In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about stakeholder analysis for UX projects, find out how to disable Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) on your WordPress site, discover an incredible camera created only with CSS, 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
“To see the earth as it truly is,
Small and blue and beautiful
In that eternal silence where it floats,
Is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.”
– American poet Archibald MacLeish on the Apollo 8 Earthrise photo#EarthDay pic.twitter.com/7I9FiZr9yd— National Air and Space Museum (@airandspace) April 23, 2021
User Experience
- Design wins for users by providing valuable information the user wants or helps the user accomplish a task, says Carrie Cousins in 7 Ways to Use Emotion in Web & Graphic Design Projects.
Useful designs are a surefire way to create a win.
- Stakeholders hold the key to whether your project is a success or not. Make sure your project has a better outcome: conduct stakeholder analysis for your UX projects to assess the positive and negative impacts of each stakeholder.
- Save the date! The User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International Conference 2021 will be an in-person event August 30, 2021 to September 2, 2021 in Baltimore, Maryland.
- Join the Bentley User Experience Graduate Association this month when Laurence Vagner and Stéphanie Walter present How cognitive biases influence user decisions. Registration is free, the online event is April 30, 2021 from 9:30am to 11:00am Eastern Time.
Accessibility
- Too often accessibility is thought to be simple, a technical problem, and hard. Devon Persing debunks these three myths as they discuss how accessibility is more than a technical problem. As I’ve learned about accessibility over the years, education is crucial.
- Data used to optimize our software needs to be
managed with people with disabilities in mind
says Cat Noone. Faulty data systems result in products with poor accessibility, putting people with disabilities at risk and preventing them from using products and services. - In the latest post in their ClassicPress plugin development series, Ian Grieve discusses developing plugins with accessibility in mind, and shares helpful resources from the A11Y Project.
- Excellent idea!
Want your team / company / organization to be accountable for accessibility?
Set a goal: all demonstrations — sprint demos, sales demos, demos to execs — are done with the keyboard.
(Yes, on mobile too, using a bluetooth connected keyboard)#accessibility #a11y #behaviour
— Derek Featherstone (@feather) April 21, 2021
- My friend Nic Steenhout, who hosts the A11y Rules podcast, is looking for disabled people to share their experience on the web for his upcoming A11y Rules Soundbites podcast series (short episodes of five to 10 minutes, with three questions asked). Reach Nic by email if you’re interested in participating.
WordPress
- One of my favorite themes, GeneratePress, announced their release candidate for GeneratePress’s GP Premium this week. What’s exciting about this release? It brings theme building to the popular, light-weight GeneratePress theme using the core block editor and GenerateBlocks plugin. And the Site Library has been completely rewritten and will work on web hosts where it didn’t work before (WordPress.com and EasyWP).
- While it’s not clear whether WordPress will treat Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as a security issue, lots of people in the community are talking about it.
- As for me, I’ve checked my Chrome browser to confirm I’m not included in Google’s FLoC advertising experiment. And I’ve disabled FLoC on this site, so users won’t participate in it. Here’s how to turn off Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts in your WordPress site.
- If you use Elementor and you’re looking for inspiration for your next site, check out their showcase of Elementor sites of March 2021. Which site is your favorite?
CSS and HTML
- Fascinating read (or listen) about the history of HTML in A Language for the Web, episode 3 of season 7 of the Command Line Heroes podcast.
What had begun as a bit of abstract philosophy had suddenly transformed into a reality.
- Learn how to float and stick an element to the bottom corner with CSS only, no JavaScript needed, with this helpful tip from Temani Afif.
- Useful!
My new favorite CSS trick:
Got a layout with global margins/padding/whitespace, but you need to break a page element out of the parent container and go full-width?
Add this utility class to your code! It works like a charm!pic.twitter.com/nruMSuVziq
— Sam Sycamore 🌲 ⛰ (@tanoaksam) April 19, 2021
- Are you familiar with the phrase “intrinsic typography?” Rather than writing specific text styles,
you define how those styles change n proportion to the text’s area.
Which means you don’t define text sizing and spacing for each breakpoint. In his CSS-Tricks post, Scott Kellum explains why intrinsic typography is the future of styling text on the web. - I’m always amazed at what people can create with CSS.
See the Pen
CSS Art Camera by Kass (@kassandrasanch)
on CodePen.
What I Found Interesting
- Announced at Figma’s virtual design conference, FigJam is a new free online whiteboarding space. You can think of it as a lightweight version of Figma, where you can use stick-notes, drawing tools, and emojis to brainstorm with others. Or use it on your own to create user flowers and create processes.
- Congrats to Ethan Marcotte and Aquent Gymnasium on the release of four free design systems courses: Design Systems for Everyone, Design Systems for Developers, Design Systems for Designers, and Design Systems for Product Managers. Each course is less than an hour long.
- April 22 marked the 51st anniversary of Earth Day. Find out the carbon footprint of your website by visiting Website Carbon or Digital Beacon.
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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.
