July 23, 2021 Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about prioritizing problems to inform product design, find a helpful accessibility quick start guide for teaching, discover how my friend James manages shady search engine optimization offers, 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

If your user research budget is smaller than the cost of your high-paid stakeholders attending meetings to argue about what the design should be, your company’s priority is not actually to save money.

— Pavel A. Samsonov (@PavelASamsonov) July 22, 2021

User Experience

• In Prioritizing Problems to Inform Product Design, Google UX researchers Julia Barrett and David Lick discuss the importance of shifting from focusing on solutions to focusing on problems.

  Researching problems can happen before designs have even been created.

• My own experience over the past 1 1/2 years of ordering groceries online had me nodding as I read Baymard Institute’s 12 common UX pitfalls of grocery ecommerce sites. Not surprised to learn grocery sites performed the worst in cart & checkout and mobile ecommerce. (I gave up trying to order groceries on my smartphone.)
• I love UX case studies, they tell the story and approach behind design changes. Ollie Rozdarz from Automattic’s Design team discusses their WordPress.com onboarding case study and how a year of experiments led to subtle changes and some unexpected results.
• Use the tool that works best for you.

  Things you can use to prototype:
  – Figma
  – InVision
  – XD
  – Sketch
  – Principle
  – PortoPie
  – HTML/CSS/JS
  – Framer
  – Webflow
  – UXpin
  – Origami Studio
  – Keynote/PowerPoint
  – pen/paper
  – whiteboards
  – paper
  – construction paper
  – sticky notes
  – cardboard
  – Legos
  
  The tool matters not.

  — Nick Finck (@nickf) July 17, 2021

• Rosenfeld Media announced their Civic Design 2021 Call for Proposals for their first inaugural Civic Design 2021 conference on December 8-10, 2021. Share your experience with design in government and civic organizations. Deadline for proposals is August 12, 2021.

Accessibility

• For people who teach workshops or training sessions, Dr. Sarah Lewthwaite offers a helpful accessibility quick start guide to introduce accessibility topics using scaffolding approaches.
• Did you know the most common form of color blindness is red-green color blindness? One in 10 males and one in 200 females are affected by it. As a designer and someone who has red-green color blindness, Andrew Wilshere asks you to please stop using red and green together in your designs.
• Cat Noone explains how making a business’s online presence accessible and inclusive to everyone affects the bottom line by highlighting how it expands the customer base, protects businesses from negative public exposure, and why it’s easier to bake it into design at project start.

  Not only is inclusive design necessary, but it’s actually already proven to be fundamental to sustainable business growth and success.

• Shoutout to Knowbility experts for publishing best practices for audio & video text alternatives, which provides answers to attendee questions they didn’t have time to answer at last month’s Audio & Video: Alternative Content for Accessibility webinar.

WordPress

• Code named Tatum in honor of jazz pianist Art Tatum, WordPress 5.8 has been released. You’ll find a number of new features: manage widgets with blocks, add duotone filters ton images, and use WebP images.
• If you’ve held off upgrading to WordPress 5.8, you may want to install the Classic Widgets plugin, which restores the pre-5.8 WordPress widgets settings screen. It’s unfortunate there wasn’t more information about the error messages WordPress 5.8 would cause for widgets. Which in turn is leading WordPress users to post issues in the Fixing WordPress forum.
• When I wanted to give my clients access to their site analytics, but the new analytics plugin only displayed stats to Administrative users, I turned to the User Role Editor plugin.
• Missed this announcement last week: PayPal Standard is hidden on new WooCommerce installs from version 5.5 onward. Users are encouraged to use the free, official PayPal extension. (Note: this doesn’t affect existing WooCommerce sites using PayPal Standard.)
• When my friend Jeff Chandler asked about using a PDF for his podcast episode, I replied PDFs weren’t an accessible choice and recommended regular old HTML. After finding numerous block collection plugins that didn’t fit his needs, Jeff found a simple accordion block to display podcast transcripts.

CSS and HTML

• Worth bookmarking! Toolb.dev is a set of free web tools, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, text tools, and image tools for your web projects.
• Have to say I can’t remember the last time I used FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in the browser. Not surprised Firefox is following Chrome and Edge in dropping support for FTP.
• Yes, it is.

  Here’s a little hot take coming at you from 2017 except I’m just now caught up: CSS grids are a really nice way to lay out some web site content.

  — Meagan Fisher Couldwell (@owltastic) July 22, 2021

• Kudos to Fehrenbach Baptiste on creating a lovely squirrel illustration, with only HTML and CSS (hat tip to CSS Weekly). I know how that squirrel feels.

  See the Pen CSSquirrel by Fehrenbach Baptiste (@medrupaloscil) on CodePen.

• Well, Peter-Paul Koch’s latest article was an interesting code walk-through of custom properties and @property ending with what he calls a failed experiment. I found it fascinating to read.

What I Found Interesting

• I always enjoy my friend James’ takedowns of shady search engine optimization (SEO) companies using spam to persuade unsuspecting business owners to use their service. This week’s post is about KPL Tech Solution. James has published 24 posts in his SEO email series so far this year.
• Yes, please.

  I wish @twitter had a small thumbtack icon by the timeline, that when pressed, would freeze the timeline from moving, refreshing, doing anything other than staying PUT!
  
  Twitter please let me lock the timeline if I’m reading an important tweet!

  — Brad Williams (@williamsba) July 21, 2021

• Can you imagine? Cockatoos in Sydney, Australia learned how to open a trash bin. In 2018, birds in three Sydney suburbs could open the lids. By the end of 2019, the birds were opening trash bins in 44 suburbs.
• Argh. The recent Chrome OS update left many Chromebook users unable to log in to their accounts. Thankfully, Google has a fix for those locked out of their accounts.

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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.