In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about this month’s Design Value Conference, find out how to document accessibility and user interactions, discover why WordPress websites should be maintained by a professional, 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!
Tweet of the Week
I love when people give shoutouts during standup.
— Novall Swift (@NovallSwift) March 16, 2022
Often what you worked on involved another person, and it’s good practice to acknowledge and thank them for helping you out.
In a space where the whole team is there, it fosters a healthy culture of collaboration and teamwork.
User Experience
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In the three building blocks of a successful modern design system, Alyssa Martin, Mike Wyatt, and Nick Olshefski explains what a design system is and how it benefits teams by creating a shared language to create content and more effective designs.
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Mark your calendars for UXPin’s Design Value Conference on March 29, 2022. The free virtual conference features a day of presentations about scaling design and improving return on investment from industry leaders at Uber Eats, PayPal, and more. The conference is free, but requires pre-registration.
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One of the first things I learned in my user experience class.
It’s *usability* testing. We’re not testing users. We’re testing designs.
— Dana Chisnell 💪🏼💻🗳🇺🇸 (@danachis) March 16, 2022 -
Over 500 user experience researchers participated in The State of User Research 2022 Report. Learn what the findings say about the art of user research, tools, and teams. Interesting to learn that 44% said that in their companies, researchers are embedded in non-research teams.
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Are you seeing a lot of blue figures with long limbs in web design illustrations? You’re not alone. Corporate Memphis illustration style seems to have taken over the corporate world. While many say the illustration style has fallen out of favor, others are more focused on what the trend says about perceptions and the future of design.
Accessibility
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Shoutout to Stephanie Walter for sharing the text version of her axe-con 2022 conference presentation A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions. Walter explains the why, what, and how for documenting accessibility. With a reminder that accessibility documentation is a team effort.
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After attending her session and taking a load of notes, I know I’ll be visiting Stephanie Eckles’s companion site for her axe-con presentation Modern CSS Upgrades to Improve Accessibility which includes techniques and code examples. Worth bookmarking!
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Check out my notes from Rachel Andrew’s New CSS with Accessibility in Mind presentation at axe-con. Loved her recommendation about HTML and CSS:
Avoid trying to fix source problems in flexbox or the grid. Fix it in HTML, not CSS.
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Microsoft Edge will now automatically generate image alternative text for screen readers, for images with no existing alternative text. Available now in Microsoft Edge for Windows, Mac, and Linux, not yet available in Edge on Android or iOS.
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Over the past few years, Ubisoft focused on making accessibility a priority in their games, considering accessibility at every state of the development process. Ubisoft’s Senior Manager of Accessibility David Tisserand explains what the future holds for accessibility at Ubisoft.
WordPress
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Expected to officially launch the week of March 21, 2022, the Pattern Creator will open to the public to expand the Pattern Directory on WordPress.org.
“Approved patterns will be added to the directory, where they will be instantly available to the authors of millions of WordPress sites.”
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Interesting to learn the WordPress Community Team is revisiting In-person regional WordCamps. I’ve supported regional WordCamps for years and never understood the issues that caused WordCamp Netherlands to be canceled in 2017. But given where we are in the pandemic, I’m not a fan of in-person events. Whether they’re meetups, WordCamps, or conferences.
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If you’re wondering what themes and tools are used on a WordPress site, ManageWP’s latest post will help you out. Personally, I’m a fan of BuiltWith.
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While auto updates make it easier, when it comes to site maintenance, Eric Karkovach explains why most WordPress websites should be maintained by a professional. I agree. Many of my clients come to me after trying to update their own site, and one of the updates caused the site to crash. And they didn’t know what to do.
CSS and HTML
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Big news in the CSS community: Digital Ocean has acquired CSS Tricks. Started in 2007 by Chris Coyier, CSS Tricks has been the go-to place for all things CSS for web designers and developers. It’s been my resource to learn new features in CSS and how to troubleshoot issues. Wishing Chris Coyier the best!
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Using viewport units,
calc,max, and CSS variables, Ahmad Shadeed demonstrates how you can align content in different wrappers. -
Exciting news for Safari! New Webkit features in Safari 15.4 bring support for lazy-loading images, for the
<dialog>element,::backdroppseudo-element, Cascade layers, and more. -
With both Safari and Firefox shipping support for the
dialogelement this month, we’ll now have cross-browser support in the three of the most-used browsers. Stefan Judis takes a closer look at the super powers of the dialog element.
What I Found Interesting
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Good news for Cloudflare users! Cloudflare is now providing a Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) Managed Ruleset to all Cloudflare plans, free of charge. That includes free plans.
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Google announced their Universal Analytics will be retired in 2023. All analytics will transition to Google Analytics 4. If you’re not interested in moving to Google Analytics 4, it’s time to consider an alternative. Two of my favorites are Plausible and Koko Analytics, which I shared my thoughts on in 2021.
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Woohoo! The James Webb Space Telescope has taken its first aligned image of a star. Here’s how it was done. Did you know the James Web Space Telescope is the largest telescope ever sent into space?
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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.
