Link tags: ux

Optimizing keyboard navigation using tabindex and ARIA — Sara Soueidan

Smart thinking from Sara to improve usability for keyboard users by using aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" to skip duplicate links:

A good rule of thumb for similar cases is that if you have multiple consecutive links to the same page, there is probably a chance to improve keyboard navigation by skipping some of those links to reduce the number of tab stops to one. The less tab stops, the better, as long as it does not worsen or compromise on other aspects of usability.

I’ve cautiously implemented this pattern now over on The Session where snippets of comments had both a title link and a “more” link going to the same destination.

as days pass by — Hammer and nails

We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.

Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?

Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?

Robin Rendle ･ Notes about product design

Some good thought morsels from Robin on product design:

Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of.

There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.

Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

• popups,
• drawers,
• mouseover popups (just say no!),
• accordions,
• tabs,
• new pages,
• scrolling,
• scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

The beauty of modern mobile websites · Pushing Pixels

Two observations of websites on mobile devices today:

1. They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
2. I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.

Both observations are the result of conscious design decisions.

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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):

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