Pixels of the Week – July 2, 2023

Contextual inquiry, card sorting, heuristic evaluations, a long horse and a frustrating password game!

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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!

Now: what I’m currently up to

collage of pictures of my 'it depends' pin in a speech bubble, 'talk to your users' in a speech bubble and a crystal

On the professional side, I’m working on some secret collaboration and can’t wait to reveal it. I’m bad at this. So, yeah, come back in 2 week ahaha.

On the craft side, I can share. I’ve got my techwrap order of different vinyls including some holographic glow in the dark ones. I ended up creating some “Talk to your users” and “It depends” pins. Those are MVPs and I need to perfect the technique, but it was a lot of fun. I put the making of on Instagram.  I also created some crystal earrings with iridescent PVC. You can check the fun shadows it projects on the Instagram video.

Interesting frameworks and concepts

If a hammer was like AI, if would have issues in the following areas: obscured data theft, carbon cost, invisible decision making, misinformation, data and privacy breaches, bias and injustice, monoculture and power concentration, accountability project, moderator trauma

If a hammer was like AI…  Per Axbom created a very nice illustration to understand that, AI is a tool, can be used for good or evil.

TL; DNR: the one you should not miss

Democratization won’t save research: very interesting read on how to actually democratize research, aka, help people understand what it is instead of having anyone do it. TL;DNR: If you’re trying to improve your research impact, involve your partners and stakeholders! Just make sure it’s a collaboration and not a handoff. Don’t use democratization to solve a lack of bandwidth. Even if you do it well, you probably won’t save any time doing it

Interesting articles that caught my attention

UX research and design

AI, drawing and other cool reads

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

TV’s Streaming Model Is Broken. It’s Also Not Going Away: long super interesting read on how Netflix disrupted the game, how capitalism is messed and how current streaming model is broken

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Useful tools & resources

  • Uncommon but useful design terms: have you ever heard the terms signifier, chrome (not the browser) , paper cut problem or greeble and wonder “what the hell are we talking about?”.
  • Flowbite Icons: open source SVG icons for your projects. You can play with size and stroke width
  • MusicGen: H-have fun and test a demo for MusicGen, a 12 second AI generated music based on a text prompt
  • The Productivity Stack: a nice place to find productivity tools arranged by task you want to accomplice and categories
  • StoryBird: I gave this story creating AI a try by telling him the story of a fox who bite a friend. Story was not bad, but the images have zero consistency. Not sure why anyone would want to buy this.

Cool and Interesting Videos

  • UXRS Hang Out with Hang Xu “Why Good UX Talent Doesn’t Get Hired”: Hang is spilling some hard truth about how hard it is to find a job in UX, especially if you don’t have experience. He explains the system so that you can better understand how to pass through it.
  • #SUX: Some Users’ Experience: I was recently reminded by Geoffrey that this talk exist. It’s 5 years old, it’s still amazing, and sadly not much has changed in terms of accessibility, we still consider only “some users”, often the ones with disabilities are ignored at best, unwelcome at worse
  • Advanced prototyping with less complexity with variables: Should designers learn to code? Well, not necessarily, but, as soon as you start playing with complex prototyping tools (like Axure or now Figma too), you might want to learn some basics of programming concepts like variables and conditions

Tutorials

  • Custom giraffe caret: this is waaay too cute (but like, please don’t do this in production)
  • Mixing Colors with CSS: this is very cool, I love the usescase where you build a page with a main color and then use the mixing functions to provide alternate color schemes

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