Pixels of the Week – July 10, 2022

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Every day, I share on Twitter and LinkedIn a list of curated articles I read, resources and tools about UX Design, User Research, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, some process, some inspiration, etc. This is an archive of everything I shared this week.

#Now – what I’m up to

Information Architecture - How to Design Adaptive Components and Pages (3-hr workshop) How do you build reusable components that can adapt to different layouts, design and needs? You start by understanding your users’ needs regarding the content of the site. And then, you use this to build a strong information architecture to provide them with what they need to accomplish their goal. In this workshop I teach you my adaptive step by step framework to help you build your own pages and components, from user needs to low fidelity wireframes. This workshop will go through: user flow, creation of a content model, content prioritisation based on user needs, list/detail pattern identification, creation of low fidelity wireframes for pages and reusable components. Bonus: we will also see how the techniques in the workshop can be used to help you design responsive sites and prioritise content across different screens as well. We will work in groups on small information architecture exercises on my Miro board template. An empty version of that template will be available after the workshop so that you can do the same exercise on your own content. No prior knowledge is required. But some basic knowledge on user research and information architecture will help. Please note that we won’t enter into the details on how to conduct the research though. The workshop is using Miro boards and sadly those are not accessible yet to screen readers by default. But please let us know if you have any accessibility needs and we will try to do our best to find a solution to accommodate those as best as we can.
#Workshop
I will be facilitating a workshop on “Information Architecture – How to Design Adaptive Components and Pages” at Concentric on Tuesday 18 October 2022. You can register to mine and other awesome people’s workshops.

Also, I can you believe I did not create an accessibility category on my blog? So, here we go, fixed, accessibility category!

I also talked about accessibility and the words we use in a twitter thread:

TL;DNR the one you should not miss

#CSS

Here is a nice generator to build cute little CSS shadows that use 2 colors

Interesting article

#UI

Why do we call it breadcrumbs? Diving into the history of UI components. Fun read on why the radio button is called like that and other UI elements. I still wonder about snack bars and chips (material UI), maybe hungry developers?

#Good Design

#Deceptive Patterns

Why it’s time to update our language about bad design patterns

#Button

Designing the perfect button – Interesting article on button that could be sum up by “obvious and labels always win”, yet a lot of sites still have poorly designed buttons so those are good little tips

#Privacy

#Touch

Touch-First Cursor: Round Pointers vs. Mouse Arrows, interesting article on what is going on with pointers those days

#Diversity

“Beyond Pride: The fight against tech’s brogrammer culture” very interesting article on why we need actual diversity change at work, beyond the fake rainbow flags once a year for pride month

#Accessibility
Wow, there a lot to know but also a lot you can do with Windows High Contrast Mode

#Portfolio

“Should You Have a UX Research Portfolio?” interesting, but from what I discussed with juniors & seniors recently, sadly a lot of companies now expect portfolios, even for research roles. I like the PDF format though, low maintenance is great.

#Crypto

Interesting article on crypto that goes against the “it’s just bad” and tries to shed some light on some of the use-cases in different countries: What is the point of crypto?

#Mobile UX

Interesting article on the strategy between the wikipedia mobile app, how and why they build a native app despite the web having more and more capabilities. I’m still not sure they do anything that could not be done with web though.

#Roles Responsibilities

In case you never heard of RACI (roles and responsibilities) matrices, here’s an example of how this can be applied to define roles in a team, but also responsibilities and accountabilities when sometimes roles overlap between people

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

#SVG Filter

This is really fun (be careful if you use it though it makes the text unreadable pretty fast): a turbulence SVG filter

Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy

#Tech

12 important feminist tech principles (and a PDF poster). Don’t forget to check the contributor page to discover all the awesome people behind this initiative.

#Tools

A big list of Design tools (UX, UI, Design system, hand-off and more) that you can compare to help you find the one that will fit your needs

#CSS

Defensive CSS: Practical CSS and design tips that helps in building future-proof user interfaces, interesting little site by @shadeed9
to help you prepare you CSS for when things might break

#Privacy #Fonts

If you don’t want to self host your fonts, you could use bunny, a zero-tracking and no-logging font host. Great replacement for Google Fonts

#Tool

For the people who use the pomodoro method, here is a cute little timer in the browser

#Game Design

In case you want to learn game design, here are some books to help you get started (by @schellgames)

Videos and podcasts

#Accessibility

“If it’s clickable it must be get-to-able and operable with they keyboard” says Bruce Lawson and here’s a small video by Bruce and Taylar Bouwmeester to help you understand the why you need to make things keyboard accessibility with a nice demo

#Arcane

Haaa I missed the Arcane honest trailer, and yup, 100%, zero notes this is perfect

Other articles you might enjoy:

Published on 10 July 2022

in Pixels of the Week (curated newsletter)

By Stéphanie Walter