Pixels of the Week – March 16, 2025

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.

Now: what I’m currently up to

I’m happy to announce I’ll be talking at uxconvienna, in October this year!
I’ve a nice talk on including edge cases, states, user preference, situation in the design process, to avoid issues, harm, and assumptions. And a (not announced yet) workshop on Information Architecture). It should be a fun couple of busy days. Also, the whole line-up is super nice!! Tickets are still in early birds, so, now is a good time to join us.

Most popular content this week

freespoons a list of products, tools and services to make disabled people’s lives easier. It’s nicely organised by different disabilities and you can filter them. You can also suggest a tool or products. Created by Ashley Peacock.

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Interesting articles that caught my attention

This page is under construction (14min) “Somewhere along the way, websites stopped being about the creators, and started being about the consumers: we don’t build websites for ourselves like we used to, we build them for the audiences we want.” a plea to build your own website, away from social media, to have your own place for fun, to experiment, HTML, CSS, the tools never changed,We can still be creators for the sake of creating. We can still post content without someone else making money from it. Just have fun! By Sophie Koonin

UX and product design

• AI transparency in UX: Designing clear AI interactions a comparison of AI components and patterns from GitLab’s Pajamas, IBM’s Carbon, Twilio’s Paste’s design systems, and some ideas to improve those
• Use of AI In UX: Insights from Recent Research (10min) a summary by Dr Maria Panagiotidi of different studies that show UX teams lack of AI policies (so AI usage falls upon individual usage), AI is mostly used for writing tasks, and people need training to follow evolution of those tools.
• Why most products today are meh. (10min) Most digital products today feel like vanilla ice cream: generic and uninspired. Or worse: their journey is a nightmare, from poor copy that forces users to sign it to check if the product has what they need (plot twist: no), to the impossibility of leaving because their unsubscribe process is broken. This happens because they prioritize short-term performance metrics over meaningful user experiences. So, what can designers do about this? Well, the usual: focus on understanding users, while also trying to understand the reason behind the short term metrics (business needs) and maybe challenge them to get a more global picture of the whole journey. By Ed Orozco

Accessiblity and inclusive design

• Usability testing with disabled users is a good investment (4min) “The European Accessibility Act requires things to work for disabled people. It does not require things to conform to a specific accessibility standard. So we should use the standards, such as WCAG, to guide our work. But we must make sure what we design and build actually works for disabled folks.” This means: do usability tests, with disabled users! By Nicolas Steenhout
• WCAG Colour Contrast: What does the 4.5:1 ratio actually mean? (10min) in case you want to geek about contrast ratio, how different types of vision work, relative luminance to better understand WCAG algorithm for color contrast calculation. By Dave Davies
• Form accessibility and usability beyond the basics (10min) great tips on autofill and paste functionality, accessible error message patterns, usable and accessible date field and auto formatted fields, to improve your forms and make them more inclusive. 2023, but still relevant in 2025, trust me, most forms out there are a mess to use.

Useful tools & resources

• BookWatch if you don’t enjoy reading books, and are more of a visual learner, maybe you will enjoy this online library that provides video animated summaries of non fiction books
• Guide: Component naming manifesto in case you need inspiration for how to name components in Figma, Luis Ouriach has an interesting guide, directly as a Figma file you can re-use. It has components names, types, instances, child layers, variants properties, values and more.
• Skew a fun little Figma plugin to skew objects with precision. Please don’t use this for those horrible portfolio with highly skewed mockups though, those are annoying!
• Notification Psychology Lab: a fun 6 lessons online game, that helps you understand the psychology techniques that make notifications so hard to ignore.
• FarbVélo is a playful color picking tool, and I love the pastel color schemes it lets me create. I have no idea what I would use this for, though, I’m thinking cute illustration. There are also fun built in interactions: clicking and dragging or swiping on the background will change the palette padding, same if you play with left/right keys.

Podcast

How to find work you love an interesting talk with Bob Moesta, the co-autor of Jobs to Be Done, who wrote a “Jobs Moves” book, about finding the right job for you. I like the idea of identifying what gives you energy, and drains you, so that you can be more happy in your next job.

Tutorials

A beginner’s guide to manual accessibility testing: a detailed guide to help you start with keyboard testing, screen reader testing, zoom testing, including details instructions on things to check for each. Testing should cover key pages, and issues should be tracked in a clear, structured way to help prioritize fixes. By Whitney Lewis