Feb 2019

CAPTCHAs are really, really bad UX design

Robin Christopherson just wrote an important article on the AbilityNet blog: "AI is making CAPTCHA increasingly cruel for disabled users".

The week in quotes (2019W08)

Adtech lobbying, sharenting, algorithmic literacy, the technology maintenance divide, good design, and biodiversity.
2019

the new digital divide on college campuses

scatter.wordpress.com

This article – on a blog with the fascinating title of “the unruly darlings of public sociology” – refers to a recent study that highlights how inequality can hide under a layer of apparent similarity:
In a survey of college students at a large, midwestern university, we find near-universal ownership of cell phones and laptops. That said, we also find big gaps in the quality and reliability of the technology students own.
2019

Be an Elegant Simplifier

behavioralscientist.org

In our modern world, it’s easy to junk things up. Simple is hard. We’re quick to add more questions to research surveys, more buttons to a digital interface, more burdens to people.
I can relate to this text, not only for the […]
2019

Surveillance capitalism, by design

medium.com

This is a great read. Heather Wiltse introduces the concept of “fluid assemblages” to describe things that, “[d]ue to networked connectivity, […] can be active and responsive, dynamically configuring themselves to particular users and […]
2019

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

worldwideweb.cern.ch

The world's first web browser, rebuilt to run within a modern browser - 30 years later.
2019

Better personalized recommendations through transparency and content design

medium.com

Ryan Bigge identifies a recent trend to cute-ify algorithmic opacity by simply summarizing it to the user as “magic sauce” or similar:
But magic sauce isn’t just black boxing. It’s taking something serious and saying, “Don’t […]
2019

The week in quotes (2019W07)

Ethics, cyberpunk standards, robust UIs, default browser behaviour, common a11y issues, and the vanishing of insects
2019

Vestibular Issues in Parallax Design

webaxe.org

The “Parallax effect” (the background of a website scrolling at a different speed than the rest of page) is one of these fads that suddenly gain traction amongst designers, just for looking cool – “it can be done, so let’s do it” – but without looking at the science of both how it is perceived by users and whether it really is an improvement:
Over the last year or so, a design trend in the web and mobile world has been transition animations, parallax effects, and the like. For many users, this can cause vestibular issues; the symptom is usually vertigo, or a feeling of motion sickness.

A hot summer ahead: Web community events in Germany

May is going to be an event-laden month for the web design community in Germany.
2019

The week in quotes (2019W06)

Web micropayments, Zuboff vs. Marx, Facebook as internet antithesis, vestigial friendships, and self-engineered devastation.
2019

Reply to a Tweet by Aral Balkan

twitter.com

For Wordpress sites, another data-minimalist stats tool (no personal data, no cookies) is Statify by Pluginkollektiv (also the makers of the privacy-friendly Akismet alternative Antispam Bee)
2019

Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy

w3ctag.github.io

I have always been a strong proponent of heuristic evaluation techniques (like Nielsen’s classic heuristic evaluation in UX). Hence, this W3C draft instantly piqued my interest:
This document provides a points to help in considering the […]
2019

15 Years of Facebook Friendships That Won't Die

theatlantic.com

[Facebook] has created an entirely new category of relationship, one that simply couldn’t have existed for most of human history—the vestigial friendship. It’s the one you’ve evolved out of, the one that would normally have faded out […]
2019

The UX design case of closed captions for everyone

Are video subtitles chiefly for users who cannot hear or lack an audio device?

What Does My Site Cost?

whatdoesmysitecost.com

The size of websites is commonly a metric related to performance and loading times. This tool puts a twist on that and uses the metric to instead highlight an other aspect:
Find out how much it costs for someone to use your site on mobile […]

Reposting a Tweet by Matt Wilcox

twitter.com

I still remember working on a Nokia project from a good ten years ago, where “for convenience of internationalisation” all action buttons were replaced with icons only. What a fight it was to convince the stakeholders it was a bad idea (we were […]

The week in quotes (2019W05)

Access to creating on the web, ethics in CS ed, abusability testing, and the loss of the human self.
2019

IoT Devices Should Deal with Privacy Impacts for People with Disabilities

fpf.org

The Future Of Privacy Forum (FPF) published a report PDF exploring the privacy impact of using IoT devices for people with disabilities.
“Internet of Things devices in homes, cars and on our bodies can improve the quality of life for people […]