February 2019
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Robin Christopherson just wrote an important article on the AbilityNet blog: "AI is making CAPTCHA increasingly cruel for disabled users".
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Adtech lobbying, sharenting, algorithmic literacy, the technology maintenance divide, good design, and biodiversity.
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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.
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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 description how studying design re-wires […] -
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 contexts and pulling together networked […]
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CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild worldwideweb.cern.ch
The world's first web browser, rebuilt to run within a modern browser - 30 years later. -
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 worry your pretty little head about […]
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Ethics, cyberpunk standards, robust UIs, default browser behaviour, common a11y issues, and the vanishing of insects
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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.
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May is going to be an event-laden month for the web design community in Germany. -
Web micropayments, Zuboff vs. Marx, Facebook as internet antithesis, vestigial friendships, and self-engineered devastation.
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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)
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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 privacy impact of a new feature or […]
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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 of your life, but which, thanks to […]
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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 networks around the […]
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Designers: icons for actions is A BAD IDEA. Just had to help my mum write an email on a tablet after years of using the Gmail app and thinking it was reading only. The fucking pencil icon means *nothing* and the paper aeroplane doesn’t mean “send” either. Use. Words. On. Buttons.
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 just an agency, and when this battle was […]
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Access to creating on the web, ethics in CS ed, abusability testing, and the loss of the human self.
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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 with disabilities—if they are designed to […]