Design handoffs are inefficient and painful. They cause frustration, friction and a lot of back and forth. Can we avoid them altogether? Of course we can! Let’s see how to do just that.

Smashing Mag’s Vitaly Friedman puts down some of his recent thoughts on authentication flows:

nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to finally identify crosswalks and fire hydrants that day. Yet every day, we prompt users through hoops and loops to sign up and log in, to set a complex enough password or recover one, to find a way to restore access to locked accounts and logged-out sessions.

Of course security matters, yet too often, it gets in the way of usability. As Jared Spool said once, “If a product isn’t usable, it’s also not secure.” That’s when people start using private email accounts and put passwords on stick-it-notes because they forget them. As usual, Jared hits the nail on the head here. So what can we do to improve the authentication UX?

Vitaly lists seven recommendations. Nothing radical here, but solid advice worth thinking through.

Vitaly Friedman, Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, breaks down the broken state of commercial web conferences saying:

The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. What lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.

…the general expectation is that speakers should speak for free as they’ve been given a unique opportunity to speak and that neither flights nor expenses should be covered for the very same reason.

The details of this post from Vitaly go much deeper than what I’ve shared here. I highly recommend taking 22 minutes to read this.

Vitaly Friedman, Founder of Smashing Magazine, joins Adam to talk about the beginnings of Smashing Magazine, taking chances, not being copyable, experimenting to find what works, supporting the community, developing content, paying writers, developing publishing principles and philosophies and also shares a bit about what’s next on the horizon for him and his team.