Links

Videos in “UX London” on Vimeo

The videos from UX London 2017 are available for your viewing pleasure.

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Patterns Day 2017: Rachel Andrew on Vimeo

Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.

0825 — ericportis.com

Well, well, well …following on from my post about container queries, it turns out that Eric has also been thinking about wrangling custom properties. He’s even written some code.

Beaker | Peer-to-peer Web browser. No blockchain required.

Here’s an intriguing project—peer-to-peer browser and hosting. I thought it might be using the InterPlanetary File System under the hood, but it’s using something called Dat instead.

It’s all very admirable, but it also feels a little bit 927.

Designing The Perfect Slider – Smashing Magazine

If you thought Vitaly’s roundup of date pickers was in-depth, wait ‘till you get a load of this exhaustive examination of slider controls.

It pairs nicely with this link.

Surfing on the Web - YouTube

I wrote this song while my colleague Tim Berners-Lee was inventing something called “The World Wide Web” a few offices away. The song was published in 1993, when less that 100 websites existed.

The first image ever published on the web was of this band, Les Horribles Cernettes …LHC.

Writing Hacks: The Adafruit Guide to Being Excellent to Each Other in Emails « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.

Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.

Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.

For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.

Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.

Jeremy Keith on resilient web design - UX Chat

In which I have a conversation with a polar bear.

Very well-mannered species …I’ll miss them when they’re gone.

It’s simple

I think “it’s simple” shouldn’t be used to explain something.

SolarBeat

Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.

Hypnotic.

ARP Observatory (@ArpObservatory) | Twitter

In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.

Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.

ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.

Patterns Day 2017: Sareh Heidari on Vimeo

Time for another video from Patterns Day. Here’s Sareh Heidari walking us through Grandstand, the CSS framework at the BBC.

Reflections on Two Years of Indieweb

Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.

With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.

This really resonates with me.

One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.

Terrific post!

Here’s to two more years.

Empathy Prompts

A series of small suggestions that anyone can try so that they can better empathise with people who experience digital products differently.

These prompts are intended to help build empathy, not describe any one person’s experience. These prompts are not intended to tokenize the experience of the individuals experiencing these conditions.

Despicable Design — When “Going Evil” is the Perfect Technique

I really like this “evil” design exercise that Jared has documented on Ev’s blog.

I broke them up into small groups of three, spreading each role across separate groups. I then asked each person to grab a sheet of paper and make their own list of ways they imagined the product’s user experience could be made worse.

Implementing Webmentions

Drew has been adding webmention support not just to his own site, but any site using Perch. This account of his process is a really good overview of webmentions.

Patterns Day 2017: Ellen De Vries on Vimeo

The latest video from Patterns Day is up—Ellen’s superb philosophical presentation: Patterns in Language, Language in Patterns.

There’s so much packed into this one, it might take more than one viewing to take it all in.

You’re Offline | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This looks like a sensible way to detect if the user is offline, and provide appropriate feedback, like making certain links or forms inactive.

(Now More Than Ever) You Might Not Need jQuery | CSS-Tricks

Thanks to jQuery, you probably don’t need jQuery. Just look at all these methods that started life in jQuery, that are now part of the standardised DOM API:

• remove()
• prepend()
• before()
• replaceWith()
• closest()