Bluehost has the worst customer service of any company I’ve worked with.
August 23, 2018
by Arthur Khachatryan
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January 11, 2017
by Arthur Khachatryan
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How UX Red Routes Help You Prioritize
Your team has broken down a project into manageable stories and is trying to identify the priorities of the various tasks that will pave the way for the efficient completion of a project. Product owners prioritize the tasks based on the features that the business finds to be critical to the bottom line. Tech may have a different take on those priorities that may be from the perspective of technical dependencies. Hopefully, there is a big overlap between how various teams see the prioritization of the work. But how does one really make sense of the priorities for iterating to the end goal of the project effectively? How about we look at this from the what the user may expect? Continue Reading →
June 24, 2016
by Arthur Khachatryan
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Balancing the User Interaction and Technical Cost
As a front-end developer, I always look to push the boundaries. I think good developers do this without giving it much thought. However, as much as we’d love to optimize the technical performance of sites and applications, we still have to come to terms with the limitations of frameworks, hardware, and networks. I’ll spare the details of what inspired this particular topic. Suffice it to say, it agitated me enough to the point of addressing it. The issue has to do with UX flows in which technical concerns are not considered, and subsequently, never discussed. In general, when the various disciplines that work together (UX, DB, back-end, front-end) to build web interfaces confine themselves inside their own silos, it is almost certain the end result is going to be a sub-optimal product. If this sounds a bit too obvious, I’m glad. It should. Continue Reading →
January 27, 2016
by Arthur Khachatryan
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Pascal’s Triangle in JavaScript
Recently I came across a JavaScript challenge on the internet. The challenge was to generate Pascal’s Triangle using JavaScript. If you don’t know what Pascal’s Triangle is, in short, it is a mathematical concept of a triangular array of the binomial coefficients (not original to Pascal). For more details see this on Wikipedia. I decided to give it a whirl. The first challenge was conceptualizing and creating a triangular array. Since arrays are typically rectangular, this took some mental maneuvers. Upon some reflection, I realized that there was no way to recreate the triangle. What was needed was some way to make everything except the actual triangle fade to white, in other words, to ‘null’ away. Continue Reading →
December 1, 2015
by Arthur Khachatryan
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FlowQuest JS Smart Questionnaire Library
Have you ever seen flowcharts or infographics that have multiple choice questions on them with each answer leading to other subsequent questions? I’ve always found them interesting myself, but it always felt a bit too passive, and often when there were lots of questions on the screen all at once, it felt difficult to follow the lines to other questions. How would one solve those issues? Well, what if that experience was interactive? These were some of the questions I pondered before deciding to write a library that would improve on the experience. The result turned out to be a JavaScript library I called FlowQuest JS (combining aspects of flowcharts and questionnaires).
FlowQuest is meant to replace the dull static presentation of flowcharts and questionnaires. FlowQuest is interactive so users participate in more ways than just looking at a screen and tracing lines to subsequent questions. Users click on their choice and the system then presents with their subsequent question. This allows the user to clearly make his way through the questionnaire without having to trace lines or be flooded with all the questions visibly available on the screen all at once. Continue Reading →
September 14, 2015
by Arthur Khachatryan
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Passenger JS – Password Creation Made Easy
During one of my daily readings I stumbled across a usability study that highlighted the difficulty users had with so many websites – the issue being how difficult it was to create passwords that fit the parameters of whatever the website or web application had established for itself. Ever come across a registration page and tried to use a password only to have a full page post-back and a terse message telling you that you FAILED with only a single reason for your utter incompetence for creating a password?! You missed a symbol, you must use a symbol! Try again. Now you missed an upper case character, nice try, try again! My favorite is when you get a failure notice, and no reason why your password has not met the lofty standards of the registration page. Well, let’s try to put a stop to that. There has to be a better way. How about we get a list of password requirements ahead of time and show them to the user so he knows how to form his passwords? Check! How about we also give the user direct immediate feedback when each specific rule has been fulfilled? Nice! Continue Reading →
SEO and Good Unique Content
September 12, 2015 by Arthur Khachatryan | 0 comments
I recently came across a really good whiteboard presentation by Rand Fishkin. The presentation is ironically called, “Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die.” The main point that Rand makes here is not that good unique content actually needs to die, just the concept and the presumption that all a website needs to rank high in search engines is good unique content. Continue Reading →
August 19, 2015
by Arthur Khachatryan
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JavaScript Code Style and JSDoc Linting
What is this JavaScript linting thing? Those who do not know exactly what JavaScript (JS) linting is, keep reading. Those of you who do, you may skip down to where applicable. JS linting is a process by which your JS file(s) are checked for all sorts of things, from outright errors and warnings, to far less explicitly problematic things, such as code styling and ensuring proper documentation. The latter will be the main focus of this article – we are going to look at JS Code Style linting, but first let’s quickly look at why one would need to do that.
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May 13, 2014
by Arthur Khachatryan
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Of late there has been a lot of movement on the responsive image specification. Largely due to the work of the W3C Responsive Images Community Group, various browser vendors are now beginning to implement the new <picture> element specifications. with Microsoft considering <picture> element for IE as well.
It’s now possible to use the <picture> element with a full future-proof implementation. As of now (5/12/2014) native <picture> element implementations in development for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Picturefill is the best option…
PSA: `picture` falls back to its inner `img` in unsupported browsers. No need to “wait” and use `img` until support is broader—it’s handled.
— Mat Marquis (@wilto) May 12, 2014
To try out the new element, do the following:
- Download Chrome Canary
- Go to
chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform- features - Click “Enable”