In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about designing for intermediate users, find a new GenerateBlocks Pattern Library, discover an entire site devoted to defensive 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
Don’t mistake assertiveness for aggression.
— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) June 27, 2022
Being assertive is advocating for your interests. Being aggressive is attacking other people’s interests.
Standing up for your ideals doesn’t make you pushy—it stops you from being a pushover. It’s not selfish—it’s self-preservation.
User Experience
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Understanding what beginner, intermediate, and expert users need is critical to your designs. In most users are intermediate users, here’s how you can support them, Christopher Wong discusses how to optimize for intermediate users while balancing the needs of beginners and experts.
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On the importance of user research.
In product and service design, the absence of user research has a technical name:
— Jared Spool (@jmspool) June 29, 2022
Guessing. -
Nice! Rosenfeld Media has a summer book sale that runs through July 4, 2022. Get 20% off plus free U.S. shipping on their user experience, product management, and content strategy books. All paperbacks come with ebooks. Use code SUMMER2022.
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Join the Center for Plain Language on July 19, 2022 for their annual 2022 ClearMark Awards, recognizing plain language communications created by North American organizations. Online event with no cost to attend. Pre-registration is required by July 15, 2022.
Accessibility
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When you see someone with a red and white striped cane, that means the person has a hearing impairment as well as sight loss. DeafBlindness Awareness Week is this week: the annual event to raise awareness about deafblindness.
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New Microsoft Teams on Web features for small businesses includes viewing captions from a CART provider (real-time captioning) in the meeting window, instead of a second window.
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Create flexible and adaptable designs to accommodate the different ways people interact with them. Eric Bailey explains a common design method: a visually hidden link name which is problematic for people who use voice control software.
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My friend Nic Steenhout shares his frustration about being asked to provide accessibility expertise without payment in accessibility work is hard and shouldn’t be treated as spec work. He wasn’t alone, many others were asked (including me).
I supposed some people might feel flattered to have a large company like that ask them for their opinion. I don’t feel flattered at all. I feel used.
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Personally, I think the headline is incorrect. When it comes to accessibility, architects must hold themselves to the higher standard should be renamed “When it comes to accessibility, architects must hold themselves to the legal standard.”
Why haven’t architects been paying attention to The Accessibility for Ontarions with Disabilities Act, which outlines accessibility standards in Ontario, Canada? It was passed in 2005.
WordPress
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Did you know there’s a new online GenerateBlocks Pattern Library? Both free and pro patterns are available for you to copy and paste into your content.
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My friend Chris Wiegman shared his experience trying Full Site Editing in WordPress again. The results were not pretty. A 17K page layout grew to more than 1MB in page weight. Yikes!
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Sad to read the news about directors resigning and new leadership at ClassicPress. It’s been almost four years since ClassicPress launched, based on WordPress 4.9 with the TinyMCE editor and no block editor.
While it is sad to be leaving the community we saw grow and evolve over time to be the most successful fork of WordPress in years, it is time for a new direction under new governance.
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Learn what’s happening in WordPress translations from the June 2022 WordPress Polyglots Monthly Newsletter. News stories include Translation Day 2023 planning as well as the annual meetup program survey translation.
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In episode 34 of the WordPress Briefing podcast (seven-minutes), Josepha Haden Chomphosy talks about the upcoming WordPress 6.1 version, speaker workshop for Indian women in the WordPress community, and submitting photos to the WordPress Photo Directory.
CSS and HTML
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Can you help? Share your feedback to help shape the future of CSS-Tricks. Take their short survey and let them know what’s important to you. (Took me less than five minutes to complete the survey.)
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Have you seen this effect?
How Airbnb makes that cool swipe up drawer on their mobile site in CSS
— Steve Sewell (@Steve8708) June 27, 2022
Pretty clever trick!
Code example: https://t.co/XLawzyURaV
No-code example: https://t.co/xGx1kPS0zx pic.twitter.com/pX8ic4g711 -
I missed this resource last week, but didn’t want you to miss it! Ahmad Shadeed has an entire site devoted to defensive CSS: practical CSS and design tips to help you build future-proof user interfaces. His introduction to defensive CSS article explains why it’s important to design and write CSS defensively.
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Is Sass still relevant in 2022? Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine chats with Stephanie Eckles in the latest Smashing Podcast episode.
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Back in the day, I created a lot of HTML newsletters for my clients and for the college when I worked there. Writing table-based code with inline CSS was tedious, challenging, and required a lot of detailed work. Glad to read Josh Comeau’s post on his wonderful HTML email workflow, using MJML (email framework from Mailjet) and MDX.
What I Found Interesting
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Get organized with this helpful guide to tools and technology for taking digital notes. I don’t agree with their comments about Evernote; I’ve used it since it was in beta. I find Evernote’s features and functionality works better for my needs than other note-taking apps.
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I agree with my friend Randy Clark that employee reviews should be an ongoing process. And that you need to be prepared.
A review shouldn’t be annual or semi-annual. It should be continuous, ongoing, and constant.
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Another good reason to use Firefox (it’s my default browser on desktop): Firefox new privacy feature strips URLs of tracking parameters. Available in Firefox 102 released this week.
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Want to know how much money you’ve saved by working from home? Camille Clayton created an app to calculate how much your time is worth and how much time/money you saved.
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