In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about using affinity diagrams to organize your UX research, find an upcoming webinar on how to remove barriers from your content, discover how to be more productive in the morning, 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
“There are three ways to ultimate success:
The first way is to be kind.
The second way is to be kind.
The third way is to be kind.” #WorldKindnessDay #CardiganDay pic.twitter.com/5xy1q4Flg4— MisterRogersQuotes (@MisterRogersSay) November 13, 2020
User Experience
- In celebration of World Usability Day this week, Caroline Jarrett shares a poster for co-design. Created by Julia Allum, the poster portrays how our landscape is co-designed by farmers and nature working together.
- Revise, revise, revise are crucial in writing microcopy that improves the user experience, says Betsy Mikel. I’m borrowing her concept of a copy draft/assessment table for evaluating microcopy in my projects.
- Not only for graduating students.
Dear Graduating Design Student,
Once you get a job offer, politely ask for more money. It shows you a) are confident in your abilities, b) are serious about your time, and c) understand that design has value.
— Mitch Goldstein (@mgoldst) November 11, 2020
- In part 2 of the Growing Your Career as a Multidisciplinary UX Designer series, Jonathan Walter discusses strategies on how to grow your career, including prioritizing necessary skills and knowledge.
Some of the most effective decisions you can make involve determining what things you shouldn’t do or should do less of.
- Affinity mapping is the process UX researchers use to gather and sort qualitative information about users. The outcome of affinity mapping is an affinity diagram. In her User Testing post, Allison Thornton explains how to use an affinity diagram to organize user research.
Accessibility
- Learn how to remove barriers from your content and multilingual websites at the Practical Tips for Accessible Content and Multilingual Websites free webinar on December 3, 2020. Hosted by Digital.gov, the webinar presenter is Willa Armstrong, digital accessibility specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress.
- Want to grow your podcast audience? Add transcripts to improve your search engine optimization. How does that work? Transcripts make your content accessible to everyone and search engines will index the transcript, making your podcast more easily found.
- The two words and their descriptions seem the same to me. I agree with Eric, it’s confusing.
PSA:
In W3C a Note is recommending something. For example the ARIA Practices document is a note and it’s recommended to do what is in there.
A Recommendation is a standard and you must write your website according to those standards.
Not confusing at all! 😂
— Eric Eggert (@yatil) November 13, 2020
- You’ll overlook a large audience when you don’t create accessible design for seniors, says Tammy Xu. A readable font size, easy to select buttons, and good color contrast are common design issues that affect older users, but benefit everyone.
Ultimately, good design for older users is about keeping them in mind and valuing their user experience as much as that of younger users.
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Visualization Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is seeking blind participants who use screen readers for their study on textual descriptions for data visualizations (Google form). Participants will receive $50 (U.S. dollars) for the one hour study.
WordPress
- Can you help test? For new installs, auto update is enabled for major and minor releases in the WordPress 5.4 Beta 4 version released this week. (Yes, that makes me nervous.)
- Eric Karkovack shares helpful info, tips, and resources for working with WordPress custom post types and taxonomies
- Concerned about updating WordPress? Check out ManageWP’s latest post on how to update WordPress without fear. I’ve been a fan of ManageWP for several years. One of the reasons I use ManageWP on my client sites is their Safe Updates feature.
- No matter your political preference, it was exciting to learn that the Biden-Harris presidential transition team launched their transition website on WordPress. And it’s hosted by Automattic!
CSS and HTML
- Robin Rendle takes a deep dive into the
flexproperty as he explains how the flex properties interact, specifically how flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis properties actually work. - The full results of the annual CSS survey haven’t been published yet, but the creators of the survey have published the responses (almost 2,000) from participants on what’s missing from CSS? (Note: you’ll need to select the Reload button for a new response.)
- I wish more web professionals understood the importance of HTML in their work. Thank you Jens Meiert for sharing your insights on HTML (and HTML in 2020)
HTML, as a technology, has not nearly been exhausted yet in terms of the semantic wealth that it offers…
- In part 1 of his How to Understand Flexbox CSS miniseries, Alan Montgomery explains the basics of flexbox, why you’ll want to use it, and how to get started.
What I Found Interesting
- Want to be more productive in the morning? Avoid looking at your digital devices, especially your phone. That’s what Zapier team members did recently, when they chose to not look at their screens first thing in the morning.
- If you’ve been on the web for a while, you might remember when Google first launched. A simple interface that provided you blue links for your search results. That’s not the case any more on Google or Bing. But you can get it back with the Simple Search extension for Firefox and Chrome, works on Google and Bing.
- In my last resource for the week, I share with you a bright light. Something that will make you feel good as you learn about Sami Schalk’s project: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane. Her project will be soon be part of the Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, exhibition now online via the Ford Foundation Gallery.
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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.
