In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to convince others against using dark patterns, find out how to improve speed on your WordPress site, discover how to improve your typography skills, 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
Picard management tip: Do your best to learn about and comprehend the experiences of people who look very different from you.
— Picard Tips (@PicardTips) May 13, 2020
User Experience
- A Microsoft multi-disciplinary team partnered with COVID-19 front line workers in government and healthcare using human-centered design in real time to create emergency response solutions.
Designing when the stakes are as high as a pandemic drives home the importance and efficacy of applying human-centered design tenets when building products.
- From my experience working with stakeholders at the college, I know how challenging it can be to convince others against using dark patterns
- Do what’s best for your users, avoid blindly following what other websites do.
Just because a lot of Web sites do something the wrong way doesn’t mean it’s OK to do the same.
If you know you can do better, you should. If you can do better, you must. If you know it, you owe it (to your users). It is our responsibility to do better. So, let’s.
— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) May 15, 2020
- How does 21st century design differ from 20th century design? Don Norman explains why we need to adopt a broader perspective for design education in this six-minute video.
Accessibility
- Join people with disabilities, advocates, and accessibility professionals at the 10th annual Ability Summit on May 27 to May 28, 2020. The free all-digital event features keynotes, panel discussions, and demos of accessibility features in Office, Windows, Xbox, and more.
- Used responsively, Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) can help people who use assistive technology, says Eric Bailey. Be aware that ARIA doesn’t have perfect support.
- Humbled to be included with this group of accessibility experts by my friend Amy Carney.
Again, I find myself truly grateful for so many #a11y champions / experts that share (often freely) what they’ve learned, so I can be a better a11y. To name only a few:@cariefisher @aardrian @vavroom @redcrew @marcysutton @scottohara @ericwbailey @svinkle @yatil @melaniersumner
— Amy Carney (@click2carney) May 14, 2020
- Are you ready for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on May 21, 2020? I’ve found three ways you can participate in GAAD.
WordPress
- Learn how to improve the performance and speed up your WordPress site with Kinsta’s free webinar on May 20, 2020.
- While the online WordCamps: resources, tools, and information is intended for WordCamp organizers, the processes and documentation are useful for every event planner.
- New required header fields for style.css will require the “Tested up to” field to indicate WordPress version tested and “Requires PHP” field to state lowest PHP version the theme can use.
- A new version of WooCommerce has been released. Here’s what’s new in WooCommerce 4.1, including a new Marketing Hub and a new Setup Wizard.
CSS and HTML
- An Event Apart: Online Together is a one-day online conference focused on digital design, user experience, content, code, and more.
- Improve your typography skills and create a better reading experience for users with Thomas Bohm’s latest post on how to space and kern punctuation marks and other symbols.
- Incredible illustration by Chris Ota created with HTML and CSS (no images or SVGs).
See the Pen
Playdate Gaming Console by Chris Ota (@chrisota)
on CodePen.
What I Found Interesting
- With the COVID-19 pandemic, our work life has changed, with many people now working from home. Suzanne Scacca offers five tips for working with clients when you’re at home to help you manage your clients and projects. Glad to read Scacca doesn’t recommend texting for client communication.
- Over 50,000 people participated in the 2020 Global Big Day of birding, spotting 6,479 species on 120,000 eBird checklists. I was one of them! Check out the results of the 2020 Global Big Day.
- If you’re as tired of ads taking over your screen as I am, you’ll be happy to know Chrome will soon block resource-draining ads. Here’s how to turn on Chrome ad-blocking now.
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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.
