In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll find a seven-step process for moving from research goals to usability testing scenarios, learn about architecture and accessibility, discover myths about fonts, 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 projects!
Want more resources like these on a daily basis? Follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
Tweet of the Week
Please tell creators when you like their work even if you're shy because the bad comments tend to drown out the good ones in our heads
— Arden 💀✨ (@sproutella) September 15, 2017
User Experience
- From Research Goals to Usability-Testing Scenarios: A 7-Step Method: The seven-step process Susan Farrell describes will help you develop usability study goals, decide what to test, and craft user scenarios.
- Designer’s Self-Checklist: what kind of designer are you or want to become?: What characteristics make up the designer you are or want to be? Are you a master of craftsmanship? An innovator, communicator, learner, writer, or community organizer?
- What are the roles of designers and project managers?
Designers have to bring clarity about what problems users need to solve. PMs have to bring clarity about which ones NOT to solve.
— Kim Goodwin (@kimgoodwin) September 19, 2017
- More Human than Human?: Designing a Conversational User Interface (UI): Listen to Steph Hay, vice-president of design for artificial intelligence experiences at Capital One, as she shares her experiences in crafting conversational UIs and her insights into the Reserve restaurant application approach.
Accessibility
- Writing CSS with Accessibility in Mind: If you read last week’s roundup, you’ll enjoy this post from Manuel Matuzovic. His slide presentation I shared with you last week has been published as a blog post with tips for writing accessible CSS.
- London Accessibility Meetup #6: Thanks to Alastair Campbell for publishing his notes from this month’s London Accessibility meetup. I agree with him about testing: beginning with keyboard testing can reveal issues more quickly.
- Architecture and Accessibility: Shoutout to my friend Emily Plummer for her guest post on my blog this week, focusing on architecture and accessibility.
- A11y Win – Safari 11 Blocks autoplay video: While social media channels are making autoplay the default, I’m glad to see Safari 11 has taken a user-centered approach. You can disable autoplay for all sites or for selective sites.
WordPress
- WordPress 4.8.2 Security and Maintenance Release: Eight security issues are fixed in this week’s WordPress 4.8.2 release. Your sites will have been updated automatically earlier this week, unless you’ve disabled autoupdate.
- Perspective on WordPress: When it comes to setting up an eCommerce site, using WordPress is not the easiest process, says Scott Bollinger. I hear this frequently from our Metro Detroit WordPress members: why is it so hard to set up an eCommerce WordPress site?
We need to pay attention to what other technologies are doing better than WordPress, and acknowledge it.
- Two More Ways to Sell on Your Site with a Payment Button: With the new payment features available in WordPress.com Premium and Business plans, you can now set up payment buttons for events or books, music, or art.
- On WordPress, and all other open source products:
Stop treating open source like a product you purchased and start treating it like a team you belong to.
— Jon Kuperman (@jkup) September 18, 2017
- Notes & Slides: Building a Journalist-Friendly Online Newsroom with WordPress: Excellent post on using WordPress to create a newsroom for anyone working at a newspaper, as well as authors, media relations (I immediately thought of higher education use cases), community organizations, and more.
CSS and HTML
- A Historical Look at Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT) and Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT): Think that the flash of unstyled text is a recent issue? Think again. It dates back to 1997, when Internet Explorer introduced it with @font-face support. (Yes, I was coding pages in 1997.)
- On Specialisation: My colleague Ian Devlin talks about his work in frontend development and how he came to specialize in HTML. I’m glad more people are talking about the issue of specialization, and the lack of respect for HTML and CSS knowledge.
- Removing the White Bars in Safari on iPhone X That notch on the new iPhone X has everyone discussing the problems with letterboxing in landscape mode. Thanks to Stephen Radford for sharing two simple CSS fixes for it.
- What to avoid in your HTML email:
Including dangerous content in your email like JavaScript and <embed> is very likely to get your email blocked. Don't do it. #litmuslive
— Chad S. White (@chadswhite) September 21, 2017
- Falsehoods programmers believe about fonts:
Fonts are free
andSomeone else will check the font license
are two of the 43 font myths (as of September 22, 2017) included in this list by Roel Nieskens. Which ones have you heard?
What I Found Interesting
- Move fast and fix things: building the best hurricane response process in 12 hours.: I love sharing these kinds of stories! A fix anticipated by a company who knew they needed to create a better solution, focused on meeting the needs of their customers.
Hundreds of customers were going to need our help, all of them at the same time, many of them having the worst day of their lives.
- This argument has been going on for 30 years.
OK ok ok… I think I've figured this out. How do you pronounce:
gab
get
git
got
gutOK, now, how do you pronounce
gifSee?
— Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) September 20, 2017
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