Link tags: ux

The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland

If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.

The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?

And I think the answer is: We are very close.

Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.

Basil: Secret Santa as a Service | Trys Mudford

Trys writes up the process—and the tech (JAM)stack—he used to build basil.christmas.

What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?

This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.

(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)

The Department of Useless Images - Gerry McGovern

The Web is smothering in useless images. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution because they take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight. They also slow down the site’s ability to download quickly.

Location, Privilege and Performant Websites

Testing on a <$100 Android device on a 3G network should be an integral part of testing your website. Not everyone is on a brand-new device or upgrades often, especially with the price point of a high-end phones these days.

When we design and build our websites with the outliers in mind, whether it’s for performance or even user experience, we build an experience that can be easy for all to access and use — and that’s what the web is about, access and information for all.

203221 – Web Share API: should prefer URL to text when both available

That unusual behaviour I wrote about with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS is now officially a bug—thanks, Tess!

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle - Cloud Four

When I liveblogged Jason’s talk at An Event Apart in Chicago, I included this bit of reporting:

Jason proceeds to relate a long and involved story about buying burritos online from Chipotle.

Well, here is that story. It’s a good one, with some practical takeaways (if you’ll pardon the pun):

1. Use HTML5 input features
2. Support autofill
3. Make autofill part of your test plans

How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson

Six UX lessons from game design:

1. Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
2. Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
3. Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
4. Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
5. Hintiness (Move to new loops)
6. Pacing (Be sure to start here)

samuelgoto/sms-receiver: phone number verification

An interesting proposal to allow websites to detect certain SMS messages. The UX implications are fascinating.

Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience| TimKadlec.com

If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.

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

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

Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely

The test results are in:

During our testing “Install App” banners were the direct and sole cause of several abandonments of some of the world’s largest e-commerce websites.

Read on for details…

Paint Holding - reducing the flash of white on same-origin navigations  |  Web  |  Google Developers

This is an excellent UX improvement in Chrome. For sites like The Session, where page loads are blazingly fast, this really makes them feel like single page apps.

Our goal with this work was for navigations in Chrome between two pages that are of the same origin to be seamless and thus deliver a fast default navigation experience with no flashes of white/solid-color background between old and new content.

This is exactly the kind of area where browsers can innovate and compete on the UX of the browser itself, rather than trying to compete on proprietary additions to what’s being rendered.

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.

We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.

Patterns for Promoting PWA Installation (mobile)  |  Web Fundamentals  |  Google Developers

Some ideas for interface elements that prompt progressive web app users to add the website to their home screen.

Methods - 18F Methods

A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.

A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.

These methods are categorised by:

1. Discover
2. Decide
3. Make
4. Validate
5. Fundamentals

User interfaces: hiding stuff should be a last resort by Adam Silver

When we hide content, there’s a greater risk the user won’t see it. There’s a higher reliance on digital literacy and it’s generally more labour intensive for the user.

Worse still, sometimes we kill off essential content.

UX Workshop | Trys Mudford

I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!

Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.