CategoryUsability

January 7, 2022 — Product roadmaps are often treated as a series of checkboxes. But they are more than that. Having a loose product landscape offers a flexible way to be strategic and decisive about how to chip away at the big picture. Not dealing with can eventually leave you stranded on the roadside without a spare to keep you going. In this article, Scott Himmer explains how internal partnerships, research, design systems, and regular touch bases can help make sure that your product roadmap is a successful one. Read more…

November 23, 2021 — The separation of content and presentation that CSS gives us always comes in handy when we need to adapt designs to better serve different communities. With a little CSS, we can adapt our web designs to be more accommodating for people with dyslexia. In this article, John C Barstow will explore those techniques by adding a dyslexia-friendly mode to an existing design. Read more…

October 27, 2021 — Eye-tracking, a method that measures where people are looking and for how long they are looking, became more accessible to UX research thanks to technology. It allows researchers to see through the users’ eyes and get insights about visual attention. This article explores the latest trends in the eye-tracking market and how the methodology can be included in the UX researcher’s toolbox. Read more…

August 5, 2021 — How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? In this article, Vitaly Friedman will take a look to common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix these issues and when disabling buttons actually makes sense. We’ll start from the beginning, looking into when disabled buttons cause more trouble than help. Read more…

July 19, 2021 — A critical part of any developer’s workflow is definitely testing. It helps us to ensure that our project is going to maintain a high level of quality, as well as prevent any pesky bugs from getting out into the wild. By adding visual elements to your tests, you can gain more options to add meaningful ways in maintaining a high level of quality for your app. In this article, Colby Fayock explains how. Read more…

July 14, 2021 — Too often the filtering experience on the web is broken and frustrating, making it just unnecessarily difficult for customers to get to that shiny comfortable range of relevant results. When designing the next filter, take a look at some of the common issues that you might want to avoid, and hopefully avoid all the frustration that comes from broken and inaccessible implementations. Read more…

July 9, 2021 — Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in Todd’s career in web development and design. The case for accessibility is something we as people who create and build things for the web should be implementing and advocating for from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond. Read more…

June 17, 2021 — Image placement on the modern web is highly intentional, helping to communicate the overall purpose of a page or view. This means that nearly every image you declare needs to have an alternate description. Nulling an image indicates that it is for decorative purposes only. In this context, decorative means that the image does not visually communicate information that is important to understanding the purpose of the page or view, and why the image is included as a part of that. Read more…

May 19, 2021 — With such a complex multi-level navigation, showing the breadth of options requires quite a bit of space. Think of large eCommerce retailers and large corporate sites, catering to many audiences and having plenty of entry points. Do we need mega-dropdown hover menus in 2021? Probably not. Let’s explore things to keep in mind when designing and building a mega-dropdown, alternatives to hover menus and fine details for designing a better UX. Read more…

May 12, 2021 — They are everywhere. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a disabled submit button that never communicates what’s actually wrong, or tooltips that — once opened — cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. In this new series of articles on UX, we take a closer look at some frustrating design patterns and explore better alternatives, along with plenty of examples to keep in mind when building or designing one. Don’t miss the next ones: subscribe to our newsletter to get updates. Read more…