In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about designing for customer intentions, discover a free webinar about digital accessibility, find a Halloween game designed in CSS, 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
Twitter helps me remember that each of us is broken in our own ways, but some of us are more skilled at hiding it. Perhaps this is my prayer, too, that someone will remember that when it’s my turn to stumble, again.
Deep breath, you.
— Connie Schultz (@ConnieSchultz) October 29, 2020
User Experience
- With the U.S. election next week, it’s wonderful to see the ballot redesigns in the New York Times interactive good design is the secret to better democracy story by Whitney Quesenbery.
- To follow up on Quesenbery’s story, Dana Chisnell explains how voting is easier than ever, despite long lines.
- For your next user research project:
When scoping any research, the most important thing is to clarify why you are doing it. Research is simply knowledge creation, so what knowledge do you want? What knowledge are you missing?
— Indi Young (@indiyoung) October 25, 2020
- Rather than designing for the content businesses have, Lis Hubert and Diana Sonis discuss how designing for customer intentions produces better outcomes for users.
In other words, we ask the question “What tasks does a customer aim to complete when coming to the website, or when using a product or service?” Then we design the navigation to fill in the answers.
Accessibility
- Creating accessible websites is crucial to providing content everyone can access. UsableNet explains what Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 is and why you should adopt it immediately in your web projects.
- Finally! You can now add live captions to your Zoom call and they’ll work. Note: only available to Otter.ai customers paying for a Business plan or Zoom Pro custsomers.
- Color contrast on websites affects everyone.
I often talk about contrast being important for accessibility, and for folks looking at a page on their mobile device in full sun. But right now, with my back to a window and lots of glare out there, good contrast makes a difference to me seeing my laptop screen. #a11y
— Nicolas Steenhout (@vavroom) October 29, 2020
- Whatever your role is on the web, you don’t want to miss out this free webinar 2020 Legal Update on Digital Accessibility Cases with attorney Lainey Feingold. Hosted by 3Play Media, Feingold will share the latest legal developments in digital accessibility in herone-hour presentation.
WordPress
- The WordPress 5.5.2 security and maintenance release is now available. The release fixes 14 bugs as well as 10 security fixes. If your site has automatic background updates enabled, it will be automatically updates. Since this is a security release, you want to update immediately.
- It’s that time again to complete the annual WordPress survey! If you use WordPress, whether you’re a blogger, designer, developers, manager, content strategist, user experience professional, share your feedback in the survey. It only took me five minutes to complete.
- For WordPress.com site owners, you now have the opportunity to use Patterns, over 100 prebuilt blocks to help you build your posts and pages.
Each Pattern is a collection of different blocks carefully put together to help you produce great looking blog posts and pages in the Editor.
- The latest version of the Editor Plus WordPress plugin brings a set of new blocks and a custom block feature which I think many users will find helpful.
CSS and HTML
- I’m a fan of Charlie Brown’s shirt, which ones would you use for custom horizontal rule and divider in your projects?
- I love getting practical helpful tips to improve my web typography skills. In his latest post, Marc Andrew shares seven tips to help you improve your web typography skills. My favorite? Tip number 6, “…use the Il1 test to determine readability of your chosen Typeface.” The three display correctly on this website!
- Happy Halloween! Thanks to Jamie Coulter for creating “The Caretaker“, a pure CSS puzzle game.
See the Pen
The Caretaker – A pure CSS Horror / Puzzle game by Jamie Coulter (@jcoulterdesign)
on CodePen. - Thought-provoking post from Gerry McGovern about waste in the digital world: our websites, smartphones, computers, and other digital gadgets. We can change. First step: recognize we have a problem. Do you really need all that speed? Do you need to write all that code?
- With credit to RWD Weekly for showcasing html_wysiwyg as their feature site this week: a naked web page that displays all the code. View the live demo to view all the code in a “what you see is what you get” mode.
What I Found Interesting
- Exciting! Wistia is the first video hosting platform to introduce podcasting as a new feature. You can now embed, distribute, and analyze your podcast content.
- Managers don’t always know, or received training, on how to handle difficult conversations when a team member shares their grief. Lara Hogan shares some helpful tips to prepare for those situations including being prepared with a simple response and avoiding jumping into problem-solving mode.
Your job is to absorb information, and then make sure this person has what they need at work.
- To end this week’s roundup, have some fun with Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler, an online site to learn when a word was first used in print.
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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.
