Pixels of the Week - October 24, 2021 by Stéphanie Walter

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Every day, I share on Twitter and LinkedIn a list of curated articles I read, resources and tools about UX Design, User Research, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, some process, some inspiration, etc. This is an archive of everything I shared this week.

#Now – what I’m up to

I am featured this week in the Introducing___ instagram account, if you are curious about my work, check this 4min small video! Also, November 11 is World Usability Day. I’m participating this year and hosting an online participatory webinar on “Testing the “Abusability” of your products & services”. Will you come? >> Registration via eventbrite

TL;DNR the one you should not miss

#UX Theatre

UX design has a dirty secret: Too often, designers are asked to perform UX Theatre, which doesn’t actually center the user at all. ? Sadly true article: “UX design has a dirty secret: too often, designers are asked to perform UX Theatre, which doesn’t actually center the user at all. ” by Tanya Snook

Also, extra bonus points for this article, 100% clickbait but I guarantee you will laugh: Can Squid Game make you a better UX designer?

Interesting article

#Research

How not having a screener and a video by a teenager on TikTok messed up some scientific research. This is a good reminder about the limits of those panel tools especially if there is no screener questions.
When I talk about indirect user research methods on B2C products, I often talk about getting feedback from store reviews. Here’s a tool to help you gather those
A list of 17 Tools That Will Streamline Your UX Research, from recruiting users to testing, surveys, interviews, analytics, data analysis, etc.

#Notification

An interesting case study on when to ask user to access push notification. Hint: when they understand the value of those, and NOT in the first screen of your app!

#Hooked

The Hook Model: when our Hormones work against us and what you can do about it for you own digital wellness.

#UI polls

If you are really going to do those “which UI is better” (please don’t), at least make those UI polls better and actionable with context and proper language. Here’s some ideas by Katrin Suetterlin

#Sketching

Sketches as an Extension of Your Mind: taking the first step from abstractionland into reality can be hard. It’s best to start simply, small, and rough, and iterate quickly. Sketches are ideal because they allow you to get rolling fast. They’re not precious, so you’re not bound to ideas prematurely.

#Shadow

Devil is in the details, this article is geeking around how to design the perfect shadow for interaction. At the end of the day, those small details make great UI design 🙂

#Priorities

Focus on the what, not the how. I really like the simple elegant Eisenhower Matrix

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

#Accessibility

This is awesome: a small game to help people understand the challenges and solutions of accessibility.

#Halloween

Halloween season is on and this little gif is awesome

#Inspiration

Catherine Arsaut is an artist, printmaker and illustrator. Her linoprints inspired by nature are amazing.

#CSSGame

Some small little CSS Squid Games

#Fun

Reddit launched “PSBattle Live”, a live event where people compete to build the best and funniest Photoshop photomontages with stock photo. There’s quite a few fun results

#FunDemo

Is this going too far? Yes. Do I love it? Also YES. So, here’s a DOOM Rendered via Checkboxes, sorry for your GPU, but winter is coming so maybe you can heat your flat while playing (mine is surprisingly fine so far)

#Inspiration

This is cute and informative: The history of the world according to cats – Eva-Maria Geigl

Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy

#Placeholder

An image placeholder generator tool with categories so that the images are actually useful an related to your theme. No more kittens when designing a fashion website!

#Gradient

This is a tool to generate mesh gradients directly inside Figma
I could play with this all day long: a mesh and light gradients generator

Videos and podcasts

#UX

How to Sell UX: Translating UX to Business Value, the “if we (do that for the users) then it will solve (this) for the business technique, in order to do this we need (that), but as a results (business impact)

#Talk

Conversational design is not about designing interfaces we chat with, but using human conversation as a model for interacting with any system, a talk by Erika Hall @mulegirl

#BehaviouralEconomics

“What can Behavioural Economics Teach Attention Economics?” an introduction to a few concepts and research on behavioural economics and the EAST framework (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) for driving attention and behaviour

Tutorials

#CSS

This is cool and an elegant CSS solution: Expandable Sections Within a CSS Grid by @basherkev

Pixels of the Week – October 24, 2021