Duke Nukem

Reading time20 min
Views6.1K
RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.

Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.

These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.


→ Text and video in Russian
Total votes 31: ↑30 and ↓1+29
Comments11

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script — Part #1

Reading time10 min
Views2.2K


TL;DR


Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens, and also AB testing of the assets via naming convention. Easy peasy :)


Well, actually it’s not that easy, but it can certainly be done. This post is a detailed explanation of how we did it, and what we discovered along the way.

The problem we were trying to solve


At Badoo we build a dating app. Actually, multiple dating apps. For multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Mobile Web, Desktop Web), across multiple teams.

We use hundreds of icons in our apps. Some of them are the same across different apps, some are very specific to the brands the apps reflect. The icons are continuously evolving, in sync with the evolution of the design. Sometimes completely new icons are added, while others get updated, and still others get dropped (although, they often remain in the codebase).
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Total votes 30: ↑29 and ↓1+28
Comments0

The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon

Reading time5 min
Views1.2K



The 7.0 release marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer — the analysis is now available not only for the code, written in C, C++, C#, but also in Java. In addition to this global improvement, some existing mechanisms for the analysis are refined and improved, diagnostic rules are added. There was another significant change that you could hardly missed. We changed the icon.

Note. In the article, you will not find cunning tricks or tips on designing icons. The purpose of the article is a bit different this time — it is to tell a story, and, if possible, make it interesting.
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Total votes 35: ↑33 and ↓2+31
Comments0

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales

Reading time10 min
Views4.3K


A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.
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Total votes 28: ↑27 and ↓1+26
Comments1

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Reading time5 min
Views2.7K


Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview


By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:
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Total votes 33: ↑32 and ↓1+31
Comments1

Manifest of Smart Home Developer: 15 principles

Reading time12 min
Views4.1K
Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.

image



Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:
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Total votes 29: ↑27 and ↓2+25
Comments1

A small notebook for a system administrator

Reading time21 min
Views161K
I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

Figure to attract attention
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Total votes 91: ↑88 and ↓3+85
Comments57