Archive: August 23rd, 2019

Stop Misusing Toggle Switches

Use a toggle switch if you are:

1. Applying a system state, not a contextual one
2. Presenting binary options, not opposing ones
3. Activating a state, not performing an action

Brendan Dawes - Adobe Alternatives

Brendan describes the software he’s using to get away from Adobe’s mafia business model.

Queen Mary 2 | Flickr

Jessica’s photos from our transatlantic crossing. Swanky!

Intentional and Emergent Design Systems | Jordan Moore

This is a really interesting distinction:

An intentional design system. The flavour and framework may vary, but the approach generally consists of: design system first → design/build solutions.

An emergent design system. This approach is much closer to the user needs end of the scale by beginning with creative solutions before deriving patterns and systems (i.e the system emerges from real, coded scenarios).

It’s certainly true that intentional design systems will invariably bake in a number of (unproven?) assumptions.

Taking shortcuts ･ Robin Rendle

How Robin really feels about Google AMP:

Here’s my hot take on this: fuck the algorithm, fuck the impressions, and fuck the king. I would rather trade those benefits and burn my website to the ground than be under the boot and heel and of some giant, uncaring corporation.

Is client side A/B testing always a bad idea in your experience? · Issue #53 · csswizardry/ama

Harry enumerates the reasons why client-side A/B testing is terrible:

• It typically blocks rendering.
• Providers are almost always off-site.
• It happens on every page load.
• No user-benefitting reuse.
• They likely skip any governance process.

While your engineers are subject to linting, code-reviews, tests, auditors, and more, your marketing team have free rein of the front-end.

Note that the problem here is not A/B testing per se, it’s client-side A/B testing. For some reason, we seem to have collectively decided that A/B testing—like analytics—is something we should offload to the JavaScript parser in the user’s browser.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

1. Obey the Law of Locality
2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
3. Pass the Squint Test
4. Teach by example

The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic

If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell.

A nice steaming cup of perspective.

If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.