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.

Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility

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You’ve heard it before: there is not enough diversity in tech. But Carie Fisher offers one solution you may not have heard: that focusing on accessibility may be key in making the tech world itself more accessible.

Trans-inclusive Design

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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.

Semantics to Screen Readers

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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

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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

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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.

Designing for Interaction Modes

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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

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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.