Pixels of the Week – March 9, 2025

UX Banana testing, a fishy doorbell, a HTML & CSS dungeon game and UX micro-tips

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 up to

Screenshot of the article on user diaries, in French, on my own blog

If you speak French, I’ve published  a translation of my Improving User Experience with Diary Studies article, on the French part of the blog: Améliorer l’expérience grâce au journal de bord.

I’ll also be live next Tuesday, with Debbie Levitt, to talk about how you can tell your project stories, in your portfolios, you can join us on Tuesday 11, 7pm CET, on YouTube or join us on  Stream.

Most popular content this week

​How To Test And Measure Content In UX (10min) wait, I’ve never heard of banana testing, when you replace key actions with bananas, sounds like a fun with to test visual structure of a page and user’s mental model (by Vitaly Friedman)

Interesting articles that caught my attention

  • The web on mobile (10min) modern websites are almost as capable, on paper, as natives apps. Yet, the mobile web remains a frustrating experience: intrusive ads, overlays and poor performance due to bloated frameworks. This isn’t a technical issue, according to Jeremy Keith, it’s a cultural one: business models prioritize tracking users, and we push users into apps over mobile websites, because, we can track way more in native apps. I sadly have to agree with this analysis, we have the medium to make the “mobile web” great, we just don’t want to. By Jeremy Keith
  • The Six Cs of Accessibility (7min) Explaining accessibility can be challenging, here is a 6 C elevator pitch to help you: compassion, collaboration, consistency, customary, celebration, conscience.
  • The effort paradox in AI design. Why making things too easy can backfire (10min) what does Ikea and Betty Crocker Cake mix have in common? They are successful, because people love to do thing themselves (we even have a cognitive bias called Ikea effect). It’s the same for AI tools: if the tool does everything, it can reduce users’ sense of ownership and satisfaction.  The challenge: designers need to find the right balance between automation and human involvement. By Sean J. Savage
  • AI-First: Designing the Next Generation of AI Products (10min) another article on what you need to think about, when designing AI tools: designers must adapt to flexible interfaces, assist users with prompts, manage AI errors, and rethink user journeys how traditional user journeys can be adapted. And on the topic of design AI tools: Thinking past the cliche of LLM’s AI design patterns, an interesting rant by Matt Jedraszczyk on how most AI tools all look alike, with a couple of examples of tools going beyond the traditional chat pattern, turning more into companions.
  • UI & UX micro-tips: 8-bit anniversary edition (10min) 36 powerful tips to help improve your designs instantly, by Marc Andrew

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

The Fish Doorbell Utrecht has the world’s first fish doorbell. There is a manually operated lock in the city. When closed, fishes have to way, which wastes their energy. To help them, an under water camera was installed. If a fish appears, you can presss the doorbell, and it will alert the lock keep, who wil unlock when many fishes are waiting. Could this be automated by machine learning? Maybe, but, what would be the fun in that? Happy fish watching!

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Divided We Fall an absolutely fun game, to help you learn HTML and CSS, while being a jelly cube, going in an adventure in a dungeon.

Useful tools & resources

  • DesignFast: Mesh Gradient Generator I like mesh gradients, especially pastel ones, so, I’m biased, and this is a fun little Figma plugin
  • An Updated Guide to Generations: if you are lost in translation and wonder what Generation Alpha or Zoboomafoomers are, trust me, you need this guide.
  • Streamin a tool to find out where to watch movies and TV shows, based on your country. The legal offer is Luxembourg is quite small and depressing.

Cool and Interesting Videos

AI and Accessibility: the Good, the Bad, and the Bollocks (video 34min) a refreshing talk, where Léonie Watson cuts through the clickbait, to bring you the good, the bad, and the bollocks of AI and accessibility. With examples of discriminative AI (text, image recognition) and generative AI (alt text generation, voice reproduction, etc) she explains how AI has and will continue to improve accessibility. She raises concerns around the usage of overlays powered by AI. She warns us relying on AI for code generation: double check it!

Tutorials

Other articles you might enjoy:

Published on 9 March 2025

in Pixels of the Week (curated newsletter)

By Stéphanie Walter