Weighing up UX
Read NoteThere's a lot of interesting thoughts packed into this overview of UX Fest 2021, but the bits that really hit home were Jeremy's musings on A/B testing and dark patterns, particularly how one can …
theAdhocracy
There's a lot of interesting thoughts packed into this overview of UX Fest 2021, but the bits that really hit home were Jeremy's musings on A/B testing and dark patterns, particularly how one can …
Starling Bank frustrates and impresses me in equal measure. Their technical solutions are magical – when they work – but their service is steeped in a privileged bias that makes them hard to truly recommend.
A sobering look into the history of the UX industry. I think the outlined three "phases of UX" seem pretty on point from my own experience: from idealistic, trusted advisor; to oft-ignored and …
I really like the concept of practical elegance that Seth argues for. It's effectively an argument for true UX: optimising the user's experience to make it as useful and memorable as …
A neat trick (now third hand) for storing the scroll position of a sidebar or other element in local storage, allowing you to keep it constant across pages without the user seeing it flash into …
Earlier this year I hit the crowd-funding sweet spot: interesting campaigns coincided with disposable income. This had never happened before. I backed two projects, one Kickstarter and one IndieGoGo. …
There's a trend amongst modern websites and web apps that is becoming increasingly irksome: hiding the damn "Login" button! If you require me to have an account to use your service (which makes …
Let Emotion Be Your Guide is a wonderful article from Hana Schank and Jana Sedivy (published on A List Apart) which has taken me far too long to actually sit down and read. It's worth your …
I just fell down a rabbit hole learning about Dark Patterns, thanks largely to a link in an, as ever, well thought out Adactio post. To be clear, I knew what a Dark Pattern was, I just hadn't come …
User experience, even over developer …
The <datalist> element is super useful for autocomplete-like functionality, but there's no native way to automatically submit a form when an option is selected. Jeremy has come up with a neat …
Something something Micropub and posting from my …
"Dark pattern" is one of those phrases that could be problematic, or could just be evocative (there are some obvious race-related issues with equating dark/darker with bad/worse, but …
Rewilding Britain just launched it's new/first website, which I'm far too excited by. Philosophical fanboyism aside, I really like the web design they've created. Plenty of green; stunning …
I've had three Xperia Z3's this year (which I've loved). The first blew out the headphone socket, so minor movements paused music (grr). The second was skewered on a surprisingly angular bollard in …
How do you decide which use cases you should support and which you shouldn't? This question has been hovering in the back of my mind for quite a while now, because it seems to be increasingly …
I love Heydon's breakdown of why "accessible" =/= "good". To paraphrase: accessibility is about removing barriers that would prevent people from using your site, but if the content is crap or the …
Two months after Disney+ launched I'm still a huge fan of the content catalogue but swing between feeling bemused and exasperated at the actual experience of using the service.
An interesting look at a "block links" at "card links": when you want large sections of HTML to be one big clickable link. It's a very common pattern and something I've done a lot, but …
Marketing needs versus user experience is a topic that I have some deep misgivings over, but a recent post made me want to try and boil some of those thoughts down into their underlying rationale. I'm not sure I totally succeeded, but there we go.
A useful and well-written overview of micro-interactions and how they can take a design from good to great. Includes some excellent examples of animated buttons, swipe interactions, and more from …
Noah explains what it's like working in web design with colour vision deficiency (CVD). Gives a great overview of what CVD covers and why some people can see more/fewer colours than the average …
The infamous frontend divide, the feeling that JavaScript-everywhere has caused a schism in what a frontend developer is. Should they be split into JavaScript Engineer and UI …
Max has a pretty brilliant colour theme switcher on his website. I agree with him that "dark mode" is only the tip of the iceberg and with CSS variables we can now theme sites very easily. There are …
Sarah has put into words some feelings I've had recently about the web (and uses two sites as examples that I keep returning to as well: Josh W Comeau and Cassie Codes) …
A quite frankly brilliant concept design for a "Mea Culpa feature" on Twitter. The idea: let users add a flag to their own tweets admitting …
Gatsby's page-fetching is a feature I consider a double-edged sword (though I'll admit I also don't fully understand it 😅). On the one hand, I'm all for anything that decreases load time between …
A very clever (and well explained) method for helping users complete forms. Particularly with modern pop-up forms, I'd say at least once a month I'm part way through typing something and …
A clever UX idea discovered on Pink News: each paragraph of text has a different highlight colour, so as you select parts of an article to copy elsewhere it reveals the LGBTQA+ flag. They're using …
A fascinating look at how modern front-end architecture and practices can help solve some of the communities issues; even the ones they initially created! Really neat to see how Brad has been using …