Pixels of the Week – August 6, 2023

UX statement earrings, Accessibility workshops, UX research insights and CSS patterns

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On Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon, I share curated articles I read, resources and tools about UX Design, User Research, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, some processes, some inspiration, etc. This is an archive of everything I shared this week. And some extra links that I decided to only share for the blog readers. Also, subscribe to the newsletter to get notified when those are published!

My accessibility workshop(s)

Mashup of 6 of my slides including the first one "accessibility for designers", one with keyboard shorts, one with button color contrast checking, an interactive flow, one with "each page has a unique title that describes the content of that page" as big title, and one with an example of alt tag documentation

Great news, you now have two options if you are interested in my Accessibility Workshop. You’ll learn how to include accessibility in the design phase, what to be careful about, what you can document and annotation, etc.

What I’m up to – Craft Edition

I’ve been testing a lot of new fun things the last couple of weeks.

Shrink plastic

A "talk to your users" pair or earrings, a keychain with an oposum in a trashbin that says "eat trash do crime", a "drink some water" pin, a "ADHD as fuck" pin, a "It depends" pin, shrink plastic pieces before getting cured laying flat on a cutting mat, the same pieces once cured with UV resin on a piece of cardboard while drying

All the fun shrink plastic pieces

First, I gave shrink plastic another try. I bought a heat gun, and it’s a lot of fun. Check the shrinking video of a couple of pieces on my Instagram. I tried some printed ones. To print and get a nice color, you need to make it lighter and desaturate, since it gets darker when you shrink it. I turned them into pins and keychains and some very cool “Talk to your Users” UX statement earrings. The whole series is on Instagram. My main issue with shrink plastic: if sometimes changes shape, so you end up with skewed pieces, and there is little you can do about this. So, you don’t get your perfect print.

Cardboard and PVC

A black cat head skeleton with a moon on its forehead, a pair of moth earrings, the pieces before getting glued together, the moths with some vinyl still on the wrapper, and some purple blue moth earings made with transparent PVC

Cardboard and PVC pieces

While looking for a solution for this, I discovered Kandor, who makes keychains with cardstock. I decided to give it a try and created some Luna inspired pins, and a couple of moths . Again, you can check the video of the making of on Instagram for the Luna  cat and the Moth earrings. I sealed both with UV resin, and added some some mica powder and glitter.

Last but not least, I experimented with 3D mod podge and created some other moth earrings made with iridescent 0.7mm PVC and some vinyl. I sealed them using 3D modpodge. I’ve sealed PVC with UV resin on another piece (check the crystals in my feed) but I didn’t like how it shrinks and got distorted. The  3D mod podge doesn’t do that, so I prefer it that way.

TL; DNR: the one you should not miss

How you can create non-obvious UX research insights (7min) 6 tips to avoid the “yes we already knew that” when presenting UX research reports: start with stakeholder interviews to clarify what they already (think they) know, combine methods, include extreme users when recruiting, build aha moments, present the findings in a narrative, and remember that it’s normal they feel that way too due to the hindsight bias (by Soyeon Lee)

Interesting articles that caught my attention

I’m introducing a time to read after the article link. It’s based on Firefox’s reader mode, but it should give you an idea of how long / short articles are. Let me know what you think of it (by email or social media).

UX Research and design

  • Unmoderated User Tests: Optimize and Scale Your Research (15 min) when to use unmoderated user testing, some advice to optimize them, but also, very important, when you want to avoid this method by Nikki Anderson-Stanier
  • How to Conduct Contextual Inquiry in Usability Testing (7min) a short introduction to this method that involved interacting with users in their usual context (aka you go to them where they are using your product / service), why use them, when, when not to, pros and cons
  • Are data dashboards vanity projects? (12min) not everyone is good at understanding complex data, no matter how visually appealing you present them. Before investing in building data visualizations or dashboards solely because they seem necessary to remain competitive or because that’s what other B2B and B2C products are doing, it’s crucial to consider your users and their actual needs.
  • Product List Usability: Avoid ‘Quick View’ Overlays (12min): I was wondering about the efficiency and usability of those. Turns out, they don’t work well for spec driven sites, focus instead in improving the product list and product page.
  • Gaming UX Research: 5 Lessons to Level-up User Experiences Across Industries: from becoming an “expert” in the subject matter, to observing users going through a complete flow without interrupting, I never noticed that game UX research is actually quite close to doing research for financial services or healthcare. Maybe I could work in game UXR once I’m tired of finance, haha.
  • How do incentives impact bias in UX research? (20min) a long read to help you understand different types of incentives and how they impact user research, and how to mitigate this

Accessibility

  • Web Accessibility in High-Risk Segments (10min): not being accessible is a risk and the best way to mitigate it is to start making meaningful progress on accessibility now. Doing so is the least expensive, least stressful, and most-sustainable approach.
  • 8 common heading questions: let’s debunk a couple of myths and bring best practices around accessibility of headings (h1, h2, etc.)

Other interesting articles

Curiosity cabinet: non-design/tech rabbit holes I enjoyed

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Dragon Typeface: looking for a hot variable font? Meet Dragon, a condensed variable font, with 36 and a lot of different options by Rajesh Rajput

Useful tools & resources

Tutorials

Accessible Animated GIF Alternatives: using the video element to put looping “GIFs” that visitors can control, don’t autoplay when user as reduced motion on, and have a text alternative.

Latest news in the industry

An interesting state of the UX report that focuses on Africa (2022) (shared by Harry ben Bossuki)

Other articles you might enjoy:

Published on 6 August 2023

in Pixels of the Week (curated newsletter)

By Stéphanie Walter