In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about creating problem statements, find out what you can do to protect users’ privacy on the websites you create, discover a two-day free online accessibility workshop, 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
API design is user experience.
An approval workflow in Slack is user experience.
A lead generation form on the marketing website is user experience.
User experience almost always starts outside the typical boundaries of a product UI.
That’s where your design also starts.
— Jehad Affoneh (@jaffoneh) August 25, 2021
User Experience
- When you create problem statements during UX discovery, be sure to include background of the problem, people affected by the problem, and the impact of the problem on the organization.
- Thank you to A List Apart for sharing an excerpt from chapter 5 of Design for Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog.
You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released.
- In the August 26, 2021 Boagworld Newsletter, Paul Boag recommends you learn to go with the flow, as he explains the concept of flow, the importance of journey mapping and sales funnels, and offers practical actions to take in understanding the user’s flow.
- By using a human-centered design approach to update a legacy technical assistance tracking tool, a team of government contractors working with the U.S. Office of Child Care was able to teach an old dog new tricks while revamping the legacy web service.
Accessibility
- Has the pandemic impacted digital accessibility for you? Deque Systems wants to hear from the accessibility community and their experiences practicing digital accessibility during COVID-19 pandemic. The 16-question survey takes less than five minutest to complete.
- I missed the livestream of Designing for the Blind: An Interactive Talk with Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable. But thanks to the DesignX Community, I was able to watch the captioned video on YouTube. Proulx discusses some of the common items to consider during research and design to help create more accessible designs. (69-minute video)
- The end of an era. It was one of the first accessibility tools I used. The online accessibility tool CynthiaSays.com will be closing down December 31, 2021.
- I shared the news a couple weeks ago that Twitter now allows you to upload an SRT caption file to your videos, without needing a Twitter Media account. 3PlayMedia walks you through the steps of adding subtitles to videos on Twitter.
- Thanks to Deque for presenting a free online two-day (2 1/2 hours each day) workshop on how to find, fix, and prevent accessibility issues. Learn useful tips and tools on September 14 to September 15, 2021. The event is free, pre-registration is required.
WordPress
- Good news for folks who are using the Classic Editor plugin. WordPress.org announced this week Classic Editor support will continue through 2022. Are you using the Classic Editor on your site?
- After an extended time away, our Metro Detroit WordPress group has a meetup planned! Join us Monday, September 13, 2021 to learn what’s new in WordPress.
- Yes, it’s time for Automattic to conduct their own accessibility audit of the block editor.
It’s been two years since @wpcampusorg commissioned the #WordPress Gutenberg accessibility audit. A lot has changed since then. Folks often ask me if the a11y has improved. I shrug. I would love to see @automattic commission an updated #accessibility audit of the block editor.
— Rachel Cherry 🍒 (@bamadesigner) August 25, 2021
- While many people turn automatically to Yoast SEO or All in One SEO plugins to improve search engine optimization for their WordPress website, Eric Karkovack suggests you consider 10 lesser-known & niche WordPress SEO plugins. I know several of my colleagues have turned to Rank Math SEO, one of Karkovack’s suggestions.
CSS and HTML
- As a web designer or web developer, it’s up to you to protect users’ data collected on your websites, says Robin Berjon in Pushing Back Against Privacy Infringement on the Web. His recommendation: work on privacy iteratively. Put a plan in place to improve over time.
- Following in Chrome’s footsteps, Firefox prepares to block insecure file downloads. The feature is expected in Firefox version 92, due to be released in early September 2021.
- Filed in my “I didn’t know that” folder. Use this preview text hack in your email marketing to create white space after your preview text, without having to truncate or user shortened preview text.
What I Found Interesting
- Working remotely provided employees with more autonomy about how they do their jobs. Kate Morgan explains how workers can cope with losing some of that autonomy when returning to the office, while modifying their job in a way that works for them.
- Do you use Microsoft Teams? You’ll be happy to learn Microsoft Team organizers can delegate responsibility for breakout rooms to individual presenters.
- I knew American Crows are considered some of the smartest birds in the world. But I didn’t know they held grudges. For generations. Get to know more about the common American bird in 10 fun facts about American Crows.
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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.
