In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll find a handy guide for moderated vs. unmoderated usability testing, learn about future of image lazy loading in WordPress, discover how to optimize SVGs, 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 because someone walked a particular path to get somewhere, doesn’t mean that path is for you.
How do you define “success” is a question I ask everyone who asks me how to become successful. My definition is usually different from what it looks like to many people.
— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) January 30, 2020
User Experience
- Fascinating read and results (with a few surprises) from Nielsen Norman Group when they replicated a 22-year-old information-seeking behavior study.
We also discovered that today, critical-internet usage is often a social activity—it involves more than one person.
- While it’s a promotion for their paid services, the one-minute Interaction Design Foundation video of Jacob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics is a good reminder of what to focus on in your designs.
- What can user experience professionals do to avoid this cost?
Massively underestimated:
The “cost” of people coming to work knowing things are broken & fearing the next thing breaking.
This holds for usability issues, “bugs”, “quality”, elephants in the room, strategy misalignment…anything.
The drag and dissonance is extremely costly.
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) January 31, 2020
- When you conduct usability tests, one of the first things you need to decide is what kind of testing to do. Get useful tips in this helpful guide on moderated and unmoderated usability testing from UserZoom.
Accessibility
- Here’s your opportunity to share your accessibility knowledge, tips, and advice as a speaker at the John Slatin AccessU conference May 12-14, 2020 in Austin, Texas. Call for proposals ends tonight, January 31, 2020 at 11:59PM Central Time.
- If you’re a meetup organizer or event planner looking for a more accessible registration option, check out what our Refresh Detroit group learned about Eventbrite and accessibility.
- I’ve recently changed to using YouTube’s embed code on this blog so I can add the privacy-enabled code (which isn’t available when you add YouTube videos using the Classic Editor technique of entering the YouTube URL in a separate line in the editor). I didn’t realize the title attribute was missing in the YouTube code, now I know!
Ensure any frames and iframes provide a title attribute that describes the purpose of the frame. People using assistive technology such as a screen reader can then determine whether to navigate into the frame or skip it.https://t.co/CbnsTppHLG#Accessibility #A11y #A11yAdvice pic.twitter.com/R2xsqc7pjC
— A11yAdvice (@A11yAdvice) January 31, 2020
- Kudos to everyone at Salesforce who worked on the seven-minute Salesforce Lightning Service Cloud video showing how it works with a screen reader.
WordPress
- You may not need to add that lazy loading plugin to your WordPress sites when WordPress 5.4 is released with native lazy loading support this spring. Note: lazy loading attribute is not supported by all browsers.
- See you there? Join us February 18 for our next West Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup: Business Roundtable on Pricing and Strategies.
- Personally, I don’t understand why XML sitemaps aren’t native to WordPress. Glad to read about the launch of the XML sitemap plugin, created in partnership with Google and Yoast. I hope the plugin is added to WordPress core this year.
- Not only for developers, 15 helpful development resources for WordPress developers is useful for everyone involved with WordPress sites who want to stay current with latest news and techniques.
CSS and HTML
- Whether you’re starting to use SVGs for the first time or you’ve been using them for years, you’ll find helpful tips on optimizing SVGs in Michelle Barker’s post.
- I don’t think font fights will ever go out of style. This one started with a tweet, and ended with the classic Times New Roman font defeating its competition.
The font should never shout louder than the work.
- Thanks to Manual Matusevic, I now know about new attibutes for
list-style-type. Note, if you use these attributes, you’ll need to consider fallbacks since they’re not supported in all browsers. - Considering dark mode for your email newsletters? Dark colors may impact your design in ways you didn’t expect, says Chad White as he outlines what you need to know.
What I Found Interesting
- After the PC Mag/Motherboard investigation revealed the Avast anti-virus application was selling users’ browser history to third-party providers, Avast’s CEO apologized and shut down their data harvesting operations.
- Imagine receiving a car repair voucher from your local police officers instead of a ticket. That’s what’s happening in Hennipin County, Minnesota.
- If you missed the news, you can now download 150,000 copyright-free art works from Paris’ museums. Stunning images!
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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.
