In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll discover user research techniques for testing user interface content, learn about the virtual WordCamp Europe 2020 event, discover how to design for cognitive accessibility, and more.
If you’re new to my blog, each Friday I publish a post highlighting my favorite user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, and HTML posts I’ve read in the past week.
Hope you find the resources helpful in your work or projects!
Want more resources like these on a daily basis? Follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
Tweet of the Week
just a reminder: viewing a friend’s content, whether through their feed, their stories, or a newsletter, does not count as engaging with them—reach out, check-in, send a video or voicenote, email or text.
we spend too much time watching and not enough time communicating.
— Joel Leon. (@JoelakaMaG) April 9, 2020
User Experience
- Through a design-thinking approach combined with iteration and rapid prototyping, organizations are reducing the risks of product innovation and improving time to market.
- A little over a month away, the Confab Content Strategy Conference on May 18 to May 20, 2020, is open for registration. This is the first year that Confab will be a virtual event.
- In his first webinar of a free series on user experience design, Wojtek Kutyla will discuss UX and People on April 14, 2020. The series kicks off with a focus on understanding your customers better and how UX skills could benefit you, your business or career.
- Benjy Stanton offers tips on different user research techniques for testing user interface content, crowdsourced from Twitter. My favorite? The memory test, where you display pages that fade to blank and then ask research participants what they remember.
Accessibility
- Have you suddenly found yourself working or teaching remotely? This helpful accessible tools for online collaboration and learning resource from Knowbility will help you choose accessible products.
- In her designing for cognitive accessibility: where to begin article, Glenda Sims discusses how designers can create user interfaces that focus attention and rely less on memory.
- If you’re looking for an accessible video conference platform, and I hope you are, be sure to read this overview of the popular video conference apps and software by BigHack.
- Moderated by Joe Devon, co-Founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the free webinar A Global Perspective on Regional Accessibility on April 16, 2020 features a panel of accessibility experts discussing accessibility challenges around the world.
WordPress
- Great news for everyone who planned to attend WordCamp Europe 2020. Event organizers announced this week that WordCamp Europe 2020 is now an online three-day event. Did I mention it’s free?
- Another in-person event is following WordCamp Europe’s lead. WP Engine Summit/2020 has also transitioned to a free, virtual event on June 10, 2020.
- Wondering how to use SVGs on your WordPress site? My friend Claire Brotherton’s latest article delves into the details of how and why you want to use SVGs in WordPress.
- While I suspect the new Jetpack search feature standalone service will attract a number of WordPress users, I think it will prove to be too expensive for many users.
CSS and HTML
- Chris Coyier walks you through the steps of recreating a Netflix animation of their preview slider in CSS. No JavaScript, all CSS.
- Whoa, impressive illustration created only with CSS.
See the Pen
CSS drawing: The king and the fly by Alvaro Montoro (@alvaromontoro)
on CodePen. - Useful! Not only has Manuel Matuzović gathered together a collection of articles and talks about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in his Front-end Bookmarks, he’s grouped them by elements, attributes, properties, selectors, methods, and expressions.
What I Found Interesting
- Microsoft Edge has overtaken Firefox as the second most popular browser. At seven and a half percent, Edge continues to add user share, but has a long way to go to catch up to Chrome at 68 percent.
- Hey, I love their cookies! And now Doubletree is sharing their famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. Now I need to buy some chocolate chips!
- I don’t know about you, but finding flow and focus has been challenging for me this past month. Ward Andrews discusses the keys to flow and focus and says:
What you focus on is ultimately going to create what you experience in the world around you.
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Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.
