Pixels of the Week – April 7, 2019
Every week I share a list of curated articles, resources and tools about UX, UI and mobile design, Front-End development, HTML, CSS and more…
This week’s selection: screen reader accessibility, HTML5 inputs, 5 Whys, orange and accessibility, dataviz, is responsive design dead, Firefox trying to reduce notification noise, designing for privacy, an avatar generator, a list of awesome design tools and more.
You can follow me on twitter to get a dose of links every days.
What I’m up to
I will be speaking about UI Frameworks and User Experience at the CSS Days UI special in June in Amsterdam this year, there’s still a few tickets let if you want to come to the conference. If you are around, come and say hi 🙂
TL;DNR the one you should not miss
#Accessibility
“Orange You Accessible?” an experiment on users finding white text on orange background easier to read than black text, despite the WCAG guidelines on color contrast. This doesn’t mean that you should not follow the guidelines, the comments in the article by a few accessibility experts explain that there’s more to it than just testing with colorblind people.
And Alastair Campbell added an interesting followup on context being important for color perception: Oddities in color perception
Interesting article
#UX #Design
- “Always Ask Why Five Times” Sometimes users tell us they need [solution] but by asking a few time why, we are able to dig and understand the [need], and maybe come up with a better solution for those users. It helps understand previous design decisions too
- What Design Can Do About Privacy, interesting read on those modals that let you customize private settings as long as you are willing to go through 18 tabs of content
#Browsers #Bad User Experience
We build crappy experiences, browsers have to clean up our mess: Firefox is current trying to fight annoyance caused by websites requesting to send you notifications (and Chrome lets you mute tabs, because a lot of sites play sound without user’s consent). This is sad, because we could build interesting experiences with sound and notifications, but most sites are too greedy or lazy to do this right. So we are shooting ourselves in the foot here. The more annoyance we create, the more browsers will try to protect users.
#Framework
You probably don’t need that hip web framework – If you’re building a new idea, you want to get it to market as fast as you can, so the absolute best thing you can do is ignore all of these new fads, frameworks, and fancy patterns—instead just using whatever works to ship a first cut.”
#Dataviz
Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few, an interesting article with examples of dataviz mistakes and how to correct them.
#E-commerce
2011 but I just discovered this story on Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies, algorithms for the win 🙂
#Responsive Design
Is Responsive Design Dead? – If your front-end-dev says “don’t worry, I’ll handle that stuff in code”, tell him there’s not a chance you’re leaving those details undocumented and up to guesswork” Hell YES
Inspiration, fun demos and Great ideas
#Inspiration #Website #Motion
dogstudio.co this a really beautiful site (but the homepage will plays sound without asking your and kill you CPU though, maybe don’t open on mobile)
Useful tools and plugins that will make your life easy
#Accessibility
HTML attributes – Screen reader compatibility
#HTML5
A sandbox to test the different HTML5 input types
#Design tools
Awesome Design Tools – a nice list of design tools organised by categories
#Avatar
Friendly Faces, a fun and inclusive avatar generator
