Pixels of the Week – April 5, 2020

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Every week I share a list of curated articles, resources and tools about UX, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, process inspiration and more…

This week’s selection: remote usability testing, alternatives for in-person workshops, a how tech works video, measuring delight, accessibility, user interview field guide,  a nice free ebook on user experience, color contrast checker, color palettes with fun names, cute colorable sheets, Apple’s attack on service workers, design sprints pitfalls, free video games, neon art, the coming back of teaching designers to code, a “are you a real developer” quizz,  etc.

#Now – what I’m up to

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My article on User Journey Maps was featured in Balsamiq’s UX/UI Links of March 2020, super proud.

TL;DNR the one you should not miss

#FrontEnd

RSS is not dead, yeaaah, Impressive Webs is sharing his list of Front-end RSS Feeds (2020 Edition) in case you are looking for people and blogs to follow

Interesting article

#Remote UX Design

“Alternatives to In-Person UX Workshops for Remote Working” by Paul Boag: don’t try to replicate in person workshops, group video calls sucks but 101s are fine so involve stakeholders with 101 sessions and interviews, etc.

#UX Methods #UX Tools

“UX Research Field Guide” offers guides on different user research and user experience design methods ordered in 8 modules. It’s an interesting introduction to understand some of the different methods UX designers use during a project.

#Usability Test

How to create a remote usability test for fast, actionable insights – a good wrap up on how to create an unmoderated usability test, how to recruit, create the tasks and also, don’t forget to test the test.

#UX Design #Journey maps

So you did your user research and built your customer journey map based on this. What do you do with this map now? 7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map by @NNgroup

#Delight

“MeasuringU: How Do You Measure Delight?” 6 different ways to measure delight based on different research literature and models

#Design Sprint

We need to talk about Design Sprints: a great summary of a lot of design Sprint pitfalls, if done wrong they do more damage than good to the design process and the product. And trust me, it’s quite easy to do it wrong (hence the list here)

#UI Patterns

Everyone loves a good checklist because they are say to digest and help us not forget about things. The people at @smashingmag built a Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklists PDF!!

#FrontEnd #BackEnd

How do Websites work? A really nice 10 minutes video explanation to help people understand the difference and relationship between Frontend, Backend, Database

#Accessibility

“Why 2020 is the Year to get Serious About Accessibility: The Supreme Court isn’t Messing Around Anymore and Neither Should You”

#Bias

The “Curse of Knowledge”: How Expertise Can Hurt Marketing. This is true for marketing but also any other fields: conversations with colleagues, teaching, writing articles, even writting documentation (readme on GitHub missing half the information)

#Code #Designer

I’m not sure what to think about this “How Should Designers Learn To Code? Git, HTML/CSS, Engineering Principles” article. Honestly it feels like its fallen in the curse of knowledge trap, it looks easy if you are a dev already knowing hot to do that. I taught and introduction to HTML and CSS basics to designers with ZERO code skills and honestly, most of the people were scared by the dev tool at the beginning. So I would not start with git and NPM, I think it’s the best way to actually scare people away from code. I usually start by “view-source” of an existing website to show them what’s under the hood like “it was there all along, don’t be scared”. Then I have them open text edit and just show them that they can build a page by adding a .html extension ^^ Then I give them local HTML files because I also explain relative vs absolute links. But codepen might do the trick. It really depends on what you teach. I teach HTML day one and CSS day 2 because I’ve seen that beginners struggle if you mix both directly. When I say beginners I mean print designers, projects managers, I also had content writers and a lot of people who wanted to understand basics of HTML and CSS for their job (but didn’t want to become front-end devs). Whole course is online here in French (it was the 3 years ago version though I need to update this with flexbox and grid but I don’t have the time)

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

#Illustrations

The neon style illustration of Aokura is amazing

#Fun

Are you a real developper? Take the quizz

#Todolist

That’s a cute concept: a todo list that grows plants when you complete tasks

News in the industry

#Service Workers

Apple’s attack on service workers: “Safari continues to ignore the existence of progressive web apps. And now it will actively discourage people from using service workers.” What we can do about this? Fill a bug :/

Conference talks and podcasts

#Code

London Creative Coding put 2 hours of talks online

#React
So, @rachelnabors, @NikkitaFTW@gurlcode and @_phzn are organizing a online Women of React conference on April 25, it’s free you can enjoy it from your couch!!!

#Podcast
If you speak French: Masculinités et milieux de l’informatique : comment, alors que l’informatique était un secteur mixte jusque dans les années 80, est-elle devenu un “truc de mecs” ? Un chouette épisode avec un rappel sur l’histoire de l’informatique

#Remote

New episode of “What is wrong with UX” by @lauraklein and @katerutter
with a lot of great tips for remote design. Haa I too usually don’t want to leave the house and now am “meeh I want to go outside, whyyyy”

Ebooks

#Ebook

User Experiences that Matter by Anton Sten is now free, want to learn what UX Design is and isn’t, how to create user experiences and how to design for people, go check it out (there’s also an audio book!!)

Useful tools and plugins that will make your life easy

#Games

If you need to chill out (or let the kids have fun) Ubisoft has a Free Events page where you can find free games. This week it’s Rayman Legends (they also used to have Child of Light which is one of the most beautiful games ever, just buy it!)

#Colors

#Accessibility

A color contrast checker that offers alternatives if your color combination has not enough contrast.

#DesignSystem

Meet Cabana, a Design Starter Kit for Figma

#Image Editing

Glimpse Image Editor – Some people forked GIMP, gave it some UI love and a better less ableist name and here we go 🙂

Other articles you might enjoy:

Published on 5 April 2020

in Pixels of the Week (curated newsletter)

By Stéphanie Walter