In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about the curse of knowledge, find a five-day online design conference, discover how to white label your WordPress admin, 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
One day I believe we will appreciate more fully the importance and significance of design. Great design connects us, enriches us and touches us both cognitively and emotionally. Great design can and does change the world. Great design is unequivocally humane.
— Simon Norris (@simon_norris) May 28, 2020
User Experience
- Have you heard of the curse of knowledge? As Matthias Ott explains, we need to recognize it, consider how it might cloud our judgement, and work to overcome it.
- In getting started with quantitative data analysis, Krause Leia discusses how quantitative research focuses on your audience as a whole as she describes the different analysis methods.
Quantitative UX research is all about understanding numerical data that explains human behavior – and it’s one of the key elements of creating a successful user experience.
- I’ve had this conversation with many of my clients.
If there’s one thing I would like to stomp out everywhere, it’s people seeing something on a competitor’s website and a) assuming that it works, and b) assuming that it will work for them. Drives me bonkers.
— Ian Fenn (@ifenn) May 29, 2020
- Hosted by Clearleft, SofaConf is a five-day online conference from June 22, 2020 to June 26, 2020 featuring keynotes, interactive Q&A, and panel discussions with experts. Each day focuses on a different topic: product strategy, research, service design, content strategy, and interaction design.
- Elizabeth Chesters explains how and why user research should be moved in-house, highlighting the benefits of conducting face-to-face research with users.
Accessibility
- Finally! Twitter has enabled alternative text for images as the default setting on the web and mobile apps. No more having to change a setting. (Note: You’ll need to update your mobile app. It may take a while for the change to rollout to desktop.)
Adding descriptions to images is a great way to include everyone in your conversation. These descriptions, aka alt-text, enable folks who use screen readers to interpret images in Tweets. Starting today, you no longer need a setting to add alt text and it’s available on 📱 & 💻. pic.twitter.com/wRDJZwSihL
— Twitter Accessibility (@TwitterA11y) May 27, 2020
- In the first of a two-part series, Eric Bailey discusses equivalent experiences and how equivalency relates to digital accessibility. I appreciate the helpful tips and resources on maintaining equivalency: semantic markup, large font size, using assistive tech to test, and more.
- Did you know Microsoft has a new Accessibility Fundamentals course? The free two-hour course offers an intro to disability and accessibility, highlights Microsoft accessibility features, and explains how to create accessible content.
- If you missed the 2020 Microsoft Ability Summit this week, all sessions were recorded. The Microsoft Ability Summit playlist is available on YouTube.
WordPress
- Can you believe it’s been 17 years since WordPress launched? I remember the 10th birthday like it was yesterday. Happy 17th birthday, WordPress!
- With the release of their two recent blocks, you can add a post carousel and embed a podcast player in your WordPress.com hosted site.
- WordCamp Europe announced their schedule along with new networking rooms and virtual sponsor booths. The online conference will be held June 4 to June 6, 2020.
- Learn how to white label your WordPress admin with Branda, now free in the WordPress repository.
CSS and HTML
- Incredible to think it’s been 10 years since the web community first read about responsive web design in Ethan Marcotte’s A List Apart article. In Responsive design turns ten, Marcotte takes a look at how responsive design came to be.
- Impressive! Kudos to Lynn Fisher on her single-div sinking cube.
See the Pen
Single div CSS sinking cube by Lynn Fisher (@lynnandtonic)
on CodePen. - From a website redesign that looks like Windows 95 to a trip down memory lane when GeoCities reigned on the web, go back in time with the web experiments in The History of the Web’s computers are retro now.
- I didn’t know you could combine text and images in the “content” CSS property, did you? Appreciate Manuel Matuzo sharing what he didn’t know about “content” along with the code examples.
What I Found Interesting
- With Microsoft Edge 83, users will find an improved spellcheck which provides support for additional languages/dialects, shared custom dictionary, and better support for URLs, acronyms, and email addresses.
- What a helpful guide from Designmodo! Getting started with Chrome and Firefox developer tools walks you through the common and unique features in each browser developer tool.
- If you’re a fan of J.K. Rowling, you can read her latest chapter book online for free. Rowling is releasing a chapter of The Ickabog every day.
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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.
