In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about designing the onboarding experience, find helpful tips for creating accessible show/hide password features, discover a slew of CSS generators, 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 you’re a #UX or #Design freelancer or entrepreneur, you need to devote significant time every week to researching the industries of the clients you’re targeting. Learn what’s going on in their world: issues, innovations, changes. So you can speak to those things when you talk.
— Joe Natoli #StopAsianHate (@joenatoli) March 17, 2021
User Experience
- You don’t get a second chance when it comes to onboarding a software product. Learn common onboarding UX mistakes as well as how immersion research tactics and practices can be used to design the user onboarding experience.
- Join IXDA Pittsburgh on March 25, 2021 for Ikebana Tips for Software Design when Katherine Frazer explains how Ikebana (Japanese floral design) principles can apply to other creative disciplines.
- Sometimes you have to find your own way to feel the numbers.
Usability participant:
“Every morning, I copy the data from the dashboard into a spreadsheet. I don’t need to do this, but this helps me internalize the data and what it means.”This deeply resonated.
Can’t underestimate or undermine people’s highly personal sensemaking work.
— Dan Brown (@brownorama) March 17, 2021
- Glad to learn Marc Andrew is continuing his UI & UX Micro-Tips series with a third volume of tips to improve your designs. One of my favorite tips: Use weight, size, and colour to indicate hierarchy within your type.
Accessibility
- In this week’s 13 Letters accessibility podcast episode College Try (93-minutes), hosts Will Butler and Cordelia Dillon talk with Lucy Greco, Kyle Shachmut, and Heidi Pettijohn about accessibility in higher education.
We’re very different because actually every one of our faculty does have to take a required accessibility training that’s annual.
- My friend Nic Steenhout published an excellent post on how you can improve accessibility of your show/hide password feature as well as password hints.
- For those times when videos on Twitter or websites don’t have captions, you can now enable live captions on Chrome with real-time auto captions. I learned it works for podcasts, too!
- Working from bed isn’t lazy, it allows disabled freelance writer Rachel Charlton-Dailey to have a job.
I wasn’t being lazy. I was working in a way that was best for me and made my life easier.
- The discussion about AccessiBe and other accessibility overlay products has expanded beyond the accessibility community as Vice reports people with disabilities say this artificial intelligence tool is making the web worse for them.
- If you’re a project manager, you’ll be interested in my recap of Angela Hooker’s Yes, Virginia, PMs Are Responsible for Accessibility presentation at axe-con. One of the few times I’ve heard someone provide actionable tips for project managers for accessibility.
- Sara Soueidan explains how you can improve ecommerce experiences for screen reader users as well as speech-input users with accessible text labels for all. Soueidan focuses on macOS and Dragon Natural Speaking in her examples.
WordPress
- As with all things WordPress, there’s always more than one way to do something. Nahla Davies explains three ways to add custom code snippets to your WordPress site. My favorite: the Code Snippets WordPress plugin.
- If you haven’t updated your Elementor site this month, you need to update your site now to avoid cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
- It’s March! Which means voting for Torque’s 2021 Plugin Madness is open. Vote for one of the 64 competitors each Monday and watch as the choices are narrowed. The winner will be crowned April 26, 2021.
- I’ve only had to increase the maximum upload file size in WordPress on one client site. My recommendation: review the file. Has it been optimized? Resized? If it’s a video, could it be better served on YouTube or Vimeo, which are optimized for serving large video files?
CSS and HTML
- In his Good Form post, Jeremy Keith highlights how the National Health Service created their online COVID vaccination booking system. Built with semantic HTML and CSS. And nothing else.
A native app would’ve been complete overkill. That may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often the overkill option is the default.
- Did you check out the helpful CSS generators post from Smashing Magazine? Either I forgot or never knew there was an Optimal Overlay Finder.
- Milica Mihajlija explains how to improve CSS performance, focusing on what kinds of performance issues CSS can cause as well as best practices for creating CSS that doesn’t cause delays. One crucial item that I’ve focused on in the past: Mihajlija says don’t worry about the speed of CSS selectors.
- While it’s not supported yet in any browser, I agree with Robin Rendle:
:haswill have a huge impact on CSS. I’ve been wanting a parent selector for CSS for years. Which is what:hasdoes: it lets you change the parent element based on a child or other element that follows the parent. Powerful.
What I Found Interesting
- Some good news for a select group of people: free unlimited Google Photos will continue for current Google Pixel phone owners.
- It’s spring migration in the northern hemisphere, which means birds are on the move north to their breeding grounds. Help them arrive safely and learn how to protect birds in your neighborhood from window collisions.
- Wow. It took over a decade and 1,000 hours of photography to create this picture of the Milky Way. What dedication by Finnish photographer JP Metsavainio.
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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.
