In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about World Information Architecture Day livestream events, rediscover the magic of HTML and CSS, learn about software to protect voting machines from hackers, 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
A typical webpage can weigh 4 MB
If it is downloaded 600,000 it creates as much CO2 as one tree can absorb in a year. (10 KG)
Reduce webpage weight#WorldWideWaste
— Gerry McGovern (@gerrymcgovern) February 21, 2020
User Experience
- World Information Architecture Day (WIAD) is Saturday, February 22, 2020. If you’re in the southeast Michigan area, you can still register for our local Ann Arbor WIAD. If there isn’t a WIAD event nearby, consider attending one of the livestream WIAD events around the world.
- In how to film and photograph online content for usability, Aurora Harley recommends considering how your audience will be using the videos or images. Often, several short videos will be more useful to users because they can play only the ones they’re interested in.
- User experience encompasses the entire customer experience with a product or service.
This morning, @SamsungMobile accidentally sent this “Find My Mobile” alert to *every* Samsung Galaxy phone, triggering fears of privacy violations and security concerns by some users.
It’s a reminder that everything a company does – from design to QA – can have an impact on #UX. pic.twitter.com/DOrDHEbc2r
— Doug Collins (@DougCollinsUX) February 20, 2020
- To manage user expectations when designing smart products, inform users what a product is able to do and don’t promise more than you can deliver.
As designers, we sometimes underestimate the complexity of understanding the user and the user’s context.
Accessibility
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology will caption online videos, according to this week’s settlement with the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). The NAD lawsuit was filed in 2015.
- Add this tip to your accessibility toolbox:
#TipForTheDay: Need text from an image for #AltText? Rather than typing it out, drop the image into @msonenote, right click and choose “Select Text from Image”, then paste. It extracts the text! #a11y #MIEExpert #ILoveOneNote pic.twitter.com/SnxhYyaSX3
— Karyn Fillhart (@Filibuster3) February 10, 2020
- With the goal of spreading awareness and tackling the stigma around sight loss, Holly Tuke asked others to share how they describe their visual impairments.
- Wondering how a11y came to be used as a hashtag for accessibility?
We use the hashtag #a11y which is a shortened version of #accessibility. The ‘a’ and ‘y’ are the first and last letters of accessibility and the ’11’ represents the number of characters between.
— Accessibility London (@A11yLondon) February 21, 2020
WordPress
- Can you help? WordPress 5.4 beta 2 is available for download and testing. The 5.4 version is scheduled for release on March 31, 2020.
- WordPress site administrators interested in privacy-focused analytics have another option as Matomo Analytics launched on the WordPress directory this week.
- Looking for a WordPress job? Or are you hiring for WordPress jobs? Check out WordPress Career and Job Pages with links to WordPress-focused companies career pages. Note: links to companies on their page open in a new tab.
- It’s crucial to keep your WordPress site secure. Here are five tips to harden and secure your WordPress sites.
CSS and HTML
- If there’s one article I hope you read in this week’s roundup, it’s CSS Tricks guide to links and buttons. Love their quick guidelines at the beginning on when to use each element.
- Continuing with learning about buttons, Ahmad Shadeed walks you through styling the good ol’ button element, highlighting common use cases and pitfalls we make with padding, height, min-width, interactive states, and more.
- Reading this article put a smile on my face for the whole day. You never know how you might inspire high school students.
What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all of us who code, I think we forget it is magic.
- Have you tried LayitOut, the online interactive CSS Grid builder?
- Another excellent guide from CSS Tricks, the complete guide to data attributes explains what they are, how to use them, and how you can access them from JavaScript.
What I Found Interesting
- Your digital life is a lot easier, thanks to the work of Larry Tesler who helped develop the cut, copy, and paste functions we take for granted on a daily basis. A former Xerox researcher and Apple chief scientist, Tesler died this week at the age of 74 years old.
- Long read, but worthwhile to learn about voting, security, and Microsoft’s open source Election Guard software to make voting machines safe from hackers.
- Whether you love it or hate it, live chat is a popular website customer support feature. I was surprised by some of the live chat statistics, but not all.
In fact, 29% of customers are frustrated by scripted, impersonal responses in live chat.
That would be me.
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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.
