Link tags: ux

Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Trying to be helpful ~ @benjaminparry

This is nice.

The IndieWeb for Everyone | Max Böck

Spot-on analysis by Max:

Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

I really hope that this when smart folks start putting their skills towards making the ideas of the indie web more widely available:

I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.

Why we need CSS Speech - Tink - Léonie Watson

I was talking about this with Léonie just yesterday. I, for one, would love to have CSS speech support. You know who else would love it? Content designers!

In these days of voice interaction on every platform, there is a growing expectation that it should be possible to design that experience just like we can the visual experience. In the same way an organisation chooses a logo and colour palette for its website, it stands to reason that they may also choose a particular voice that represents their brand.

It’s wild that there’s no way to do this on the web.

The Customer Onboarding Handbook [PDF]

A free PDF with five articles:

• The Brand Experience Gap by Emma Parnell
• Ongoing Onboarding: Taking Customers from First Use to Product Mastery by Chris How
• Just Add ICE: 3 Ways to Make Your Customer Experience More Meaningful by Candi Williams
• Effectively Researching and Using Customer Journey Maps by Lauren Isaacson
• Using and Abusing Surveys in Customer Onboarding by Caroline Jarrett

Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!

In Defence of the Single Page Application | William Kennedy

This is very convincing.

UI Pattern: Natural Language Form

I only just found this article about those “mad libs” style forms that I started with Huffduffer.

The web is overrun and pop-up blockers haven’t worked in years

The technical challenge in blocking modern pop-ups is bigger than the pop-ups of the past decades. However, it’s long overdue that web browsers step up and act to protect their users’ interests. Pop-ups, pop-overs, interstitials, modal dialogs, whatever you want to call them! It’s time to ban them from the web again! At least immediately after a page load.

Code & Pixels

This forthcoming podcast about design engineering sounds like my cup of tea!

Canned web development — Jeremy Wagner

Our mental model for how we build for the web is too reliant on canned solutions to unique problems.

This is very perceptive indeed.

Compounding this problem is that too few boot camps are preparing new web developers to think critically about what problems are best solved by JavaScript and which aren’t — and that those problems that are best solved by JavaScript can be solved without engaging in frivolous framework whataboutism. The question developers should ask more often when grappling with framework shortcomings shouldn’t be “what about that other framework?”, but rather “what’s best for the user experience?”.

Software Paper Cuts · Matthew Bischoff

Running up against a paper cut bug feels a little bit like getting a physical one: not the end of the world, but certainly unpleasant. These types of tiny annoyances accrete over time, especially when no one is paying attention to them. In a single day of using my phone, I encounter dozens of these minor bugs that each annoy me just a little bit, making the task I’m trying to accomplish just a little bit more complicated.

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Chip Delaney and Octavia Butler on a panel together in 1998 when hypertext and “cyberspace” are in the air. Here’s Octavia Butler on her process (which reminds me of when I’m preparing a conference talk):

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.

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.

The State Of The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I’ve also published a transcript.

HmntyCntrd | Critical UX Event

This looks like an excellent (and very reasonably-priced) online event happening on November 12th with three panels:

1. beyond accessibility,
2. failure of diversity, and
3. design as resistance!

the Intersection (2021) - YouTube

A great little sci-fi short film from Superflux—a mockumentary from the near future. It starts dystopian but then gets more solarpunk.

Software developers have stopped caring about reliability

My web browser has been perfectly competent at submitting HTML forms for the past 28 years, but for some stupid reason some asshole developer decided to reimplement all of the form semantics in JavaScript, and now I can’t pay my electricity bill without opening up the dev tools. Imagine what it’s like to not know how to do that. Imagine if you were blind.

Folks, this is not okay. Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users.

My Challenge to the Web Performance Community — Philip Walton

I’ve noticed a trend in recent years—a trend that I’ve admittedly been part of myself—where performance-minded developers will rebuild a site and then post a screenshot of their Lighthouse score on social media to show off how fast it is.

Mea culpa! I should post my CrUX reports too.

But I’m going to respectfully decline Phil’s advice to use any of the RUM analytics providers he recommends that require me to put another script element on my site. One third-party script is one third-party script too many.

Getting Started with PWAs [Workshop]

The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes - YouTube

This is a terrific and nuanced talk that packs a lot into less than twenty minutes.

I heartily concur with Rich’s assessment that most websites aren’t apps or documents but something in between. It’s a continuum. And I really like Rich’s proposed approach: transitional web apps.

(The secret sauce in transitional web apps is progressive enhancement.)

Build a Better Mobile Input

This is such a handy tool for building forms! Choose different combinations of type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes on input elements and see how that will be conveyed to users on iOS and Android devices.