In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn whether using face emojis offers benefits for rating options, find a three-day free online course on multimedia accessibility, discover how to use the new Recipe Block plugin in WordPress, 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!
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Tweet of the Week
Good managers lead from the place of direction upfront, not correction after the fact. The goal is to empower your team with everything they need to succeed, not come behind them and tell them what they did wrong when you haven’t set clear expectations.
— Lisa Angela (@intrepidleeloo) September 10, 2020
User Experience
Calculating Return on Investment (ROI) is a powerful tool for building buy-in
from management for your projects, since it demonstrates how UX is good for business, says Kate Moran as she explains the 3 myths of ROI in UX.- Considering different labels for your rating scales? You’ll want to read Measuring U’s recent study of face emoji ratings vs numbers for response options. Personally, I enjoyed their summary!
- When you remove the complexity of your products and services, for example, simplifying the design with color and typography, you draw user’s attention to the most important areas of your design.
- If you tried to visit UX Matters this week, one of my favorite UX websites that I’m happy to support financially, you may have noticed it’s asking you to log in. UX Matters announced today their web host’s server was hit with malware. They’re working on resolving the issue.
Accessibility
- In his latest post, my colleague Neil Milliken asks how we can make accessibility sustainable at scale.
We already have legislation on accessibility but it is frequently not enforced, which leads to organizations taking the gamble that they won’t be penalised.
- No need to use external tools to check color contrast ratio in your Webflow designs. You can now check text color contrast with the built-in Webflow tool.
- Thinking of using the title attribute for a tooltip? Think again.
This is why native tooltips via the title attribute don’t work for me. Yes, I use a large mouse pointer. No, information doesn’t have to be hidden, so custom tooltips aren’t the solution because other reasons. #a11y pic.twitter.com/wFcON0v1zo
— Amy Carney (@click2carney) September 10, 2020
- Have you registered for ACCESS At Home? Hosted by 3PlayMedia, the three-day online free course focused on multimedia accessibility kicks off September 14, 2020.
WordPress
- The latest Jetpack plugin includes email marketing tools with Creative Mail integration, allowing store owners to synchronize their contacts to their email lists.
- WordPress.com has added a new revenue stream feature with the Donations block, which allows you to accept donations, tips, and contributions on your WordPress.com site.
- For anyone who publishes blog posts with recipes, you’ll find the new Recipe Block plugin to be a great choice for your blog. I agree with the reviewer: I hope the plugin author chooses to add schema to the plugin.
- In this tutorial, Eric Karkovack walks you through the steps of creating a simple Gutenberg block in WordPress.
CSS and HTML
- I’ve never worked with CSS perspective, have you? In his CSS Tricks post, Amit Sheen explains how CSS perspective works and shows you how to create a fully animated 3D cube.
- Learn about color contrast, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines conformance levels, and how to use the color contrast curve in the color picker to create compliant designs in Una Kravets’ 12-minute video.
- Wondering what tools you have in your toolbox for creating responsive designs, beyond media queries? David Atanda highlights newer HTML and CSS features for responsive designs.
- In her designing with reduced motion for motion sensitivities post, Val Head explains how you can use
prefers-reduced-motion-mediaCSS feature to create innovative designs that respect users’ motion sensitivity needs.
What I Found Interesting
- Do you remember Archie? It was the very first search engine, released 30 years ago this week.
- How can rural school districts get Internet access to students? For the Louisa County Public Schools district, where 40 percent of students don’t have reliable home internet, they turned to solar-powered Wireless on Wheels units.
- I heard the same story about Grace Hopper, a moth, and the first computer bug. But did you know the concept of a bug dates back to Thomas Edison, 70 years before Hopper?
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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.
