Pixels of the Week – November 10, 2024

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

Next Wednesday (November 13), I’ll be talking about user diary studies and how we used that method to help collect feedback to inform design decisions for the redesign of a big enterprise tool used by more than 2000 internal people. You can join us on YouTube, or join via the LinkedIn event.

I’m also working on a fun illustration for a friend that I turned into a sticker. It’s a big reference to Sailor Moon, and one of my favorite cat in anime history, Luna. I’ve been experimenting with glow in the dark paper, but I’m not happy about the result, it’s too greenish. I’ve ordered paper from another brand and we’ll see how this goes. So, it’s not in my sticker shop yet, but, soon. The current version is for my friend and uses STFU (shut the F up), but, I’m thinking about having a more, hum, polite version, like replace it with “shhhhhh”, or, maybe “hush” (as suggested in a LinkedIn comment by Melanie). If you have other ideas to make the last part more polite while keeping the message, you can comment on TwitterX, LinkedIn, Mastodon, or Bluesky.

Most popular content this week

NN/g’s Free UX Templates and Guides: NN/g brought some templates and guides for inspiration and to accelerate your product development activities and UX career. Most are in PDF though so you will need to copy and paste and adapt them.

If you need more advanced templates, but also tools (like cards, full Miro /Figjam boards, checklists, etc.) I’ve also a couple of templates on my shop that could help you with UX research, cognitive biases and accessibility.

Interesting articles that caught my attention

• Making Accessibility Accessible (7min) On MacOS, you could use tools like Voice Control, Hover Text, and the VoiceOver caption panel to better understand accessibility threw practice, and help developers visualize and evaluate accessibility issues. This should help make accessibility more tangible for you and your teams.
• The Current State of Mobile App UX (10 Common Pitfalls & Best Practices) (14min) Time to fix them and make mobile ecommerce apps more inclusive in the process, because a lot of them are also accessibility issues. Great benchmark by Baymard Institute.
• Research Plans: Organize, Document, Inform (8min) an introduction to UX research plans, their goals, how to create one, and a couple of free templates.
• The Best Prompts Start as Conversations: SNAP: Speak, Note, Analyze, Polish, an interesting way to use AI generative tools (like ChatGPT) to bring more creativity. With a prompt you can copy paste to get you started. By Patrick Morgan.

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

Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2024, yes they are back, costumes so mundane you have to explain them, 2024 edition!

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

• 3-axis sphere packing an interesting theeJS demo by Sergey Borovikov
• Halloween Postcards, ca. 1900–1920 a collection of Halloween postcards in the public domain, and friends, some of those are scary!
• One Square Minesweeper hahhaah, hahhaa.

Books

The Small Business Accessibility Playbook for WordPress a 44-page free (you must give your email) ebook, that will explain why accessibility is important, it’s impact, and how to test your accessibility (WordPress and browser plugins) and fix issues. Full disclosure: they are selling an accessibility scanner plugin, so the check in WordPress uses their plugin, but, the content of the ebook is still nice.

Useful tools & resources

• PlayDOSGames.com this week’s procrastination, brings back some good memories: play DOS games in a modern way! This site features 639 original DOS games. Should keep you busy a couple of hours.
• Grayscale a Figma plugin to turn you mockups into gray scale. It usually helps evaluate visual hierarchy.  I’m not sure if I would use this for usability testing though, if it’s a high fidelity mockup users might just be confused as to why we go high fidelity in grayscale, but on wireframes, why not.
• Beautifully crafted animated icons  an open-source (MIT License) collection of smooth animated icons for your projects.

Tutorials

Tooltip Best Practices  a couple of tips (haha) to develop tools tips, including how to provide contextual description for screen readers, and a couple of dos and don’t. Also, remember that since touch users don’t have hover, they won’t get the label, so, do you really want to hide it under a tooltip in the first place?

Conferences

The Dos and Don’ts of Disability Representation in Media an amazing talk by Xian Horn with examples of ableist bad representations of disabled people in the media, but also good examples, so that you have a large panel of advice and best practices to help bring better representation

Latest news in the industry

• The Vatican’s new ‘pop culture’ anime mascot raises eyebrows Maybe brown on green on Luce’s boots wasn’t the best design choice, the first thing I see is an anime character with demon blood on her shoes. But, I just finished Demon slayer, I might be biased.
• Introducing ChatGPT search following Perplexity’s example, chatGPT can search the web when needed. Not sure what this means for SEO though. But, at least you will get access to the sources then.