In this week’s roundup of web design and development resources, you’ll find out how Apple Music onboards users, learn about the new Accessible UX site, discover nine ways to create shapes with CSS, and more.
If you’re new to the blog, each Friday I publish a post with my favorite resources for user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, and HTML I’ve read in the past week.
If you’d like to learn about resources like these on a daily basis, follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
This week’s photo is the gazebo overlooking Belleville Lake, where I enjoyed a concert last night on a beautiful summer evening before our Fourth of July weekend celebrations.
Tweet of the Week
We used to have to work on managing our time, now we need to manage our attention.#ISTE2015
— Matt Lee (@leematt06) June 30, 2015
User Experience
- How Apple Music Onboards New Users: Music fans were thrilled when Apple Music was released this week, but the onboarding process has a few confusing steps, as Samuel Hulick from User Onboarding discovered.
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Failing isn't what's important.
Learning is what's important.
Failure just provides the stimuli for learning.
— Jared Spool (@jmspool) July 2, 2015
- Should Designers Learn to code?: Whether designers should learn to code or not has been an ongoing discussion topic for years. It depends, right? Hear what some user experience designers think about it.
- So You Want To Be a User Experience Professional?: My post compiling all the recommendations from the Ladies that UX Detroit and Detroit User Experience members for a fellow member looking to become a user experience designer.
- Making Companies Competitive By Expanding Design’s Role: To gain a competitive advantage, companies are looking beyond providing delightful experiences for their customers. They’re looking at how design affects the people who interact with your service or product.
Accessibility
- Accessible UX: Launched today, the Accessible UX site will support people and organizations committed to the Manifesto for Accessible UX. Additionally, it will offer resources, case studies and other material to learn about accessible ux.
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#ProTip: For those new to Web accessibility, dates on posts matter … Always check. Times, best practices, and technology change!
— Jennifer Sutton (@jsutt) July 2, 2015
- DOJ shifts position on web access: stating in court filings that public accommodations have a “pre-existing” obligation to make websites accessible: What a difference five years makes. The U.S. Department of Justice shifts their position on web accessibility.
- Why Apple’s next operating systems are already making users sick: Craig Grannell argues that Apple must take the lead to give users more control in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan.
WordPress
- 4th of July Independence Day Deals: If you’re looking for deals on themes, plugins, or hosting, check out this roundup from WP Lift.
- WordPress 4.3 Beta 1: Help test the next version of WordPress, download the 4.3 beta version. As with all beta version, use it on a test site, not a production site.
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Listening to Q&A with @photomatt – so happy to see so many people here for WordPress #wceu #wceu2015 pic.twitter.com/OccRiMZJR8
— Pragmatic (@pragmaticweb) June 26, 2015
- WordPress 4.3 Adds New Site Icons Feature and a Text Editor to Press This: In the upcoming 4.3 release, administrators can create a favicon within WordPress. User will also see additional text editor functionality in Press This.
Responsive Design
- Baseline: Jeremy Keith likes to think of progressive enhancement as a baseline,
…to cover the use cases we can’t predict.
- Why Availability: You’ve heard that 1% of visits to your site don’t get the full site? Well, not really. Read the rest of the story.
Almost all the people who don’t get your site correctly actually should have been able to.
- Thriving in Unpredictability: Delivering a website to a visitor is dependent on many actions between the network, device, browser, context, and visitors-actions you have no control over. What can you control?
CSS and HTML
- Working with Shapes in Web Design: I was familiar with several of the nine methods to create shapes with CSS, but I had no idea you could create a shape with
box-shadow. - W3C Mobile Checker: The W3C Mobile Checker is an online tool that emulates what your web app looks like on different mobile devices.
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TIL: <iframe> tags are treated as inline-blocks by some browsers.
— Chris (@tenzochris) July 1, 2015
- Op-ed: Safari is the new Internet Explorer: Developers have complained about Internet Explorer for years, but Nolan Lawson argues that Safari is now the browser lagging with its web strategy.
What I Found Interesting
- 4 Tips for Prototyping with Adobe Photoshop Artboards: Are you using the new Artboards in Photoshop CC 2016? These tips will help you speed up your design process.
- 6 More of The Best Free Stock Photo Websites We Could Find: I think Design Instruct is on a quest to find the best free stock photos on the web. Here’s six more, none of which I’ve heard before.
- Google Translate Keeps Getting Better: Did you know over 100 billion words a day are translated by Google Translate? And thanks to users, you’ll find the latest update of Google Translate is much better at translating informal speech.
