None of us want to build products that put our users’ safety at risk, but how do you reduce the risk that our products will be weaponized by abusers? In this excerpt from Design for Safety, Eva PenzeyMoog offers a clear strategy for building inclusive safety in our products.
Topic: Usability
Creative problem solving. Designing for your audience. Designing for contingencies. Designing feedback loops. Conducting meaningful user testing—even on the cheap. A primer on A/B testing. Testing accordion forms. Good “Help” content is hard to find. Quick and dirty remote user testing. Web standards for e-books.
Voice Content and Usability
In this excerpt from Voice Content and Usability, author Preston So talks about the messy, primordial nature of human speech and challenges with programming computers to deal with these complexities.
Immersive Content Strategy
Those immersive experiences are so hot right now, as new tools and frameworks help our designs and code transcend the web. But fresh tech doesn’t mean our content is ready for extended and mixed-reality prime time. Preston So shows us how to recast our fixed web content in more immersive ways—to create exciting new experiences and prepare our sites for an unpredictable future.
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.
Designing for Interaction Modes
To deliver a great user experience, you have to think about interaction modes. But because of pressures, competing priorities, and industry trends, they’re often an afterthought. Andrew Grimes shows you how to make them a more central part of your design process.
Designing for Research
Image quality may be about striking the balance between speed and quality, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. What if, despite having methods to develop better and better image experiences for the web, the user disagrees? In a quest to find answers, Jeremy Wagner takes us through an image quality study that he designs, develops, and iterates on with user feedback. Asking “Why?” is no easy undertaking in research. His lossy is your gain.
My Accessibility Journey: What I’ve Learned So Far
It’s not about writing the most sophisticated code or finding the most clever solution to a problem; it’s about users and whether they’re able to use our products.” Manuel Matuzovic shares 11 lessons as a developer learning about & incorporating accessibility into his work.
Design Like a Teacher
A difficult user migration project led Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron to reevaluate how she approaches her work. She started to see herself not just as an expert on user experience, but as a teacher, a realization that transformed her work. She reflects on how developing a teaching mindset can improve any UX project.
Planning for Accessibility
Incorporating accessibility from the beginning of a web design project is easier, more effective, and less expensive than making accessibility fixes after the fact. Yet most of us too often get stuck doing the latter. Fear not! ALA’s exclusive excerpt from Laura Kalbag’s Accessibility for Everyone is here to help. You’ll learn how to make the case for accessibility to reluctant coworkers, bosses, or clients. How to build your team, scope the project, and even budget the job.
Color Accessibility Workflows
Color is a powerful tool that allows for an almost infinite array of design options. Yet when applying color to our work, we can have a “myopic” viewpoint that puts us, rather than our audience, front and center. Author Geri Coady discusses some solid color considerations we can make for our audiences in this excerpt from her new book, Color Accessibility Workflows, available from A Book Apart.
