Trying to gauge if a design you’ve worked on tests successfully can be stressful. What do you track, listen to, measure, and so on to see if you’ve improved? But did you know that there are battle-tested standardized usability question systems that tie directly to business value benchmarks like NPS (Net Promoter Score)? So how […]
Learning how to use assistive tech can be a real pain, especially when your tools are between mixed OSes. Here are a few quick tips on getting set up fast. What you’ll need First, let’s talk about the tooling you’ll need to test well across the most common assistive technologies and browsers. It’s important to […]
Often when approaching a design for a new app or website, it’s a pretty ‘me’ focused experience. What do I think looks good, what will sell the most, and so on. And you know what, that can be fine as a creator, drawing others into what I feel would be awesome. And people want that. […]
After exploring history, what formats the web natively supports, basic UX content principles, and what actually works cross-browser, it’s time to talk about my final caption styling recommendations. What You Should Do In Your VTT file First, start with a VTT file. Make sure the text is accurate to the content presented. Make sure it […]
For those who don’t know, there is a classic confusion among the term UX and UI. User experience (or UX) is streamlining how people move through intent. Business goals are often added alongside this flow. User interface (or UI), is commonly where a user moves through that flow. User interface is commonly visual in nature, […]
Just a small thought, but I think an important one for this week. Have you ever thought about why we use apps, websites, and devices? It’s not because we like it – it’s because UI is an abstraction. We need to know if someone needs something from us. We want to let a company know […]
You’ve learned how the industry uses captions, now let’s take a look at browser defaults and spec compliance to see what’s even possible to style. Here we go! What Browsers Do By Default Web captions render very differently from OS-to-OS and browser-to-browser. I’ve tested what rendering looks like on the latest versions of everything: MacOS […]
There are so many incredibly useful online tools on the web these days, just lying around for free. And with CSS Tricks recently posting an article about lots of the neat helper sites, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite online resource as well, that help me (and others) design at warp speed. […]
Last time in the series, I highlighted some really nice hacks others shared to up your color game. This time, I’d like to share a few of my own design color hacks for UI design. Avoid Intense Neutrals Just because white on black is the best contrast you can get and great for web-to-print, some […]
Every so often I come across a set of resources that are incredibly helpful. This week I’m on kid duty again, so I figured I’d share one of my favorite resources of the year. DesignerUp shares easily accessible methods for using color well. It also has some very cool practical applications for design system theming. […]
