To-Do Terrarium
I love this little to-do app! Every time you tick something off your list, something grows in your virtual terrarium. Lovely!
Link tags: ux
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I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whomever Did | Adrian Roselli
Cargo cultism is not a strategy:
Apple and Google get it wrong just as often as the rest of us.
Workshop Countdown Clock
Here’s a nifty little progressive web app that Trys whipped up so that Clearlefties running workshops remotely still get to have their beloved countdown clock.
How big tech hijacked its sharpest, funniest critics - MIT Technology Review
How design fiction was co-opted. A piece by Tim Maughan with soundbites from Julian Bleecker, Anab Jain, and Scott Smith.
Web bloat
Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.
Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:
- A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
- Some sites will use a lot of data!
CrUX.RUN
This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.
Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.
Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish - Tantek
Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.
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):
- Use HTML5 input features
- Support autofill
- Make autofill part of your test plans
How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- 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:
- Applying a system state, not a contextual one
- Presenting binary options, not opposing ones
- Activating a state, not performing an action
4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example