Pixels of the Week – December 15, 2024 by Stéphanie Walter

My curated weekly-ish online newsletter, where I share interesting articles, tools, and resources I found during the week. You can expect content about UX, design, user research, accessibility & tech, but also some processes, some inspiration, sometimes books, and a couple of videos and podcasts. Also, don’t forget to, subscribe to the newsletter to get notified, you will get the weekly links directly in your mailbox, and be notified when I publish other articles.

New stickers and a coupon on my shop!

I’ve teased this a couple of weeks ago, and I’m happy to announce I’ve finally brought the Luna “On Behalf of the Moon…” to the sticker shop! You get to choose between the STFU version, and the more polite “ARHHH” version. I was also playing with glow in the dark paper, so you get 2 versions:

Speaking of glow in the dark, I also brought my Glow in the Dark T-Rex Dinosaur to the shop.

And the Drink Some Water and ADHD As Fuck also got a limited edition glow in the dark version too.

To celebrate the end of the year, and the solstice on Dec 21, I’m adding a coupon on the whole shop as well: use SOL2024 at checkout for -15% on the whole order, including stickers and templates (valid until Jan 5 2025). Might be useful for late gifts.

Visit my shop

Most popular content this week

The Accessibility Quiz Preparing for the CPACC isn’t easy. Ashley Peacock created a nice quiz tool to help you prepare: Test your knowledge across the three core domains of the CPACC certification. That’s a total 150 questions available.

Interesting articles that caught my attention

UX Research

Not everyone needs to be talking to customers (5min) the whole “everyone should do research” pushed by some product gurus is often ineffective. Real collaboration happens when team members use their specific skills instead of trying to involve everyone in everything. 1+1=3 But for this to work, collaboration means more than throwing a couple of people in a room and hoping for the best. I really like the example of the breadboarding given by Ryan Singer. In case you’ve never heard of it: it’s the idea to use simple diagrams with words, to quickly prototype an interaction.
Never skip research day. (12min) My friend Myriam says “bring data to an opinion fight”. This is a nice example of how (A/B preference test in that case) helped influence product roadmap, and get out of personal opinion conflicts. Personal opinion: I would have argued that the while on dark icon has more contrast so it works better for accessibility, but sadly not all teams care about this.

Design and AI

Harsh truths for freelancers and agencies (5 min) Love the “15. Sites that win Awwwards pay 10x less than “boring” enterprise. Enterprise is where the money is.”. Yes, I’ve been saying that for years, money, and a chance to make a different in users’s daily lives! By Hunter Hammonds
AI’s Transformative Impact On Web Design: Supercharging Productivity Across The Industry (8min) an interesting list of AI tools with analysis and examples on how they can help boost productivity in design code, writing and more. The key to harnessing AI’s power lies in working with it collaboratively. By Paul Boag.
The Great Creative Unbundling (6min) AI gives independent creators the tools to rival with traditional organizations, but also gives full companies ways to maintain design with fewer employees. Patrick Morgan explains: “it’s not just about reorganizing human talent to drive business, but about reimagining creative work in an AI-enabled world. The winners won’t just be those who adopt the new tools, but those who discover how to combine AI capabilities with human creativity in novel ways.”

On Accessibility and SEO

Why Accessibility Matters for Your SEO Strategy (12min) Making your website accessible and more inclusive will also benefit your SEO in the long term. From proper heading structures to descriptive alt text, many practices benefit both users and search engines. By Taeke Reijenga

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Floppy disk leather wallet I’m not sure I would buy this, but, still, the concept is quite nice. Maybe as a gift for a geek friend
Comball, a small game in the browsers that blends elements of billiards, color matching, and 2048. You have 15 balls, and from time to time, you will try to combine them with skillful shots. How high can you level up?

Books

Authors Apart A Book Apart closed, but Alan Dalton is trying to keep an updated list of where you can now find all of those amazing books. Some are now released for free by their very generous author.

Useful tools & resources

Research Practice Bookmarks: a collection of research related bookmarks, organized by topics lie facilitation, case studies, interviews, methodologies and more, maintained by Gregg Bernstein

Interesting frameworks and concepts

Information patterns and narrative structures in content (10min) a very nice matrix, with 10 patterns to structure your content for better understanding. Each pattern is illustrated with a small graph and examples of what the pattern is good for. Amazing work by Lauren Pope. She also offers a matrix to help decide which structure should work for your content, based on complexity (simple, short, familiar, complex, long or unfamiliar) and scope (inform, explain persuade, engage) (via Jorge Arango’s newsletter of course)

Pixels of the Week – December 15, 2024