Pixels of the Week is my weekly-ish curated newsletter for designers, UX folks, devs, and anyone building accessible, inclusive, usable (and let’s be honest, awesome) digital products. This week we cover how to mitigate AI generated strong opinions presented by humans as insights and how to do inclusive research with vulnerable users. Also: the fun Fraude satyr website, some open source icons and  3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG.

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Now: what I’m currently up to

A lot happened in the last 5 months with my current client. I won’t enter into the details, but, I’m happy to announce I’ve been promoted (kind of, still a consultant, but, internally promoted) and will be the official UX Lead, in charge of building and maintaining a whole design system, that should centralize many tools for this client. This is huge because until now there was no centralization, and a lot of inconsistencies across all their tools. It’s, going to be a big task, but, I’m excited. I’ll still do a lot of user research, for the fundamental high level parts of the tool, but also, to bring components to this design system. I’m also curious to explore a couple of things that can be put in place around accessibility with design systems and design system governance. Yeahy!

Also, hot take of the week: I’m growing tired of companies slapping the “AI” label on everything. So, folks, you don’t need AI to check color contrasts. You just, need a good old math formula. That’s it. You also don’t need AI, to get suggestions for colors that pass the contrast ratio. Actually, you don’t WANT AI if it’s a probabilistic model, since you want predictability and reproducibility.  For contrast color tools, I have a whole article about color contrast tools and more to help you build accessible color palettes. 

And list, little reminder, if you are in Paris next week I’ll run my accessibility journey mapping workshop at Flupa UX days. Let’s have some coffee if you are at the event!

Most popular content this week

Strong opinions, loosely held — and what that means in the age of AI  (13min) We’ve all been in a situation where someone came with a strong opinion to the meeting. But as soon as you start digging, you understand it’s not their opinion, but an AI generated one. And it’s going to happen more and more. AI can help with analysis, yup. But it can’t replace lived experience. And product discovery (aka user research) it what helps turn opinions into hypotheses that can then be tested to improve products. I love this quote: “Next time someone hands you an AI-generated analysis, ask them what their opinion is of the findings they’re about to present? Ask them what would have to be right for their point of view to be true? If the answers cause friction, your conversation is headed in the right direction. That friction is where their actual opinion lives.” Great article by Jeff Gothelf.

Interesting articles that caught my attention

On the right tool for the job (5min) Karl Koch answers the question “how do you work”. Short version: it depends. I like the part about having to steer the tools a lot: “The agent is not a designer. It is not a front-end engineer. It is a very fast collaborator that will do almost exactly what you tell it, and nothing it has not been told. If you do not know what good looks like, you will get something that is technically correct and aesthetically dead (…) The agent turns knowledge into output faster than you could. It does not replace knowledge. Do not skip the part where you learn how things actually work.“

The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs (12min) the promise of “passive income” pushed people into building more or less scammy systems instead of solving real problems. And we are left with dropshipped junk websites and affiliate spam. And that’s just for people selling physical goods. The article doesn’t mention it, but, once you start selling digital goods like templates, ebooks, or, like one of my friends, crochet patterns, you discover a whole world of people illegally selling your own content. And taking those places down is like fighting hydras: you cut one head, two appear. Giant mess.

Six Characters (13min) What the PNR (Passenger Name Record) locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist. The kind of super geeky article I loved, especially since I worked for an airline company in the past.  You quickly discover the amount of legacy in this industry is huge, and a lot of things can’t be changed since they must be international and work everywhere. By Ajitem Sahasrabuddhe

Inclusive user research: vulnerable people (10min) Some very important key consideration, when running research with vulnerable people: involve them only when necessary, be mindful about their privacy, flag sensitive topics in advance and be careful with trauma related topics when you build your question guide, offer participants a way out, and remain neutral. Also, such kind of research can be challenging and emotionally draining for the researcher, make sure you too get training and support. By Ela Gorla

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Fraude Design a parody of Claude design, with quite a compelling landing page: “Finally, bringing terrible design decisions to production can be done under the guise of gaslighting yourself into believing the thing you’ve made is actually good.”

Useful tools & resources

heerich.js  why would you need a tiny JavaScript engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG? Not sure. But, it’s very cool.

The Sites We Lost is a collection of sites that we lost and got hosted on The useless web for safe keeping.

Griddy Icons an open-source set of icons. I do like the simple line style. Designed By Filip Gres and Developed By Zuzana Benova

Conference

Yeah folks, I’ve spoken at UX London 2 years ago, and had an amazing time! It’s a great event if you want to level-up your UX skills. I really enjoyed the many workshops to practice, and great curated talks are in a single track, so no FOMO! This year’s line up is great, go check it out!

Tutorials

AI-Generated UI Is Inaccessible by Default  (15min) 5 layouts to help you build more accessible components if you are using AI, and how to solve some common failure patterns (invisible modals, icon only buttons, etc.) by Durgesh Rajubhai Pawar

Also, don’t miss Eric Bailey’s Here’s how to instruct a LLM to reference the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide: don’t instruct the LLM use the full ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) because it was build as a showcase and some of those code examples are unreliable. Instead, reference the pattern name,  “about this interactions” and “keyboard interaction” sections, to, I quote “help to push a LLM towards only slurping up the salient bits.