September 3, 2021: Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn why it’s important to rethink user personas, discover what the color contrast ratio is all about, find free online games to improve your CSS and flexbox knowledge, 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

Top tip:

Make it easy for busy people to help you.

Make your asks “one-click”:

– Make emails easy to skim
– Make “yes” easy to say
– Make an email easy to forward

etc.

A good heuristic is 30 seconds.

If an action takes more than that, assume you’re asking for too much.

— Eloho Omame (🚢 17/30) (@ElohoGM) August 31, 2021

User Experience

• Personas that focus on visuals rather than information are great for marketing, but not for problem-solving says Cindy Brummer. It’s time to rethink user personas, and create personas that focus on storytelling and relevance.
• In The psychology of design: 15 principles every UI/UX designer should know, Renee Fleck provides a helpful guide of psychology principles (Hick’s Law, cognitive load, etc.) you’ll want to understand as you create your designs.
• Good reminder.
  

  A little UX tip: Take on meaningful work that actually improves lives#UX #UXTips pic.twitter.com/TWr0teMefH

  — Alexander Rådahl 🤓 (@AlexanderRadahl) September 2, 2021

• Help users find what they’re searching for, offer relevant autocomplete suggestions for misspellings in search terms. Despite the importance of autocomplete in search, Baymard Institute’s study discovered 69% of sites don’t support autocomplete suggestions for closely misspelled queries.

Accessibility

• In Color and contrasts, what does it mean? , Erik Kroes discusses how the color contrast ratio is determined and what it means to you, your palette, and project. First I’ve heard of Leonardo for generating color palettes.
• If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, Microsoft and the Accessibility User Research Collective are looking for adult participants for their accessibility study on technology and digital devices. Study participants will be paid.
• Sometimes it takes a personal connection to understand the impact of web accessibility.
  

  “I can’t use my mouse right now. Keyboard access, I get it a LOT more now!”. Said a developer I’ve been working with for nearly a year. He broke his dominant arm in a couple places after falling off his skateboard…#a11y

  — Nicolas Steenhout (@vavroom) August 31, 2021

• Ken Nakata catches us up on the latest legal cases involving accessibility in legal update: August 2021. One of the cases he highlights is a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District. (With my years of work in higher ed, I pay close attention to website accessibility suits against higher ed schools.)

WordPress

• The first release candidate for WordPress 5.8.1 is available for download and testing. The version is scheduled for final release on September 8, 2021.
• Did you know all WordPress versions are named after musicians? Or that you can use WordPress in 205 different languages? Find more amazing stats about WordPress in this post from iThemes.
• She will be missed by me and many other community organizers. After 10 years of working full-time on the WordPress open source project, community leader Andrea Middleton is leaving Automattic to take on a community-focused role at Reddit. Wishing you the best, Andrea!
• Nick Schaferhoff explains why and how to customize the WordPress admin toolbar, providing code to add to your functions.php file as well as plugin recommendations for people who prefer not to code.

CSS and HTML

• Apple is proposing a new HTML element, model, to allow a website to embed interactive 3D models in the browser. Who remembers Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)?
• Have fun learning CSS and flexbox with the free online games I’ve recommended. (CSS Froggy is one of my favorites!)
  
• While not related directly to CSS or HTML, you’ll often find yourself working with low-resolution photos for projects. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could upscale those photos? With Google’s new artificial intelligence photo upscaling technology, you can.
• Excellent resource! Tiffany Brown has published the third edition of CSS Master, with improved and expanded chapters on selectors and layout.

What I Found Interesting

• Want to diversify the teams making critical decisions about how data is used at your organization? Build up their data literacy, says Rasheed Sabar. Key takeaways: make data literacy an organization-wide priority and develop an internal language for speaking about data.
• Happens to me every day.
  

  I’m just a girl, standing in front of a newly opened browser tab, asking it why I opened it in the first place

  — Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) September 2, 2021

• Wish I lived in Chicago so I could see Monty and Rose 2, the feature-length documentary film about the Piping Plovers that captured the hearts of Chicagoans.

If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.

Want to make sure you don’t miss out on updates? Subscribe to get notified when new posts are published.

Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.