Pixels of the Week – July 9, 2023

Debriefing UX research, a glow in a dark yodelling pickle and a lot of accessibility resources

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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

Smashing Training on “Accessibility for Designers”

I’m super happy to announce that I’m bringing my “Accessibility do Designer” training to the Smashing Conference Antwerpen. It’s going to be a full day (6 hours) workshop that I’ll run on October 12.

Register for the training

Article update, more training, cards, etc.

a collage of a picture of a microphone with screens that show some video editing (behind the scene of my talk recording), a screenshot of the new cards with pastel colors and of the article on color contrast

I’ve also been a very busy little fox.

TL; DNR: the one you should not miss

How to Debrief Your Research Team Post-Session some great tips to help with user research synthesis and a very helpful Miro template you can reuse

Interesting articles that caught my attention

UX research and career

  • Gestalt Principles of Design – Continuity: more examples of Gestalt principles
  • Stop asking UX researchers to defend their sample size, n = 3 reasons to trust your UXR and let them work in peace, haha. True, especially for quantitative research, we determine “sample size” by the principle of saturation.
  • Shape Your Path with a UXR Career Framework career path in UX is sadly often a mess, people don’t know what to expect, how to evaluate us, how to help us grow. Nikki brings you a framework to help you and your teams identify different levels, areas of focus, collaboration and more
  • AI-Powered Tools for UX Research: Issues and Limitations: the technology is promising, but there’s a lot of “market claims” that are just claims, and the tools don’t actually live up to their marketing brochure. So, for now, play with it, but also be cautious and double check everything.
  • The Aura of Care. – Faster and Worse: “UX needs to make clear distinctions between commercial design work and design as a social good so the aura of care is not just an aura. Until that happens we’ll continue to see the worst companies hire the best people to help them make the worst things.” Damn, that hurts, but it’s also sadly true (and why I prefer working in enterprise UX those days)

AI, chatGPT, you know the gist

Accessibility

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

The Comic Natural History of the Human Race: a fun bestiary of drawings from 1851 where the author added satires of people’s heads on top of animal bodies

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Useful tools & resources

  • UI Skeleton Gallery: if you are looking for inspiration for skeleton screens, I got you covered!
  • Online Free Safety Guide: a nice guide to help you prevent potential online harassment. Start with these three steps: 1. create unique, complex passwords, 2. set up two-step verification, 3. remove potential doxxing information
  • Styles to Variables Converter: a Figma plugin to convert all your style into variables so that you don’t need to do it manually
  • Focus txt: a very simple ephemeral daily planner and note taking tool in the browser
  • Type in a Figma Prototype with Your Keyboard: told you it would come: Levi recreated a fake mobile keyboard for your Figma prototyping needs. I love the technical challenge, but it’s a lot of efforts to mimic an HTML field. It would really be amazing if they could simply get “native” HTML form elements, like Axure does. I guess, technically, it’s complex since they generate canvas?
  • Squiggles, scribbles, shapes and… other stuff: a library of over 70 custom-color elements ready to paste into your project.
  • Understanding SVG Paths: a fun interactive playground to understand how SVGs are built, the math and coordinates behind it.

Cool and Interesting Videos

Twitter video thread on cool things you can do with min / max in Figma

Tutorials

Position-Driven Styles: I like it when people just have fun with CSS and explore new techniques, this time, using scroll driven animations

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