How much do you really know about color? In this excerpt from Figure It Out, Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast dive deep into the science around color, cultural aspects of how color is perceived, and how our thoughts on color have evolved over time.
Articles
Jobs To Be Done
Ever find solutions before you find the problems? In this excerpt from The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Jim Kalbach gives some advice on aligning innovation to customer needs, including creating a jobs-driven roadmap and using job stories to solve specific design problems.
Usability Testing for Voice Content
It’s an important time to be in voice design, but it’s not without its own challenges. Content in voice-driven interfaces can vary wildly from that of traditional websites, which might leave many of us wondering about our existing approaches to usability testing. Preston So not only shows us how to reframe these challenges into opportunities, but as advantages for the medium itself.
Cross-Cultural Design
How much consideration have you given to how the text of your site is rendered when it’s localized? Do you consider whether your webfonts load in China? How dense your paragraphs appear in Korean? How your buttons grow (or shrink) in Japanese? Senongo Akpem covers all this and more in this excerpt from Cross-Cultural Design.
Standards for Writing Accessibly
In this excerpt from Writing Is Designing, Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle discuss critical accessibility considerations for content authors, including reading order, references to additional content, and instructions.
Making Room for Variation
Design systems exist to bring unity, cohesion, and harmony to our designs. That said, the best design systems are flexible enough to enable variation while still maintaining connectedness between those variants. In this excerpt from Expressive Designs Systems, Yesenia Perez-Cruz goes deep on what it takes to create design systems that enables intentional, meaningful variation.
Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs
Caching media files, especially images, seems like an obvious way to improve performance, but should we? To provide a more performant UX without abusing users’s network connections or hard drives, Aaron Gustafson puts a spin on classic best practices, experiments with media caching strategies, and shares smart Cache API tricks.
Responsible JavaScript: Part III
Convenience always comes at a price. On the web, developer convenience often means third-party JavaScript—and we pass the hefty cost on to our users. Jeremy Wagner shows us how to get and keep third-party scripts under control through clean-up sprints and eternal vigilance in Part III of Responsible JavaScript.
The Untapped Power of Vulnerability & Transparency in Content Strategy
Vulnerability and transparency are strengths masquerading as weaknesses. Together, they create empowering and meaningful content that can deeply engage your users, transcending mere conversion to build lifelong customer loyalty. Travis McKnight shows how to turn even your company’s worst problems and mistakes into powerful content strategies.
An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments
The best way to prepare for your next job application, interview, or performance review takes just a few minutes each week. Jessica Ivins tells us about the Career Management Document, how it can help your career, and how to get started.
