In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to build a dedicated usability lab, find out what’s new in the published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, discover how alignment works in flexbox, 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
It’s not the technology that matters. It’s the humans that matter.
Find great people who you enjoy, who treat you well. And work with them on whichever tech stack they want. The tech stack does not matter. What you are making does.
— Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) June 6, 2018
User Experience
- Orchestrating Experiences: In this excerpt from Chapter 2 (“Pinning Down Touchpoints”) of Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity, Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum discuss the importance of experience principles to provide structure and guidelines for an organization.
- The one question you need to ask:
Just because you're running an experiment, doesn't mean you're learning what you set out to.
Always assess the data coming in and ask, "Is this the most important thing I need to learn right now?"
If not, kill the test. Launch a new one.
— Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) June 6, 2018
- The UX of User Research Surveys: While surveys are a cost- and time-effective way to get a lot of feedback, all that information can be overwhelming. Discover Sarah Doody’s one tip to help you write survey questions that provide quality responses.
How can we make it easier on ourselves to make sense of survey responses and give the respondent a better user experience?
- How to Build a Dedicated Usability Lab: If your organization is conducting more than the occasional usability test, you’ll want to consider setting up a dedicated space for a usability lab.
Accessibility
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Recommendation: The big news this week in the web accessibility world is the published standard of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Find out what’s new in WCAG 2.1 along with quotes from personas to better understand the success criteria.
- Making WSJ.com more accessible: With the launch of the new Wall Street Journal site (wsj.com) home page for mobile devices comes a more accessible experience for users. And a commitment to their recently written accessibility guidelines (Google Doc)>
- Another reason to use native HTML, and not create custom controls.
WOW! Another reason to use Native HTML inputs like <input type=tel>, <input type=date>, & native <select> over custom controls made of <div> tags. The native controls will work on Apple Watch and already have #A11y included for free! pic.twitter.com/2sYipJx0Kx
— Paul J. Adam (@pauljadam) June 6, 2018
- How to Add Alternative Text to Facebook Photos: Everyone I asked didn’t know you could add alternative text to the photos you post on Facebook. So I wrote a quick tutorial on how to do it.
WordPress
- Delivering WordPress in 7KB: Can you imagine a WordPress site that only uses 7KB? That’s what Jack Lenox did with SustyWP, created using sustainable design and development techniques.
- Gutenberg Webinar Series: The last webinar (on June 12) in Pantheon’s five-part Gutenberg series features my friend Birgit Pauli-Haack, creator of Gutenberg Times. She’ll discuss how she keeps up with the changes in Gutenberg.
- The Menace of WordPress Theme Creep: I’m not a fan of WordPress theme creep. Losing data and functionality when you change themes is frustrating. That’s why I recommend adding functionality with plugins.
- Jetpack 6.2: General Maintenance: While announced as a general maintenance release, you’ll find a number of new features in the 6.2 release, including support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and improvements in the cookies & consent widget.
CSS and HTML
- 1 Element CSS Rainbow Gradient Infinity: Wow. Can you image using one element to create this infinity rainbow?
- Specificity in :not(), :has(), and :matches(): Eric Meyer walks you through how specificity will be calculated for grouped selectors in :not(), :has(), and :matches ().
- How CSS has changed over the past few years.
No more “Ugh I want to use this but support is so bad” most of the times. Sure there are exceptions at times, but most of today’s best CSS additions can be layered on top of a basic experience very well.
— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) June 2, 2018
- A Comprehensive Guide to Flexbox Alignment: Struggling to figure out flexbox alignment? This guide can help!
What I Found Interesting
- Microsoft buys GitHub for $7.5 billion: The rumors started last weekend. And by Monday the technology world was abuzz with the news that Microsoft had bought open-source GitHub.
- Cool Backgrounds: Create some cool gradient, trianglify, topography backgrounds with this free online tool.
- A Digital First Approach Is the Way Forward for Brand Design: What happens when digital and brand designers don’t work together? A second-rate digital brand experience for users.
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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.
