Design decisions across our projects can mean the difference between affirmation and invalidation—and sometimes safety and danger. Erin White explores the repercussions for trans, non-binary, and gender-variant users and what we can do about it.
Topic: User Experience
What do the people who use your website actually want? Making web content accessible. Designing and testing interfaces and the systems that support them. Talking to users and considering real-world use cases. Testing on the cheap. Design, architecture, research, benchmarking, usability, analytics, studies, interviews, surveys, focus groups.
Everyday Information Architecture: Auditing for Structure
To rebuild a system, we must understand it. Enter the structural audit: a review of the site focused solely on its menus, links, flows, and hierarchies. Lisa Maria Martin explains in this excerpt from her new A Book Apart book, Everyday Information Architecture.
Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective
Developer Facundo Corradini shares how his temporary disability taught him about why accessibility testing is so important. Focused on vestibular disorders, he both shares best practices to create sites that avoid triggering symptoms and informs us of the potential impact.
Semantics to Screen Readers
As an extension to our From URL to Interactive series, designer and front-end developer Melanie Richards takes a deep dive into how our content is accessed by a wide array of screen readers, which are highly customizable to users. Understanding the nuances of accessibility APIs, thorough testing approaches, and the wealth of resources available, site creators can create the most widely accessible content for the most users possible.
Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need
Designers want to create fully branded experiences, which often results in customized highlighting colors or pixel-perfect typography. While these design touches can enhance the experience for some, they can render the experience inaccessible for others. Designer Eric Bailey makes a case for leaving key accessibility features to the browser to ensure the most accessible experience possible.
UX in the Age of Personalization
There is a watershed moment approaching for personalization design. Most strategy is still driven out of marketing and IT departments, a holdover from the legacy of the inbound, “creepy” targeted ad. According to Colin Eagan, fixing that model requires the same paradigm shift we’ve used to tackle other challenges in our field. In this piece, he takes a detailed look at the UX practitioner’s emerging role in personalization design: from influencing technology selection, to data modeling, to page-level implementation. It’s now 2019, and the timing couldn’t be better.
Conversations with Robots: Voice, Smart Agents & the Case for Structured Content
Voice user interfaces, smart software agents, and AI-powered search are changing the way users—and computers—interact with content. Whether or not you’re building services for these emerging technologies, structured content is now necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of your content across the evolving digital landscape.
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 Cognitive Differences
Accessible design is often reduced to adding alt text and avoiding colors imperceptible by colorblindness. While physical differences are an important component of accessible design, cognitive differences are often ignored entirely. Brandon Gregory considers three common types—inattention, anxiety, and depression—and how they impact their users, patterns that trigger those conditions, and how designers can be more conscientious when design for them.
The Psychology of Design
As humans, we have an underlying “blueprint” for how we perceive and process the world around us, and the study of psychology helps us define this blueprint. And as designers, we can leverage psychology principles to build more intuitive products. But where to start? Author Jon Yablonski explains three essential theories of psychology, and provides real-world examples of how they can be used to benefit design. He also discusses the ethical implications of leveraging psychology in design, and what we should all keep in mind if we want to be ethical design citizens.
