Link tags: user

Tech-last

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about evaluating technology and what Robin describes here is definitely a bad “code smell” that should ring alarm bells:

What’s really concerning is when everyone is consumed with the technology-first and the problem-last.

Unless you’re working in an R’n’D lab, start with user needs.

I’m certain now that if you want to build something great you have to see through the tech. And that’s really hard to do when this cool new thing is all that anyone is talking about. But that’s why this one specific thing is the hallmark of a great organization; they aren’t distracted by short-lived trends and instead focus on the problem-first. Relentlessly, through the noise.

User Stylesheets Are Still Pretty Great and Should Be More Widely Supported — Pixel Envy

Hear, hear!

If you have even a passing knowledge of CSS, I encourage you to experiment with its possibilities.

Body Margin 8px | Miriam Eric Suzanne

I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!

Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.

Emily F. Gorcenski: Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection

Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.

Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.

UA gotta be kidding

Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.

I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”

Help Users Accomplish What They Came For - CSS-Tricks

If I were to point out one thing that people can do to make their website better, it is to take a moment to think about the most crucial actions that we want our users to be able to do on a page and make them as easy and accessible as possible.

All visual effects, fancy graphics, beautiful interactions, and tracking scripts should come second.

Wise words from Anna.

I hope that progressive enhancement doesn’t become yet another buzzword and that you really take a moment to help the user accomplish what they came for.

A Web Browser Built for Me • Robin Rendle

What I want instead is an anarchist web browser.

What I’d really like to see is a browser that cuts things out, that takes things away from the web. Colors, fonts, confusion. Do you need an enormous JavaScript engine under the hood to power a modern web browser? I don’t think you do. Do you need all the extensions? All the latest CSS features? Nah, mate.

Throw away everything and start again and focus intensely about what people care about when it comes to the web.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : prefers-reduced-motion and browser defaults

I think Bruce is onto something here:

It seems to me that browsers could do more to protect their users. Browsers are, after all, user agents that protect the visitor from pop-ups, malicious sites, autoplaying videos and other denizens of the underworld. They should also protect users against nausea and migraines, regardless of whether the developer thought to (or had the tools available to).

So, I propose that browsers should never respect scroll-behavior: smooth; if a user prefers reduced motion, regardless of whether a developer has set the media query.

I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me

Jesse has his Oppenheimer moment, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.

Principles of User Privacy (PUP)

This looks like an excellent proposal for agreement around discussing privacy on the web.

The section on user agents resonates with what I wrote recently about not considering Google Chrome a user agent any more:

Its fiduciary duties include:

• Duty of Protection
• Duty of Discretion
• Duty of Honesty
• Duty of Loyalty

Dribbble first 5k users.

Turns out I was the twelfth ever user of Dribbble—ah, memories!

Reflecting on My Own Experience Using the Web to Get the Vaccine - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I click the link. The page loads fast. I navigate the surprisingly sparse yet clear form inputs. And complete the whole thing in less than thirty seconds.

Oh, how I wish this experience weren’t remarkable!

Simple forms with clear labels. Little to no branding being shoved down my throat. No array of colors, big logos, or overly-customized UI components.

Content Design Basics by Giles Turnbull - YouTube

This is a great series of short videos all about content design. The one on writing for humans is particularly good.

Progressive enhancement and accessibility redux - QuirksBlog

This is a really interesting take on the intersection between accessibility and progressive enhancement (which I always felt was there, but this expresses it well):

Accessibility aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user capabilities. Progressive enhancement aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user agent capabilities.

Indeed, if you broaden the definition of “user agent” to include a user’s physiology, I think the concepts become nearly identical.

Creative Good: Why I’m losing faith in UX

Increasingly, I think UX doesn’t live up to its original meaning of “user experience.” Instead, much of the discpline today, as it’s practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.

UX is now “user exploitation.”

mnot’s blog: RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.

A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.

Also worth noting:

Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.

Make me think! – Ralph Ammer

This is about seamful design.

We need to know things better if we want to be better.

It’s also about progressive enhancement.

Highly sophisticated systems work flawlessly, as long as things go as expected.

When a problem occurs which hasn’t been anticipated by the designers, those systems are prone to fail. The more complex the systems are, the higher are the chances that things go wrong. They are less resilient.

4 Design Patterns That Violate “Back” Button Expectations – 59% of Sites Get It Wrong - Articles - Baymard Institute

Some interesting research in here around user expecations with the back button:

Generally, we’ve observed that if a new view is sufficiently different visually, or if a new view conceptually feels like a new page, it will be perceived as one — regardless of whether it technically is a new page or not. This has consequences for how a site should handle common product-finding and -exploration elements like overlays, filtering, and sorting. For example, if users click a link and 70% of the view changes to something new, most will perceive this to be a new page, even if it’s technically still the same page, just with a new view loaded in.

Prioritizing users in a crisis: Building the California COVID-19 response site

This is a great case study of the excellent California COVID-19 response site. Accessibility and performance are the watchwords here.

Want to know their secret weapon?

A $20 device running Android 9, with no contract commitment has been one of the most useful and effective tools in our effort to be accessible.

Leaner, faster sites benefit everybody, but making sure your applications run smoothly on low-end hardware makes a massive difference for those users.

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.