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A researcher said that millions of records were leaking 300,000 Tap30 drivers' names, ID numbers and phone numbers. View the full article

You're reading Emojis in Email Newsletters: What You Need to Know, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! Emojis have a long history. It began in the 1980s when Scott Fahlman, leader of Common Lisp, introduced to the world the first emoticons. We know them as happy and sad face. There was nothing fancy: just a combination of colon … View the full article

The flaw, which existed in a Shopify API endpoint, has been patched. View the full article

The U.S-focused eGobbler malvertising attacks are exploiting an unpatched Google Chrome bug. View the full article

The flaw could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access the devices, Cisco said. View the full article

The ubiquitous nature of the flaw opens the door for rapidly spreading, crippling cyberattacks. View the full article

Overall Oracle patched 297 flaws across multiple product as part of its April security update. View the full article

Patched just last week, the Windows kernel bug is being used for full system takeover. View the full article

You're reading 10 Top WordPress Plugins You Can Use to Improve Your Websites, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! WordPress plugins are very important. They are to your website designs what cheese, sour cream, and bacon bits are to a baked potato. They can turn the so-so into the extraordinary. They can produce features for your website that might … View the full article

Business users of Cisco, F5 Networks, Palo Alto Networks and Pulse Secure platforms are impacted, according the U.S. government. View the full article

Yet another Wordpress plugin, Yellow Pencil Visual Theme Customizer, is being exploited in the wild after two software vulnerabilities were discovered. View the full article

A vulnerability in the Yuzo Related Posts WordPress plugin, used by 60,000 websites, is being exploited in the wild. View the full article

Overall Intel patched four vulnerabilities, including high-severity flaws in its Media SDK and Intel NUC mini PC. View the full article

You're reading Static Pages – Upload Static HTML Pages to WordPress, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! Static Pages allows you to publish any static page on a WordPress website with any URL in a matter of seconds. And it is perfect for SEO. Do you want to improve sales by adding a beautiful landing page for … View the full article

During its regularly scheduled April security update, Adobe overall issued 43 patches, including ones for 24 critical vulnerabilities in eight of its products. View the full article

A high-severity flaw in the Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway, used in millions of U.S. homes, could allow for command injection. View the full article

You're reading Free File Uploader Scripts for Websites, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! Do you know that each second almost 1,000 photos are uploaded to Instagram? It means that when you finish reading this article, Instagram will become richer by nearly 200,000 pictures. And that is just one platform. With this passion for … View the full article

Consumer router models allowed authenticated users to take unrestricted remote control over TL-WR940N and TL-WR941ND routers. View the full article

Cisco repatched its RV320 and RV325 routers against two high-severity vulnerabilities, but at the same time reported two new medium-severity bugs with no fixes. View the full article

Three waves of DNS hijacking attacks against consumer routers have been linked back to Google Cloud Platform abuse. View the full article

No. 4 global phone maker, Xiaomi, preinstalled a security app called ‘Guard Provider’ that had a major flaw. View the full article

Have your business try Cynet's Free Threat Assessment that checks for malware, C&C connections, data exfiltration, phishing link access, user credential thefts attempts, etc. View the full article

You're reading How to Create a Good Transactional Email that Converts, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook! There are two general types of email newsletters: promotional and transactional. While the first is widely used by email marketers to draw attention to websites and goods, the second is considered to be a technical asset. While the first is … View the full article

What exactly is a user flow? Visually, it's a bit like a dance mat. Right foot here. Left foot over there. Now bring them together, turn and repeat. Without knowing how to dance, you're still able to stand on this mat and move along with your feet stepping in the right places in the right order. A user flow is just that. A loose but coordinated dance with your website. It's important that you know where a user will step and in what order for that dance to go well. Working through the expectations of users and crafting an overall positive user experience can be a complicated mixture of data points, use cases, wireframes and prototypes to connect the dots before the project is fully built out. With so many moving parts, it's easy to get tripped up or have a stakeholder misunderstand the vision. The 20 best wireframe tools Unlike a design showcasing what a user will interact with after development, the role of a user flow is to set the ground rules for what the subsequent wireframes and designs will represent. It's the strategy document to design how the user flows from point to point. What you need for a user flow Apply user flows to work out how navigation will work in apps, as well as websites Whether you work for an agency or directly with a client as a freelancer, you're probably no stranger to the confusion that comes with sharing early designs with a client. In your head, you understand the intricacies of how each block of content fits into the overall experience and it's glorious. Then you show someone else or, even worse, the client and they don't get it. They get hung up on the wrong details, often because they don't have the full vision in front of them yet. Which is where strategy documents that outline purpose – like a user flow – come in handy to keep things moving forward. To do that, you'll need the following: Business goals Why do you want someone to visit your website? You can typically get these from your point of contact with a brief conversation. Are they launching a new service, product or trying to generate traffic for a specific area of the site? The more granular you can get the better. Goals lead to accountability from all sides and will benefit the users. User goals Why is someone actually visiting your website? Be hesitant to take these directly from the client unless they have done user testing or some kind of data-driven research to support it. Otherwise you'll end up with the same business goals with a different twist. Entry points and user types Based on the data, where are users landing right now? Do users typically land on a blog post? On a portfolio piece or a featured product? More importantly, how are they getting there? If organic traffic is driving mostly to the blog, those users may flow between secondary or tertiary pages differently than someone coming in from a referring website, social media or an email campaign. You may need to map them out differently to properly showcase the flow. Yellow Brick Roads (YBRs) What is the ideal path for users to travel between pages to meet both the business and user goals? To get them from the entry point to the results-driven destination? As users flow in non-linear ways, what are the edge cases that users may flow into? For example, if your YBR is a blog post landing page that clicks through to a service page and then the contact page, where might some users get lost? Do some users end up on the about page? Where do they go from there? Map out those edge cases and how they branch off from your ideal scenarios. A lo-fi wireframe is useful for getting a rough idea of how a page works You can extract the last two points with Google Analytics and the User Explorer feature for individual user flow paths or the Users Flow section to see a 10,000 foot view of trending paths for all users on the site. Both are worth getting familiar with (see our top tools in Google Analytics post). Think of the dance mat. Where do users place their feet first (landing page)? Where does each foot go next (page two, three, four, etc)? Show that in a flow chart for each user type or goal. There are plenty of plugins, frameworks or software solutions that can be used to create diagrams; let's look at what the deliverable should be in a user flow. Easily shared and printed. This may seem like a no-brainer but you'd be surprised how often people bring printouts for diagrams that are unreadable. If there are too many steps or too much text to fit clearly on an 8.5 x 11-inch printout, you're overcomplicating things. Bridge the communication gap between clients, stakeholders, designers and developers. Flows show how a user will navigate and interact with the site jumping between pages. This is important to give a framework for everyone to unify their understanding moving forward. Showcase the path(s) toward each priority business and customer goal, common entry point pathways and a streamlined YBR pathway that offers up missed opportunities for key content. For clarity, this does not happen in a single flow. This will be multiple stand-alone flows. With buy-in from stakeholders, you can take these user flow documents and use them to inform the designers creating wireframes to ensure they follow the core user experience strategies. They can be treated like a check list to validate the project is meeting the goals at each step. Learn more about UX and more at generate New York 2019. Click the image to book your ticket Expand user flows into wireframes Map out edge cases and consider how they branch off from your ideal scenarios Most of us have experience with wireframes in some form. Wireframes are used to represent the strategy behind a website layout. Sometimes they will be handed off to developers to begin building the bones of the infrastructure. They're the blueprint to the home. They help stakeholders understand the 'why' of the strategy without getting roped into details like fonts, colours or content. Many times someone responsible for the user experience or design of a project will jump directly into the wireframe because they construct their own mental model of a user flow. The problem with that is they run the risk of internalising strategy, applying unforeseen bias, repurposing old ideas and may become a bottleneck between the design and the communication of the design. Clear communication is paramount. User flows will help mitigate those risks because they pass down structured communication. It adds a layer of checkpoints. There are various levels of visual fidelities when it comes to wireframing. Some prefer low-fidelity templated wireframes they can drop into place to represent the general information architecture of a given page. Others prefer high-fidelity wireframes that are very much designs but without the proper font, copy, colours and imagery in place. It's important to know your audience and what to use when. Realistically, if you are working from user flows you should move into a higher-fidelity wireframe that then grows into a prototype more easily. It's a good idea to start on paper, whiteboard or some tablet sketching tool It's a good idea to start on paper, whiteboard or some tablet sketching tool. This enables you to focus on the quick ideation of potential solutions to problem areas and keeping the user on the ideal pathway. To get started, you will need a list of each page to design and build into the website: home, about, service listing, etc. That acts as your checklist to ensure you don't miss anything. Start with rough sketches for each of those based on the goals you've uncovered previously. Where does the navigation go? How are you going to convey the business goals on the home page? Are you following a 12-column grid for speed of understanding the structure with a certain demographic or is it a more progressive interactive site that can exude a bit more expressive freedom? This is where you determine the best way to achieve the goals and build on top of a strong base. User flow documents can inform the creation of wireframes , as in this example for Sullair Once those rough sketches are complete, select one of your user flows. For example, if the ideal pathway is a blog post landing page that the user clicks through to a service page and then the contact page, test that out with your wireframes. Look at your blog post landing page: how would a user find the service page based on your structure? Is it clear? Is it truly a priority on that page's layout or is it just another link tucked away on the sidebar, footer or navigation? The user flow becomes an auditor to your work, the unbiased fact checker to your wireframes. Even better, when you can show a client you've connected all of the dots they deemed a priority, they become very satisfied with the work at each step. It reminds them of why they hired you to do this in the first place. It's a relief and they will likely begin to settle into your full process. If you don't show you've provided a solution for those goals or a way to alleviate the existing pain points, each phase of your project will rely heavily on trust. Even with the best of us, that can only take you so far until comments like 'why didn't we catch that?' sneak into your conversations. The later those pop up, the more expensive they are to fix. The more often they pop up, the more that trust erodes. That's why following a process like this and supporting decisions with data and focus is so crucial. Interactive prototypes Showcase the path(s) toward each priority business and customer goal Now you've validated the wireframe implementation with user flows, it's time to turn them into interactive prototypes. These are basically clickable static image files that enable you to jump to another image file to give the impression of navigating a website. Not only are these great for clients to experience, it's also very important to ensure your developers and designers are on the same page. That great layout idea may actually add 100 hours of development time and be out of scope. This kick-starts those conversations before time is wasted. You or your design team may have a very clear vision for what this set of wireframes will evolve into in the weeks ahead. Maybe you're even taking the wireframes into a full design and prototyping that. That's not uncommon. But one problem persists. Those subtle hover states and microinteractions that support an intuitive user experience are hidden away inside of someone's mind. A stakeholder doesn't see that vision yet but prototypes can help. Much like wireframing, prototypes can come in various fidelities. At Candorem we have used InVision for years because of the simplicity of creating sharable prototypes that focus on the user pathways between pages and key interactions or overlays. Drop in existing images and draw hot spots over links. Creating low-fidelity interactions then enables you to share a prototype within an hour, depending on complexity. Bring out the hi-fidelity wireframes when you want to drill down into content in detail Others may suggest using Adobe XD, which is far more robust in showcasing interactive elements of a design beyond page transitions. It's like if you combined Adobe's Creative Suite (get Adobe Creative Cloud here) with InVision as a single product. You could create your wireframes, full design concepts and prototypes in one fell swoop if you're organised enough. The important part is connecting the pages to craft an experience someone can click through and understand the vision. It's important to set expectations Again, know your audience. Even with basic click-throughs in InVision, some clients confuse it with a built-out website. It's important to set expectations. Communicate exactly what it is you're showing a client with the prototype and, more importantly, what kind of feedback you are looking for at this stage. Are you looking for feedback on flow between those key pages in the user flow? Are you looking for feedback on the page transition animations in the prototype? The content that fits into the spaces and where it will come from? Communicate that. It will help you grow as a professional very quickly and the quality of your work will increase exponentially. You can judge the success of this process by beginning the prototype review on a key landing page like the blog from earlier. Ask someone in the review from the stakeholder team to click through to a specific page on the prototype and see what paths they take. Even in edge cases where the user travels down another path, as users travel in non-linear fashion, they should be able to locate the key pages that reflect a business goal. Your work must be accountable to that. Your ability to showcase the critical thinking and implementation behind key decisions, as well as how you or your team have adapted your goals into an intuitive experience, is crucial. That's what enables you to reframe perspectives, move away from short-term trends and obtain support from the otherwise loudest people in the room. Strategy at every step. This article was originally published in issue 315 of net, the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Buy issue 315 here or subscribe here. Related articles: 10 rules for making user-friendly web forms Performance UX: A primer 10 steps to an engaging user experience View the full article

For readers of a certain age, the game Snake will bring back hazy memories of squinting at the screen of a Nokia 3210 as you furiously try to beat your best mate's high score. To give people the chance to relive the classic game, Google has added a version of Snake to Google Maps today as an April Fool's Day treat. Rolling out worldwide today across Android and iOS, Snake on Google Maps sees players control buses and trains instead of a slithering serpent. The aim of the game is still the same though: players have to gobble up objects, in this case tourists and famous landmarks, while making sure they don't overlap themselves or run off the map. After a few goes, you'll realise (or remember) that this isn't as easy as it sounds. Players get to choose from a variety of locations from Google Maps, including Cairo, London, San Francisco, São Paulo, Sydney and Tokyo. Each map and its associated landmarks are picked out in colourful pixel art, ensuring that this version of Snake brings out all of your '90s nostalgia. According to Google Maps product manager Omar Abdelaziz, Snake on Google Maps will be available in the app for "about a week". However, if you just can't get enough of the game, you'll be pleased to hear that it has a standalone site, so you will be able to keep playing "long after April Fools is over." As far as pranks go, Google is playing it very safe this year. That's if you can even call Snakes on Google Maps a prank. However, given that your social media feeds have probably been inundated with joke stories this morning, we appreciate that the search engine giant is saving you a bit of hassle by being upfront with its mild tomfoolery. Another reason that Google is treading carefully around April Fool's Day could be related to a 2016 prank that backfired. That year Google launched the 'Mic Drop', a feature which temporarily replaced the 'Send and Archive' button. By clicking 'Mic Drop', users sent everyone in the conversation a GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone, as well as stopping further replies from appearing in your inbox. The Mic Drop prank caused headaches for companies, with at least one freelancer losing work as a result of it burying their replies. Hilarious. In response to the fallout, Google issued an apology and deactivated the feature, so we can't really blame it for not taking a risk this April Fool's Day. Related articles: Google's new gaming logo is cleverly off-brand The Period Game is Dream Phone with ovaries 5 ads that tried to be cool, but failed View the full article