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.
Topic: User Experience
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.
Conversational Semantics
Semantic markup has always mattered, but with voice interfaces rapidly becoming the norm, it now matters more than ever. Aaron Gustafson shows us how simple HTML tags can have a huge impact with voice interfaces.
Discovery on a Budget: Part III
Rounding out her series of articles on how to conduct value-adding user research when resources are limited, Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek takes us on a journey through the results of the fake door A/B test set up in Part II. After shedding light on the darker side of surveys, and offering guidelines to maximize their value for minimum input, she concludes by touching on that that old favorite: how to know when the research is done and it’s time to start building.
The Problem with Patterns
Design systems have become the norm for organizations big and small. Yet, as more of our products and services move online, we can learn a thing or two from the world of service design. A dependence on any form of design system can create a pattern of ignoring our users’ context, hindering the design process, and even our own sense of empathy.
