rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
48,A Holiday Wish,"A friend and I were talking the other day about why clients spend more on toilet cleaning than design, and how the industry has changed since the mid-1990s, when we got our starts. Early in his career, my friend wrote a fine CSS book, but for years he has called himself a UX designer. And our conversation got me thinking about how I reacted to that title back when I first started hearing it.

“Just what this business needs,” I said to myself, “another phony expert.”

Okay, so I was wrong about UX, but my touchiness was not altogether unfounded. In the beginning, our industry was divided between freelance jack-of-all-trade punks, who designed and built and coded and hosted and Photoshopped and even wrote the copy when the client couldn’t come up with any, and snot-slick dot-com mega-agencies that blew up like Alice and handed out titles like impoverished nobles in the years between the world wars. 

I was the former kind of designer, a guy who, having failed or just coasted along at a cluster of other careers, had suddenly, out of nowhere, blossomed into a web designer—an immensely curious designer slash coder slash writer with a near-insatiable lust to shave just one more byte from every image. We had modems back then, and I dreamed in sixteen colors. My source code was as pretty as my layouts (arguably prettier) and I hoovered up facts and opinions from newsgroups and bulletin boards as fast as any loudmouth geek could throw them. It was a beautiful life.

But soon, too soon, the professional digital agencies arose, buying loft buildings downtown, jacking in at T1 speeds, charging a hundred times what I did, and communicating with their clients in person, in large artfully bedecked rooms, wearing hand-tailored Barney’s suits and bringing back the big city bullshit I thought I’d left behind when I quit advertising to become a web designer. 

Just like the big bad ad agencies of my early career, the new digital agencies stocked every meeting with a totem pole worth of ranks and titles. If the client brought five upper middle managers to the meeting, the agency did likewise. If fifteen stakeholders got to ask for a bigger logo, fifteen agency personnel showed up to take notes on the percentage of enlargement required.

But my biggest gripe was with the titles.

The bigger and more expensive the agency, the lousier it ran with newly invented titles. Nobody was a designer any more. Oh, no. Designer, apparently, wasn’t good enough. Designer was not what you called someone you threw that much money at.

Instead of designers, there were user interaction leads and consulting middleware integrators and bilabial experience park rangers and you name it. At an AIGA Miami event where I was asked to speak in the 1990s, I once watched the executive creative director of the biggest dot-com agency of the day make a presentation where he spent half his time bragging that the agency had recently shaved down the number of titles for people who basically did design stuff from forty-six to just twenty-three—he presented this as though it were an Einsteinian coup—and the other half of his time showing a film about the agency’s newly opened branch in Oslo. The Oslo footage was shot in December. I kept wondering which designer in the audience who lived in the constant breezy balminess of Miami they hoped to entice to move to dark, wintry Norway. But I digress.

Shortly after I viewed this presentation, the dot-com world imploded, brought about largely by the euphoric excess of the agencies and their clients. But people still needed websites, and my practice flourished—to the point where, in 1999, I made the terrifying transition from guy in his underwear working freelance out of his apartment to head of a fledgling design studio. (Note: you never stop working on that change.)

I had heard about experience design in the 1990s, but assumed it was a gig for people who only knew one font. 

But sometime around 2004 or 2005, among my freelance and small-studio colleagues, like a hobbit in the Shire, I began hearing whispers in the trees of a new evil stirring. The fires of Mordor were burning. Web designers were turning in their HTML editing tools and calling themselves UXers.

I wasn’t sure if they pronounced it “uck-sir,” or “you-ex-er,” but I trusted their claims to authenticity about as far as I trusted the actors in a Doctor Pepper commercial when they claimed to be Peppers. I’m an UXer, you’re an UXer, wouldn’t you like to be an UXer too? No thanks, said I. I still make things. With my hands.

Such was my thinking. I may have earned an MFA at the end of some long-past period of soul confusion, but I have working-class roots and am profoundly suspicious of, well, everything, but especially of anything that smacks of pretense. I got exporting GIFs. I didn’t get how white papers and bullet points helped anybody do anything.

I was wrong. And gradually I came to know I was wrong. And before other members of my tribe embraced UX, and research, and content strategy, and the other airier consultant services, I was on board. It helped that my wife of the time was a librarian from Michigan, so I’d already bought into the cult of information architecture. And if I wasn’t exactly the seer who first understood how borderline academic practices related to UX could become as important to our medium and industry as our craft skills, at least I was down a lot faster than Judd Apatow got with feminism. But I digress.

I love the web and all the people in it. Today I understand design as a strategic practice above all. The promise of the web, to make all knowledge accessible to all people, won’t be won by HTML5, WCAG 2, and responsive web design alone. 

We are all designers. You may call yourself a front-end developer, but if you spend hours shaving half-seconds off an interaction, that’s user experience and you, my friend, are a designer. If the client asks, “Can you migrate all my old content to the new CMS?” and you answer, “Of course we can, but should we?”, you are a designer. Even our users are designers. Think about it. 

Once again, as in the dim dumb dot-com past, we seem to be divided by our titles. But, O, my friends, our varied titles are only differing facets of the same bright gem. Sisters, brothers, we are all designers. Love on! Love on!

And may all your web pages, cards, clusters, clumps, asides, articles, and relational databases be bright.",2014,Jeffrey Zeldman,jeffreyzeldman,2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/a-holiday-wish/,ux
125,Accessible Dynamic Links,"Although hyperlinks are the soul of the World Wide Web, it’s worth using them in moderation. Too many links becomes a barrier for visitors navigating their way through a page. This difficulty is multiplied when the visitor is using assistive technology, or is using a keyboard; being able to skip over a block of links doesn’t make the task of finding a specific link any easier.

In an effort to make sites easier to use, various user interfaces based on the hiding and showing of links have been crafted. From drop-down menus to expose the deeper structure of a website, to a decluttering of skip links so as not to impact design considerations. Both are well intentioned with the aim of preserving a good usability experience for the majority of a website’s audience; hiding the real complexity of a page until the visitor interacts with the element.

When JavaScript is not available

The modern dynamic link techniques rely on JavaScript and CSS, but regardless of whether scripting and styles are enabled or not, we should consider the accessibility implications, particularly for screen-reader users, and people who rely on keyboard access.

In typical web standards-based drop-down navigation implementations, the rough consensus is that the navigation should be structured as nested lists so when JavaScript is not available the entire navigation map is available to the visitor. This creates a situation where a visitor is faced with potentially well over 50 links on every page of the website. Keyboard access to such structures is frustrating, there’s far too many options, and the method of serially tabbing through each link looking for a specific one is tedious.

Instead of offering the visitor an indigestible chunk of links when JavaScript is not available, consider instead having the minimum number of links on a page, and when JavaScript is available bringing in the extra links dynamically. Santa Chris Heilmann offers an excellent proof of concept in making Ajax navigation optional.

When JavaScript is enabled, we need to decide how to hide links. One technique offers a means of comprehensively hiding links from keyboard users and assistive technology users. Another technique allows keyboard and screen-reader users to access links while they are hidden, and making them visible when reached.

Hiding the links

In JavaScript enhanced pages whether a link displays on screen depends on a certain event happening first. For example, a visitor needs to click a top-level navigation link that makes a set of sub-navigation links appear. In these cases, we need to ensure that these links are not available to any user until that event has happened.

The typical way of hiding links is to style the anchor elements, or its parent nodes with display: none. This has the advantage of taking the links out of the tab order, so they are not focusable. It’s useful in reducing the number of links presented to a screen-reader or keyboard user to a minimum. Although the links are still in the document (they can be referenced and manipulated using DOM Scripting), they are not directly triggerable by a visitor.

Once the necessary event has happened, like our visitor has clicked on a top-level navigation link which shows our hidden set of links, then we can display the links to the visitor and make them triggerable. This is done simply by undoing the display: none, perhaps by setting the display back to block for block level elements, or inline for inline elements. For as long as this display style remains, the links are in the tab order, focusable by keyboard, and triggerable.

A common mistake in this situation is to use visibility: hidden, text-indent: -999em, or position: absolute with left: -999em to position these links off-screen. But all of these links remain accessible via keyboard tabbing even though the links remain hidden from screen view. In some ways this is a good idea, but for hiding sub-navigation links, it presents the screen-reader user and keyboard user with too many links to be of practical use.

Moving the links out of sight

If you want a set of text links accessible to screen-readers and keyboard users, but don’t want them cluttering up space on the screen, then style the links with position: absolute; left: -999em. Links styled this way remain in the tab order, and are accessible via keyboard. (The position: absolute is added as a style to the link, not to a parent node of the link – this will give us a useful hook to solve the next problem).

a.helper {
	position: absolute;
	left: -999em;
}

One important requirement when displaying links off-screen is that they are visible to a keyboard user when they receive focus. Tabbing on a link that is not visible is a usability mudpit, since the visitor has no visible cue as to what a focused link will do, or where it will go.

The simple answer is to restyle the link so that it appears on the screen when the hidden link receives focus. The anchor’s :focus pseudo-class is a logical hook to use, and with the following style repositions the link onscreen when it receives the focus:

a.helper:focus, a.helper.focus {
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}

This technique is useful for hiding skip links, and options you want screen-reader and keyboard users to use, but don’t want cluttering up the page. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and 7 don’t support the focus pseudo-class, which is why there’s a second CSS selector a.helper.focus so we can use some JavaScript to help out. When the page loads, we look for all links that have a class of helper and add in onfocus and onblur event handlers:

if (anchor.className == ""helper"") {
	anchor.onfocus = function() {
		this.className = 'helper focus';
	}
	anchor.onblur = function() {
		this.className = 'helper';
	}
}

Since we are using JavaScript to cover up for deficiencies in Internet Explorer, it makes sense to use JavaScript initially to place the links off-screen. That way an Internet Explorer user with JavaScript disabled can still use the skip link functionality.

It is vital that the number of links rendered in this way is kept to a minimum. Every link you offer needs to be tabbed through, and gets read out in a screen reader. Offer these off-screen links that directly benefit these types of visitor.

Andy Clarke and Kimberly Blessing use a similar technique in the Web Standards Project‘s latest design, but their technique involves hiding the skip link in plain sight and making it visible when it receives focus. Navigate the page using just the tab key to see the accessibility-related links appear when they receive focus.

This technique is also a good way of hiding image replaced text. That way the screen-readers still get the actual text, and the website still gets its designed look.

Which way?

If the links are not meant to be reachable until a certain event has occurred, then the display: none technique is the preferred approach. If you want the links accessible but out of the way until they receive focus, then the off-screen positioning (or Andy’s hiding in plain sight technique) is the way to go.",2006,Mike Davies,mikedavies,2006-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/accessible-dynamic-links/,ux
262,Be the Villain,"Inclusive Design is the practice of making products and services accessible to, and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for specialized accommodations. The practice was popularized by author and User Experience Design Director Kat Holmes. If getting you to discover her work is the only thing this article succeeds in doing then I’ll consider it a success.
As a framework for creating resilient solutions to problems, Inclusive Design is incredible. However, the aimless idealistic aspirations many of its newer practitioners default to can oftentimes run into trouble. Without outlining concrete, actionable outcomes that are then vetted by the people you intend to serve, there is the potential to do more harm than good. 
When designing, you take a user flow and make sure it can’t be broken. Ensuring that if something is removed, it can be restored. Or that something editable can also be updated at a later date—you know, that kind of thing. What we want to do is avoid surprises. Much like a water slide with a section of pipe missing, a broken flow forcibly ejects a user, to great surprise and frustration. Interactions within a user flow also have to be small enough to be self-contained, so as to avoid creating a none pizza with left beef scenario.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to expand on this practice. Watertight user flows make for a great immediate experience, but it’s all too easy to miss the forest for the trees when you’re a product designer focused on cranking out features. 
What I’m concerned about is while to trying to envision how a user flow could be broken, you also think about how it could be subverted. In addition to preventing the removal of a section of water slide, you also keep someone from mugging the user when they shoot out the end.
If you pay attention, you’ll start to notice this subversion with increasing frequency:

Domestic abusers using internet-controlled devices to spy on and control their partner.
Zealots tanking a business’ rating on Google because its owners spoke out against unchecked gun violence.
Forcing people to choose between TV or stalking because the messaging center portion of a cable provider’s entertainment package lacks muting or blocking features.
White supremacists tricking celebrities into endorsing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Facebook repeatedly allowing housing, credit, and employment advertisers to discriminate against users by their race, ability, and religion.
White supremacists also using a video game chat service as a recruiting tool.
The unchecked harassment of minors on Instagram.
Swatting.

If I were to guess why we haven’t heard more about this problem, I’d say that optimistically, people have settled out of court. Pessimistically, it’s most likely because we ignore, dismiss, downplay, and suppress those who try to bring it to our attention. 
Subverted design isn’t the practice of employing Dark Patterns to achieve your business goals. If you are not familiar with the term, Dark Patterns are the use of cheap user interface tricks and psychological manipulation to get users to act against their own best interests. User Experience consultant Chris Nodder wrote Evil By Design, a fantastic book that unpacks how to detect and think about them, if you’re interested in this kind of thing
Subverted design also isn’t beholden design, or simple lack of attention. This phenomenon isn’t even necessarily premeditated. I think it arises from naïve (or willfully ignorant) design decisions being executed at a historically unprecedented pace and scale. These decisions are then preyed on by the shrewd and opportunistic, used to control and inflict harm on the undeserving. Have system, will game.
This is worth discussing. As the field of design continues to industrialize empathy, it also continues to ignore the very established practice of threat modeling. Most times, framing user experience in terms of how to best funnel people into a service comes with an implicit agreement that the larger system that necessitates the service is worth supporting. 
To achieve success in the eyes of their superiors, designers may turn to emotional empathy exercises. By projecting themselves into the perceived surface-level experiences of others, they play-act at understanding how to nudge their targeted demographics into a conversion funnel. This roleplaying exercise has the effect of scoping concerns to the immediate, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea of engagement at all cost within the identified demographic.
The thing is, pure engagement leaves the door wide open for bad actors. Even within the scope of a limited population, the assumption that everyone entering into the funnel is acting with good intentions is a poor one. Security researchers, network administrators, and other professionals who practice threat modeling understand that the opposite is true. By preventing everyone save for well-intentioned users from operating a system within the parameters you set for them, you intentionally limit the scope of abuse that can be enacted.
Don’t get me wrong: being able to escort as many users as you can to the happy path is a foundational skill. But we should also be having uncomfortable conversations about why something unthinkable may in fact not be. 
They’re not going to be fun conversations. It’s not going to be easy convincing others that these aren’t paranoid delusions best tucked out of sight in the darkest, dustiest corner of the backlog. Realistically, talking about it may even harm your career.
But consider the alternative. The controlled environment of the hypothetical allows us to explore these issues without propagating harm. Better to be viewed as the office’s resident villain than to have to live with something like this:

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the choices we make—or avoid making—have consequences. Design has been doing a lot of growing up as of late, including waking up to the idea that technology isn’t neutral. 
You’re going to have to start thinking the way a monster does—if you can imagine it, chances are someone else can as well. To get into this kind of mindset, inverting the Inclusive Design Principles is a good place to start:

Providing a comparable experience becomes forcing a single path.
Considering situation becomes ignoring circumstance.
Being consistent becomes acting capriciously.
Giving control becomes removing autonomy. 
Offering choice becomes limiting options. 
Prioritizing content becomes obfuscating purpose.
Adding value becomes filling with gibberish. 

Combined, these inverted principles start to paint a picture of something we’re all familiar with: a half-baked, unscrupulous service that will jump at the chance to take advantage of you. This environment is also a perfect breeding ground for spawning bad actors.
These kinds of services limit you in the ways you can interact with them. They kick you out or lock you in if you don’t meet their unnamed criteria. They force you to parse layout, prices, and policies that change without notification or justification. Their controls operate in ways that are unexpected and may shift throughout the experience. Their terms are dictated to you, gaslighting you to extract profit. Heaps of jargon and flashy, unnecessary features are showered on you to distract from larger structural and conceptual flaws.
So, how else can we go about preventing subverted design? Marli Mesibov, Content Strategist and Managing Editor of UX Booth, wrote a brilliant article about how to use Dark Patterns for good—perhaps the most important takeaway being admitting you have a problem in the first place. 
Another exercise is asking the question, “What is the evil version of this feature?” Ask it during the ideation phase. Ask it as part of acceptance criteria. Heck, ask it over lunch. I honestly don’t care when, so long as the question is actually raised. 
In keeping with the spirit of this article, we can also expand on this line of thinking. Author, scientist, feminist, and pacifist Ursula Franklin urges us to ask, “Whose benefits? Whose risks?” instead of “What benefits? What risks?” in her talk, When the Seven Deadly Sins Became the Seven Cardinal Virtues. Inspired by the talk, Ethan Marcotte discusses how this relates to the web platform in his powerful post, Seven into seven.
Few things in this world are intrinsically altruistic or good—it’s just the nature of the beast. However, that doesn’t mean we have to stand idly by when harm is created. If we can add terms like “anti-pattern” to our professional vocabulary, we can certainly also incorporate phrases like “abuser flow.” 
Design finally got a seat at the table. We should use this newfound privilege wisely. Listen to women. Listen to minorities, listen to immigrants, the unhoused, the less economically advantaged, and the less technologically-literate. Listen to the underrepresented and the underprivileged.
Subverted design is a huge problem, likely one that will never completely go away. However, the more of us who put the hard work into being the villain, the more we can lessen the scope of its impact.",2018,Eric Bailey,ericbailey,2018-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/be-the-villain/,ux
17,Bringing Design and Research Closer Together,"The ‘should designers be able to code’ debate has raged for some time, but I’m interested in another debate: should designers be able to research? 

Are you a designer who can do research? Good research and the insights you uncover inspire fresh ways of thinking and get your creative juices flowing. Good research brings clarity to a woolly brief. Audience insight helps sharpen your focus on what’s really important. Experimentation through research and design brings a sense of playfulness and curiosity to your work. Good research helps you do good design.

Being a web designer today is pretty tough, particularly if you’re a freelancer and work on your own. There are so many new ideas, approaches to workflow and trends and tools to keep up with. How do you decide which things to do and which to ignore? A modern web designer needs to be able to consider the needs of the audience, design appropriate IAs and layouts, choose colour palettes, pick appropriate typefaces and type layouts, wrangle with content, style, code, dabble in SEO, and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but today’s web designer also has to keep up with the latest talking points in the industry: responsive design, Agile, accessibility, Sass, Git, lean UX, content first, mobile first, blah blah blah. Any good web designer doesn’t need to be persuaded about the merits of including research in their toolkit, but do you really have time to include research too? 

Who is responsible for research?

Generally, research in the web industry forms part of other disciplines and isn’t so much a discipline in its own right. It’s very often thought of as part of UX, or activities that make up a process such as IA or content strategy. Research is often undertaken by UX designers, information architects or content strategists and isn’t something designers or developers get that involved in. Some people lump all of these activities together and label it design research and have design researchers to do it. Some companies, such as the one I run with my husband Mark, are lucky enough to have someone with specialist research knowledge (yup, that would be me folks) who can lead all or most of the research work undertaken by the company. See also Mule Design, GOV.UK, the BBC, Mailchimp, Facebook and Twitter. 

What if you’re not lucky enough to have your own researcher or team of researchers? Often research is the kind of thing that’s nice to have, or it can be cut from scope when doing the budget dance with a client. It often forms part of the discovery phase of a project and sometimes just becomes a tick-box exercise. But research isn’t just user testing and it shouldn’t just live in a report on Basecamp that no one reads. I would argue that research and experimentation is a way of working or an approach to how you design. Research can be used during the whole design process and must be a vital part of a designer’s workflow on every project. Even if you work in a small studio, you can still create a culture of audience insight. Even if you work on your own, you can still absorb yourself in as much audience data as you can throughout the project life cycle. Here’s how.

Research is everyone’s job

There is a subtle difference between writing a research report and delivering it to a client, and them actually using it and applying the insights to their thought process. In my experience of working in the audiences team at the BBC, research was most effective when the role was embedded in the production team and insights were used as part of the editorial process.

In this section I’ll talk through some common problems you might encounter in a typical project life cycle and show you ways you can use research to help you. For the sake of this article, let’s imagine that we’re talking about a particular project here and not ongoing product development. The same principles can of course be applied then, but even if you work in-house rather than on the agency side, you’re probably used to working on distinct projects or phases of work.

1. Problem: I want to come up with a new product idea. 

Solution: Inspiration through insights.

Before you begin a new project, a good way of quickly absorbing all the existing knowledge that there maybe about a theme, product type or website is to literally surround yourself with it. This is especially relevant for new ideas or product development. Create an incident room if you can: fill the walls of your meeting room, the walls near your desk, or even just use a pinboard or online pinboard if space is tight or you’re working with a dispersed team. The same process can be used throughout a project’s or product life cycle — read about how MailChimp has applied this idea. 

Let’s take a new product idea as an example. Say you wanted to develop a responsive tool for web designers but you weren’t sure what aspect of responsive design to focus on. First of all, you should pose a hypothesis or problem statement to gather ideas around. For example: “How to speed up a designer’s responsive workflow.” You would then need to gather insights around this topic. You could run some interviews with freelance designers about how they work responsively. You could shadow a development team for the day to understand their processes. You could observe conversations on Twitter or IRC or wherever your target audience interact to see what people talk about. You could search out industry data and articles currently available.

The next stage is to comb through this data and extract insights from it. You can use good old Post-it notes and a sharpie: capture one insight or thought per Post-it. If one insight leads into another, use two Post-its. The objective is volume. Try to ensure clarity in each Post-it so you don’t have to go back and reference material again (maybe you could use a key if you think it’ll get confusing).



After this, stick them all up and synthesise the same way you would for any kind of cluster or affinity sort. Organise into broad themes. These themes then become springboards for further exploration and idea generation. You might see a gap or opportunity in one particular area, both from a workflow perspective but also from a business perspective. Bingo. Your insights then become the fuel for ideas generation.

This method doesn’t just have to be used for new products — it works particularly well in a discovery phase for new projects or for new features in an existing product. We’re doing something similar for our own responsive tool, Gridset at the moment.

Resources:


	Sticky Wisdom by Dave Allan, Matt Kingdon, Kris Murrin, Daz Rudkin
	The Science of Serendipity by Matt Kingdon
	The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley


2. Problem: You’re starting a new project and need to know the basics before you get headlong into designing or building. 

Solution: Quantitative survey.

Common questions might be:


	Who are the users?
	How many are there?
	What are they like?
	Why do they use the site?
	What do they need from the site?
	What are their goals?


Print out and stick up what you already know and have in your project space or ‘incident room’: any reports you have found or been given, analytics graphs, personas, pen portraits, as well as screengrabs of the current website, product or branding. Spend time looking through it all and identify the gaps. 

If you have very little existing audience data, a quick and easy way to get some baseline information is to run a quick user survey on a current website. You can establish basic demographic information, appreciation and views of the website as it stands, as well as delve a little deeper into needs and wants. This is also vital if you want some kind of trackable measures to go back to once you have designed and built your shiny new website for your client — read more in my article for 24 ways last year.)



We use surveys a lot at Mark Boulton Design for our client work. Here’s a screen grab of one we ran in March on http://info.cern.ch before we redesigned the site and did the work on the First Website Project. We repeated the survey after the new website went live and were able to compare the results. Both surveys were a great source of insight to the project team as well as for the project stakeholders who needed to pitch the idea of the hack days and fundraise for them.



Once you’ve run your survey, you should always write up a short summary for yourself and your client to refer to. If you’re not a trained researcher, you should try to read up on analysis techniques or data visualisation. It can be easy to misinterpret data and make it bend to the story you are trying to tell. You should be looking for the story in the data and present it without bias. 

If you’re using the ‘incident room’ method I mentioned earlier on, you can also extract the insights onto post it notes and add them to your growing body of knowledge.

Resources: 


	Using Questionnaires for Design Research by Emma Boulton
	Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey by Aarron Walter
	Research Methods for Product Design by Alex Milton and Paul Rodgers
	A Practical Guide to Designing with Data by Brian Suda


3. Problem: You have a prototype of a new design and you need some feedback from real users. 

Solution: User interviews and task based testing.

Interviewing is a staple research method that every designer should master as it can be used throughout a project life cycle. Erika Hall recently wrote a great article on the basics for A List Apart. From stakeholder interviews in a discovery phase, to initial user research, right through to task based testing and iteration, interviews can be enormously helpful. They are very time-consuming, however, and although speaking to someone is better than speaking to no one, it’s always better to plan to do a few interviews at once, rather than one or two. I generally find that patterns only start to emerge after I’ve spoken to 4 or 5 people. Interviews are another thing we do a lot of at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the interviews we do are remote due to the location of our clients and their users. 



Rigour is an important consideration in all research activities and especially if you’re a non-researcher. Interviews particularly can be easily skewed by an inexperienced facilitator, which is why pairing can be a good approach. Building rapport, questioning, time keeping, note taking and thinking on your feet can be difficult to do all at once, so having a colleague take notes while you concentrate on leading the conversation can work really well. It’s important for the note taker to sit in on more than one interview so that they get a more rounded view of the feedback. The same person should also be involved in the analysis of the data. 



Interviews can be analysed and written up in a report or summary as with other types of research. I often use the same kind of collaborative process detailed earlier for deciding on themes, particularly if multiple members of the team have been involved in interviewing. 

Interviews are particularly useful for our incident room and can provide much colour and insight to an exploratory process. I often find verbatim quotes to be the most insightful type of data. You might find that an inexperienced researcher (or designer who is used to solving problems) will jump to interpretation too soon and forget to just listen to what the interviewee is saying. Capturing the exact form of words a person uses can help get away from this.

Resources: 


	Interviewing Humans by Erika Hall
	A Pocket Guide to Interviewing for Research by Andrew Travers
	Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal


4. Problem: How successful have I been with this new design? 

Solution: Key performance indicators

Once your new design has been realised, it’s important to evaluate it. What works, what doesn’t work so well? As well as a straightforward design crit, don’t forget to introduce audience insights into a review meeting or project wash up. 



Work out what your KPIs — your key performance indicators — will be beforehand and then you can start to track them over time. For example, number of visits, appreciation of the site, willingness to recommend the site to a friend, number of sales, and number of conversions are all sensible measures to track. Interviews can again be helpful but cold, hard numbers are often better here. Read Corey Vilhauer’s take on this on A List Apart.

Consistency is key here. If you have looked at your analytics and done a survey beforehand, you will have a baseline to start from. Don’t keep changing your measures and questions, or your data will not be comparable. Pick a few key questions or a set of measures, create a survey and then run it once a month, once a quarter, every six months or annually. You’ll start to see changes over time as the design beds in. You may see seasonal trends and spot patterns in the data related to other activities like marketing, promotion and so on. Keeping a record of all of this will increase your understanding of your audience. We’ve created a satisfaction survey for Gridset with a number of measures that we track on an ongoing basis. MailChimp has also created an annual survey with the aim of tracking their audience measures over time

Resources:


	Search Analytics by Louis Rosenfeld
	A Primer on A/B Testing by Lara Swanson
	Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf


Anyone can do research

Research can be brought into the project life cycle at any stage. And of course, anyone can do research — you don’t need to be a researcher. Some of the main skills most designers possess are also key research skills: inquisitive nature, problem solving, playfulness, empathy, and so on.

We have a small team at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the team are designers and the rest of us focus on supporting the team and clients both in terms of billable work (research, content strategy, project management) as well as the non-billable things like finance and studio management.

Despite my best intentions, in the past I’ve undertaken research for clients in isolation — first being briefed by the design lead, carrying out the research and then delivering the findings back, trusting the design team to take the findings on board. This was often due to time and availability of resources.

We’ve been trying hard to join up our processes and collaborate even more across the team. Undertaking heuristic or design reviews collaboratively; taking part in frequent critiques of our work and the work of others together; pairing a researcher and a designer to run interviews; workshopping results from interviews to come up with recommendations; working closely together on questionnaire design; shadowing each other on tasks that don’t fall within our core skills. A little thing like moving our desks around has also helped us have more conversations that we can all be a part of.



I’ve come to the conclusion that my role as the research director at Mark Boulton Design is actually a facilitator of research. As well as carrying out research, I am responsible for ensuring that research happens consistently across the team. I am responsible for empowering and training our designers so they feel confident in carrying out their own user, audience or design research for clients. So they know what to look for, when to listen, when to probe and when to take note of something. So they know how to look for themes, how to synthesise insights from research and how to apply them to their work.

Better research leads to better design

So, are you a designer who can do research? Are you a researcher who can design? The best designers are a lucky combination of researcher and designer. If you’re not one of those, look at ways of enhancing the skills you lack. Because there’s no doubt in my mind, that becoming a better researcher will make you a better designer.

General resources: 


	Seeing the Elephant by Louis Rosenfeld
	Connected UX by Aarron Walter
	Beyond Usability Testing by Devan Goldstein
	Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
	The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley
	Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
	A Pocket Guide to Psychology for Designers by Joe Leech
	A Pocket Guide to International User Research by Chui Chui Tan
	Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte
	A Pocket Guide to Experiments for Designers by Colin McFarland",2013,Emma Boulton,emmaboulton,2013-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/bringing-design-and-research-closer-together/,ux
106,Checking Out: Progress Meters,"It’s the holiday season, so you know what that means: online shopping! When I started developing Web sites back in the 90s, many of my first clients were small local shops wanting to sell their goods online, so I developed many a checkout system. And because of slow dial-up speeds back then, informing the user about where they were in the checkout process was pretty important.

Even though we’re (mostly) beyond the dial-up days, informing users about where they are in a flow is still important. In usability tests at the companies I’ve worked at, I’ve seen time and time again how not adequately informing the user about their state can cause real frustration. This is especially true for two sets of users: mobile users and users of assistive devices, in particular, screen readers.

The progress meter is a very common design solution used to indicate to the user’s state within a flow. On the design side, much effort may go in to crafting a solution that is as visually informative as possible. On the development side, however, solutions range widely. I’ve checked out the checkouts at a number of sites and here’s what I’ve found when it comes to progress meters: they’re sometimes inaccessible and often confusing or unhelpful — all because of the way in which they’re coded. For those who use assistive devices or text-only browsers, there must be a better way to code the progress meter — and there is.

(Note: All code samples are from live sites but have been tweaked to hide the culprits’ identities.)

How not to make progress

A number of sites assemble their progress meters using non- or semi-semantic markup and images with no alternate text. On text-only browsers (like my mobile phone) and to screen readers, this looks and reads like chunks of content with no context given.

<div id=""progress"">
	<img src=""icon_progress_1a.gif"" alt="""">
	<em>Shipping information</em>
	<img src=""icon_progress_arrow.gif"" alt="""">
	<img src=""icon_progress_2a.gif"" alt="""">
	<em>Payment information</em>
	<img src=""icon_progress_arrow.gif"" alt="""" class=""progarrow"">
	<img src=""icon_progress_3b.gif"" alt="""">
	<strong>Place your order</strong>
</div>

In the above example, the third state, “Place your order”, is the current state. But a screen reader may not know that, and my cell phone only displays ""Shipping informationPayment informationPlace your order"". Not good.

Is this progress?

Other sites present the entire progress meter as a graphic, like the following:



Now, I have no problem with using a graphic to render a very stylish progress meter (my sample above is probably not the most stylish example, of course, but you understand my point). What becomes important in this case is the use of appropriate alternate text to describe the image. Disappointingly, sites today have a wide range of solutions, including using no alternate text. Check out these code samples which call progress meter images.

<img src=""checkout_step2.gif"" alt="""">

I think we can all agree that the above is bad, unless you really don’t care whether or not users know where they are in a flow.

<img src=""checkout_step2.gif"" alt=""Shipping information - Payment information - Place your order"">

The alt text in the example above just copies all of the text found in the graphic, but it doesn’t represent the status at all. So for every page in the checkout, the user sees or hears the same text. Sure, by the second or third page in the flow, the user has figured out what’s going on, but she or he had to think about it. I don’t think that’s good.

<img src=""checkout_step2.gif"" alt=""Checkout: Payment information"">

The above probably has the best alternate text out of these examples, because the user at least understands that they’re in the Checkout process, on the Place your order page. But going through the flow with alt text like this, the user doesn’t know how many steps are in the flow.

Semantic progress

Of course, there are some sites that use an ordered list when marking up the progress meter. Hooray! Unfortunately, no text-only browser or screen reader would be able to describe the user’s current state given this markup.

<ol class=""progressmeter"">
	<li class=""one current"">shipping information</li>
	<li class=""two"">payment information</li>
	<li class=""three"">place your order</li>
</ol>

Without CSS enabled, the above is rendered as follows:



Progress at last

We all know that semantic markup makes for the best foundation, so we’ll start with the markup found above. In order to make the state information accessible, let’s add some additional text in paragraph and span elements.

<div class=""progressmeter"">
	<p>There are three steps in this checkout process.</p>
	<ol>
		<li class=""one""><span>Enter your</span> shipping information</li>
		<li class=""two""><span>Enter your</span> payment information</li>
		<li class=""three""><span>Review details and</span> place your order</li>
	</ol>
</div>

Add on some simple CSS to hide the paragraph and spans, and arrange the list items on a single line with a background image to represent the large number, and this is what you’ll get:

 
	There are three steps in this checkout process.
	
		Enter your shipping information
		Enter your payment information
		Review details and place your order
	
 

To display and describe a state as active, add the class “current” to one of the list items. Then change the hidden content such that it better describes the state to the user.

<div class=""progressmeter"">
	<p>There are three steps in this checkout process.</p>
	<ol>
		<li class=""one current""><span>You are currently entering your</span> shipping information</li>
		<li class=""two""><span>In the next step, you will enter your</span> payment information</li>
		<li class=""three""><span>In the last step, you will review the details and</span> place your order</li>
	</ol>
</div>

The end result is an attractive progress meter that gives much greater semantic and contextual information.

 
	There are three steps in this checkout process.
	
		You are currently entering your shipping information
		In the next step, you will enter your payment information
		In the last step, you will review the details and place your order
	
 

For example, the above example renders in a text-only browser as follows:

 
	There are three steps in this checkout process.
	
		You are currently entering your shipping information
		In the next step, you will enter your payment information
		In the last step, you will review the details and place your order
	
 

And the screen reader I use for testing announces the following:

 
	There are three steps in this checkout process. List of three items. You are currently entering your shipping information. In the next step, you will enter your payment information. In the last step, you will review the details and place your order. List end.
 

Here’s a sample code page that summarises this approach.

Happy frustration-free online shopping with this improved progress meter!",2008,Kimberly Blessing,kimberlyblessing,2008-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/checking-out-progress-meters/,ux
32,Cohesive UX,"With Yosemite, Apple users can answer iPhone calls on their MacBooks. This is weird. And yet it’s representative of a greater trend toward cohesion.

Shortly after upgrading to Yosemite, a call came in on my iPhone and my MacBook “rang” in parallel. And I was all, like, “Wut?” This was a new feature in Yosemite, and honestly it was a little bizarre at first.

 Apple promotional image showing a phone call ringing simultaneously on multiple devices.

However, I had just spoken at a conference on the very topic you’re reading about now, and therefore I appreciated the underlying concept: the cohesion of user experience, the cohesion of screens.

This is just one of many examples I’ve encountered since beginning to speak about this topic months ago. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at the past few years, specifically the role of responsive web design.

RWD != cohesive experience

I needn’t expound on the virtues of responsive web design (RWD). You’ve likely already encountered more than a career’s worth on the topic. This is a good thing. Count me in as one of its biggest fans.

However, if we are to sing the praises of RWD, we must also acknowledge its shortcomings. One of these is that RWD ends where the browser ends. For all its goodness, RWD really has no bearing on native apps or any other experiences that take place outside the browser. This makes it challenging, therefore, to create cohesion for multi-screen users if RWD is the only response to “let’s make it work everywhere.”

We need something that incorporates the spirit of RWD while unifying all touchpoints for the entire user experience—single device or several devices, in browser or sans browser, native app or otherwise.

I call this cohesive UX, and I believe it’s the next era of successful user experiences.

Toward a unified whole

Simply put, the goal of cohesive UX is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends.

Two facets are vital to cohesive UX:


	Function and form
	Data symmetry


Let’s examine each of these.

Function AND form

Function over form, of course. Right? Not so fast, kiddo.

Consider Bruce Lawson’s dad. After receiving an Android phone for Christmas and thumbing through his favorite sites, he was puzzled why some looked different from their counterparts on the desktop. “When a site looked radically different,” Bruce observed, “he’d check the URL bar to ensure that he’d typed in the right address. In short, he found RWD to be confusing and it meant he didn’t trust the site.” A lack of cohesive form led to a jarring experience for Bruce’s dad.

Now, if I appear to be suggesting websites must look the same in every browser—you already learned they needn’t—know that I recognize the importance of context, especially in regards to mobile. I made a case for this more than seven years ago.

Rather, cohesive UX suggests that form deserves the same respect as function when crafting user experiences that span multiple screens or devices. And users are increasingly comfortable traversing media. For example, more than 40% of adults in the U.S. owning more than one device start an activity on one screen and finish it on another, according to a study commissioned by Facebook. I suspect that percentage will only increase in 2015, and I suspect the tech-affluent readers of 24 ways are among the 40%.

There are countless examples of cohesive form and function. Consider Gmail, which displays email conversations visually as a stack that can be expanded and collapsed like the bellows of an accordion. This visual metaphor has been consistent in virtually any instance of Gmail—website or app—since at least 2007 when I captured this screenshot on my Nokia 6680:

 Screenshot captured while authoring Mobile Web Design (2007). Back then we didn’t call this an app, but rather a ‘smart client’.

When the holistic experience is cohesive as it is with Gmail, users’ mental models and even muscle memory are preserved.1 Functionality and aesthetics align with the expectations users have for how things should function and what they should look like. In other words, the experience is roughly the same across screens.

But don’t be ridiculous, peoples. Note that I said “roughly.” It’s important to avoid mindless replication of aesthetics and functionality for the sake of cohesion. Again, the goal is a unified whole, not a carbon copy. Affordances and concessions should be made as context and intuition require. For example, while Facebook users are accustomed to top-aligned navigation in the browser, they encounter bottom-aligned navigation in the iOS app as justified by user testing:

The iOS app model has held up despite many attempts to better it: http://t.co/rSMSAqeh9m pic.twitter.com/mBp36lAEgc— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) December 10, 2014


Despite the (rather minor) lack of consistency in navigation placement, other elements such as icons, labels, and color theme work in tandem to produce a unified, holistic whole.

Data symmetry

Data symmetry involves the repetition, continuity, or synchronicity of data across screens, devices, and platforms. As regards cohesive UX, data includes not just the material (such as an article you’re writing on Medium) but also the actions that can be performed on or with that material (such as Medium’s authoring tools). That is to say, “sync verbs, not just nouns” (Josh Clark).

In my estimation, Amazon is an archetype of data symmetry, as is Rdio. When logged in, data is shared across virtually any device of any kind, irrespective of using a browser or native app. Add a product to your Amazon cart from your phone during the morning commute, and finish the transaction at work on your laptop. Easy peasy.

Amazon’s aesthetics are crazy cohesive, to boot:

 Amazon web (left) and native app (right).

With Rdio, not only are playlists and listening history synced across screens as you would expect, but the cohesion goes even further. Rdio’s remote control feature allows you to control music playing on one device using another device, all in real time.

 Rdio’s remote control feature, as viewed on my MacBook while music plays on my iMac.

At my office I often work from my couch using my MacBook, but my speakers are connected to my iMac. When signed in to Rdio on both devices, my MacBook serves as proxy for controlling Rdio on my iMac, much the same as any Yosemite-enabled device can serve as proxy for an incoming iPhone call.

 Me, in my office. Note the iMac and speakers at far right.

This is a brilliant example of cohesive design, and it’s executed entirely via the cloud.

Things to consider

Consider the following when crafting cohesive experiences:


	Inventory the elements that comprise your product experience, and cohesify them.2
Consider things such as copy, tone, typography, iconography, imagery, flow, placement, brand identification, account data, session data, user preferences, and so on. Then, create cohesion among these elements to the greatest extent possible, while adapting to context as needed.
	Store session data in the cloud rather than locally.
For example, avoid using browser cookies to store shopping cart data, as cookies are specific to a single browser on a single device. Instead, store this data in the cloud so it can be accessed from other devices, as well as beyond the browser.
	Consider using web views when developing your native app.
“You’re already using web apps in native wrappers without even noticing it,” Lukas Mathis contends. “The fact that nobody even notices, the fact that this isn’t a story, shows that, when it comes to user experience, web vs. native doesn’t matter anymore.” Web views essentially allow you to display HTML content inside a native wrapper. This can reduce the time and effort needed to make the overall experience cohesive. So whereas the navigation bar may be rendered by the app, for example, the remaining page display may be rendered via the web. There’s readily accessible documentation for using web views in C++, iOS, Android, and so forth.


Nature is calling

Returning to the example of Yosemite and sychronized phone calls, is it really that bizarre in light of cohesive UX? Perhaps at first. But I suspect that, over time, Yosemite’s cohesiveness — and the cohesiveness of other examples like the ones we’ve discussed here — will become not only more natural but more commonplace, too.



1 I browse Flipboard on my iPad nearly every morning as part of my breakfast routine. Swiping horizontally advances to the next page. Countless times I’ve done the same gesture in Flipboard for iPhone only to have it do nothing. This is because the gesture for advancing is vertical on phones. I’m so conditioned to the horizontal swipe that I often fail to make the switch to vertical swipe, and apparently others suffer from the same muscle memory, too.

2 Cohesify isn’t a thing. But chances are you understood what I meant. Yay neologism!",2014,Cameron Moll,cameronmoll,2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/cohesive-ux/,ux
290,Creating a Weekly Research Cadence,"Working on a product team, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on building features and lose sight of your users and their daily challenges. User research can be time-consuming to set up, so it often becomes ad-hoc and irregular, only performed in response to a particular question or concern. But without frequent touch points and opportunities for discovery, your product will stagnate and become less and less relevant. Setting up an efficient cadence of weekly research conversations will re-focus your team on user problems and provide a steady stream of insights for product development.
As my team transitioned into a Lean process earlier this year, we needed a way to get more feedback from users in a short amount of time. Our users are internet marketers—always busy and often difficult to reach. Scheduling research took days of emailing back and forth to find mutually agreeable times, and juggling one-off conversations made it difficult to connect with more than one or two people per week. The slow pace of research was allowing additional risk to creep into our product development.
I wanted to find a way for our team to test ideas and validate assumptions sooner and more often—but without increasing the administrative burden of scheduling. The solution: creating a regular cadence of research and testing that required a minimum of effort to coordinate. 
Setting up a weekly user research cadence accelerated our learning and built momentum behind strategic experiments. By dedicating time every week to talk to a few users, we made ongoing research a painless part of every weekly sprint. But increasing the frequency of our research had other benefits as well. With only five working days between sessions, a weekly cadence forced us to keep our work small and iterative. Committing to testing something every week meant showing work earlier and more often than we might have preferred—pushing us out of your comfort zone into a process of more rapid experimentation.
Best of all, frequent conversations with users helped us become more customer-focused. After just a few weeks in a consistent research cadence, I noticed user feedback weaving itself through our planning and strategy sessions. Comments like “Remember what Jenna said last week, about not being able to customize her lists?” would pop up as frequent reference points to guide our decisions. As discussions become less about subjective opinions and more about responding to user needs, we saw immediate improvement in the quality of our solutions.
Establishing an efficient recruitment process
The key to creating a regular cadence of ongoing user research is an efficient recruitment and scheduling process—along with a commitment to prioritize the time needed for research conversations. This is an invaluable tool for product teams (whether or not they follow a Lean process), but could easily be adapted for content strategy teams, agency teams, a UX team of one, or any other project that would benefit from short, frequent conversations with users. 
The process I use requires a few hours of setup time at the beginning, but pays off in better learning and better releases over the long run. Almost any team could use this as a starting point and adapt it to their own needs.
Pick a dedicated time each week for research
In order to make research a priority, we started by choosing a time each week when everyone on the product team was available. Between stand-ups, grooming sessions, and roadmap reviews, it wasn’t easy to do! Nevertheless, it’s important to include as many people as possible in conversations with your users. Getting a second-hand summary of research results doesn’t have the same impact as hearing someone describe their frustrations and concerns first-hand. The more people in the room to hear those concerns, the more likely they are to become priorities for your team.
I blocked off 2 hours for research conversations every Thursday afternoon. We make this time sacred, and never schedule other meetings or work across those hours. 
Divide your time into several research slots
After my weekly cadence was set, I divided the time into four 20-minute time slots. Twenty minutes is long enough for us to ask several open-ended questions or get feedback on a prototype, without being a burden on our users’ busy schedules. Depending on your work, you may need schedule longer sessions—but beware the urge to create blocks that last an hour or more. A weekly research cadence is designed to facilitate rapid, ongoing feedback and testing; it should force you to talk to users often and to keep your work small and iterative. Projects that require longer, more in-depth testing will probably need a dedicated research project of their own.
I used the scheduling software Calendly to create interview appointments on a calendar that I can share with users, and customized the confirmation and reminder emails with information about how to access our video conferencing software. (Most of our research is done remotely, but this could be set up with details for in-person meetings as well.) Automating these emails and reminders took a little bit of time to set up, but was worth it for how much faster it made the process overall.


Invite users to sign up for a time that’s convenient for them
With a calendar set up and follow-up emails automated, it becomes incredibly easy to schedule research conversations. Each week, I send a short email out to a small group of users inviting them to participate, explaining that this is a chance to provide feedback that will improve our product or occasionally promoting the opportunity to get a sneak peek at new features we’re working on. The email includes a link to the Calendly appointments, allowing users who are interested to opt in to a time that fits their schedule.
Setting up appointments the first go around involved a bit of educated guessing. How many invitations would it take to fill all four of my weekly slots? How far in advance did I need to recruit users? But after a few weeks of trial and error, I found that sending 12-16 invitations usually allows me to fill all four interview slots. Our users often have meetings pop up at short notice, so we get the best results when I send the recruiting email on Tuesday, two days before my research block.
It may take a bit of experimentation to fine tune your process, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. (The worst thing that’s happened since I began recruiting this way was receiving emails from users complaining that there were no open slots available!) I can now fill most of an afternoon with back-to-back user research sessions just by sending just one or two emails each week, increasing our research pace while leaving plenty time to focus on discovery and design.
Getting the most out of your research sessions
As you get comfortable with the rhythm of talking to users each week, you’ll find more and more ways to get value out of your conversations. At first, you may prefer to just show work in progress—such as mockups or a simple prototype—and ask open-ended questions to measure user reaction. When you begin new projects, you may want to use this time to research behavior on existing features—either watching participants as they use part of your product or asking them to give an account of a recent experience in your app. You may even want to run more abstracted Lean experiments, if that’s the best way to validate the assumptions your team is working from.
Whatever you do, plan some time a day or two later to come back together and review what you’ve learned each week. Synthesizing research outcomes as a group will help keep your team in alignment and allow each person to highlight what they took away from each conversation. 
Over time, you may find that the pace of weekly user research becomes more exhausting than energizing, especially if the responsibility for scheduling and planning falls on just one person. Don’t allow yourself to get burned out; a healthy research cadence should also include time to rest and reflect if the pace becomes too rapid to sustain. Take breaks as needed, then pick up the pace again as soon as you’re ready.",2016,Wren Lanier,wrenlanier,2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/creating-a-weekly-research-cadence/,ux
197,Designing for Mobile Performance,"Last year, some colleagues at Google ran a research study titled “The Need for Mobile Speed” to find out what the impact of performance and perception of speed had on the way people use the web on their mobile devices. 
That’s not a trivial distinction; when considering performance, how fast something feels is often more important than how fast it actually is. When dealing with sometimes underpowered mobile devices and slow mobile networks, designing experiences that feel fast is exceptionally important.
One of the most startling numbers we found in the study was that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
We wanted to find out more, so following on from this study, we conducted research to define what the crucial elements of speed are. We took into consideration the user experience (UX), overall perception of speed, and how differing contexts the user finds themselves in can alter how fast a user thinks something loaded.
To understand speed and load times first we must understand that user mobile web behaviour is broken down into three buckets;

Intention
Location
State of mind

Let’s look at each of those in turn.
Intention
Users browse sites on a mobile device for many different reasons. To be able to effectively design a performant user experience for them, it’s important to understand what those reasons might be. When asked to describe their reason for visiting a site, approximately 30% of people asked by the study claimed that they were simply browsing without a particular purpose in mind. Looking deeper, we found that this number increased slightly (34%) for retail sites. 30% said they were just there to find out some information for a future task or action, such as booking a flight.
Interestingly, the research shows that users are actually window shopping using their mobile browser. Only 29% actually said they had a specific goal or intent in mind, and this number increases significantly for financial services like banking sites (57%). This goes against a traditionally held view of users wanting to perform simple actions efficiently on their mobile device. Sure, some users are absolutely doing that, but many are just browsing around without a goal in mind, just like they would on a desktop browser.
This gives great insight into the user’s intentions. It tells us that users are actively using sites on their mobile, but a large majority do not intend to do anything instantly. There’s no goal they’re under pressure to achieve. If a site’s performance is lousy or janky, this will only reaffirm to the user to that they can hold off on completing a task, so they might just give up. 
However, if a site is quick to load, sophisticated in expressing its value proposition quickly, and enables the user to perform their actions seamlessly, then turning that “browsing user” into a “buying user” becomes all that much easier. When the user has no goal, there’s more opportunity to convert, and you stand a greater chance of doing that if the performance is good enough so they stick around.
Location
Obviously, mobile devices by their nature can be used in many different locations. This is an interesting consideration, because it’s not something we traditionally need to take into account designing experiences for static platforms like desktop computers.
The in the study, we found that 82% of users browse the web on their mobile phone while in their home. In contrast, only 7% do the same while at work. This might come across as a bit of a shock, but when you look at mobile usage – in particular app usage – most of the apps being used are either a social network or some sort of entertainment or media app. Due to the unreliability of network connections, users will often alternate between these two types of apps.
The consequence being that if a site doesn’t work offline, or otherwise compensate for bad network connectivity in some way by providing opportunities to allow users to browse their site, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as to why users mostly view the mobile web from the comfort of their homes where there is a strong WiFi connection. They’re using mobile devices, but they’re not actually mobile themselves.
Another thing to bear in mind is how users alternate between devices, a study by comScore found that 80% of transactions take place on desktop while 69% of the browsing takes place on mobile. Any given user might access from more than one location - they might visit one day from a bus queue on their phone, and then next day from a laptop at home.
State of mind
One more thing we need to take into consideration is the user’s state of mind. Whilst browsing at home, users tend to be more relaxed, and in the research 76% stated they were generally calmer at home. The user’s state of mind can have quite a big impact on how they perceive things. The calmer they are, the quicker a site might appear to load. If the user is anxious and impatiently drumming their fingers on the table, things seem to take longer, and even a small wait can feel like an eternity.
This is quite key. Over 40% of sites take longer than 4 seconds to load for users who are are out and about and using a mobile data connection. Coupled with our perception, and amplified by a potentially less-than-calm state of mind, this can seem like an age.
What does this all mean?
I think we can all agree that users prefer strong, steady connections and comfort when completing transactions. It seems like common sense when we say it out loud. Recreating these feelings and sensations of comfort and predictability under all circumstances therefore becomes paramount. Equally, when asked in the study, users all claimed that speed was the most important factor impacting their mobile web usage. Over 40%, in fact, said it was the most important UX feature of a site, and nobody asked considered it to be of no importance at all.

The meaning of speed
When it comes to performance, speed is measured in two ways – real speed; as measured on a clock, and perceived speed; how responsive an interaction feels.  We can, of course, improve how quickly a site loads by simply making files smaller. Even then, the study showed that 32% of users felt a site can feel slow even when it loads in less than 4 seconds. This gets even worse when you look at it by age group, with 50% if young people (18-24 year olds) thinking a site was slower than it actually was. When you add to the mix that users think a site loaded faster when they are sitting compared to when they are standing up, then you are in a world of trouble if your site doesn’t have any clear indicators to let the user know the loading state of you website or app.
So what can we do about this to improve our designs?
How to fix / hack user perception
There are some golden rules of speed, the first thing is hacking response time. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will certainly start to lose your users. However, if that slowness is part of a UX flow such as processing information, the user understands it might take a little time. Under those circumstances, a load time of under 5 seconds is acceptable, but even then, you should take caution. Anything above 8 seconds and you are in very real danger of losing your audience completely.  



Load time
User impression




200 ms
Feels instant


1 s
Feels it is performing smoothly


5 s
Part of user flow


8 s
Lose attention



Remove the tap delay
Mobile browsers often use a 300-350ms delay between the triggering of the touchend and click events. This delay was added so the browser could determine if there was going to be a double-tap triggered or not, since double-tap is a common gesture used to zoom into text. This delay can have the side effect of making interactions feel laggy, and therefore giving the user the impression that the site is slow, even if it’s their own browser causing the problem.
Fortunately there’s a way to remove the delay. Add following in the <head> of your page, and the delay no longer takes effect:
<meta name=""viewport"" content=""width=device-width"">
You can also use touch-action: manipulation in newer browsers to eliminate click delay. For old browsers, FastClick by FT Labs uses touch events to trigger clicks faster and remove the double-tap gesture.
Make use of Skeleton Screens
A skeleton layout is a wireframe version of your app that displays while content is being loaded. This demonstrates to the user that content is about to be loaded, giving the impression that something is happening more quickly than it really is. Consider also using a preloader UI as well, with a text label informing the user that the app is loading. One example would be to pulsate the wireframe content giving the app the feeling that it is alive and loading. This reassures the user that something is happening and helps prevent resubmissions or refreshes of your app. Razvan Caliman created a Codepen example of how to create this effect in purely CSS. 
One thing to consider though, if data doesn’t load then you might need to create a fallback 404 or error page to let the user know what happened.  

Example by Owen-Campbell Moore
Responsive Touch Feedback
Carefully designing the process by which items load is one aspect of increasing the perceived speed of your page, but reassuring the user that an action they have taken is in process is another. At Google we use something called a Ripple, which is is animating dot that expands or ripples in order to confirm to the user that their input has been triggered. This happens immediately, expanding outward from the point of touch. This reaffirms to the user that their input has been received and is being acted on, even before the site has had a chance to process or respond to the action. From the user’s point of view, they’ve tapped and the page has responded immediately, so it feels really quick and satisfying.
You can mimic this same behavior using our Material Design Components Web GitHub repo.

Progress bars
These UI elements have existed for a very long time, but research conducted by Chris Harrison and published in New Scientist found that the style of a progress bar can alter the perception of speed drastically. As a matter of fact, progress bars with ripples that animate towards the left appear like they are loading faster by at least 11% percent. So when including them in your site, take into consideration that ripples and progress bars that pulsate faster as they get to the end will make your sites seem quicker.

    
  
  Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration with Visual Augmentations
Navigation
The speed with which a user can locate navigational items or call to actions adds to their perceived performance of a site. If the user’s next action is quick to spot on the screen, they don’t spend time hunting around the interface with their eyes and fingers. So no matter how quickly your code runs, hiding items behind a nav bar will make a site feel slower than it actually is. 
Facebook found that switching to using bottom navigation saw an increase in engagement, satisfaction, revenue, speed, and importantly, perception of speed. If the user sees the navigation items they’re looking for quickly, the interaction feels fast. What’s more, end-to-end task completion is quicker too, as the interface not only feels quicker, but actually measures quicker as well. Similar reactions were found with Spotify and Redbooth.
Luke Wroblewski gave a talk last year in Ireland titled “Obvious Always Wins” which he demonstrated through the work he did with Google+. Luke’s message is that by making the core features of your app obvious to your user, you will see engagement go up. This again seems obvious, right? However, it is important to note that adding bottom navigation doesn’t just mean a black bar at the bottom of your screen like some kind of performance magic bullet. The goal is to make the items clear to the user so they know what they need to be doing, and how you achieve that could be different from one interface to the next. Google keeps experimenting with different navigation styles, but finally settled with the below when they conducted user research and testing.

Conclusion
By utilizing a collection of UI patterns and speed optimisation techniques, you can improve not only the actual speed of a site, but the perception of how quickly a user thinks your site is loading. It is critical to remember that users will not always be using your site in a calm and relaxed manner and that even their age can impact how they will use or not use your site. By improving your site’s stability, you increase the likelihood of positive user engagement and task completion.
You can learn more about techniques to hack user perception and improve user speed by taking a look at an E-Book we published with Awwwards.com called Speed Matters: Design for Mobile Performance.",2017,Mustafa Kurtuldu,mustafakurtuldu,2017-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/designing-for-mobile-performance/,ux
166,Performance On A Shoe String,"Back in the summer, I happened to notice the official Wimbledon All England Tennis Club site had jumped to the top of Alexa’s Movers & Shakers list — a list that tracks sites that have had the biggest upturn or downturn in traffic. The lawn tennis championships were underway, and so traffic had leapt from almost nothing to crazy-busy in a no time at all. 

Many sites have similar peaks in traffic, especially when they’re based around scheduled events. No one cares about the site for most of the year, and then all of a sudden – wham! – things start getting warm in the data centre. Whilst the thought of chestnuts roasting on an open server has a certain appeal, it’s less attractive if you care about your site being available to visitors. Take a look at this Alexa traffic graph showing traffic patterns for superbowl.com at the beginning of each year, and wimbledon.org in the month of July.

Traffic graph from Alexa.com 

Whilst not on the same scale or with such dramatic peaks, we have a similar pattern of traffic here at 24ways.org. Over the last three years we’ve seen a dramatic pick up in traffic over the month of December (as would be expected) and then a much lower, although steady load throughout the year. What we do have, however, is the luxury of knowing when the peaks will be. For a normal site, be that a blog, small scale web app, or even a small corporate site, you often just cannot predict when you might get slashdotted, end up on the front page of Digg or linked to from a similarly high-profile site. You just don’t know when the peaks will be.

If you’re a big commercial enterprise like the Super Bowl, scaling up for that traffic is simply a cost of doing business. But for most of us, we can’t afford to have massive capacity sat there unused for 90% of the year. What you have to do instead is work out how to deal with as much traffic as possible with the modest resources you have.

In this article I’m going to talk about some of the things we’ve learned about keeping 24 ways running throughout December, whilst not spending a fortune on hosting we don’t need for 11 months of each year. We’ve not always got it right, but we’ve learned a lot along the way.

The Problem

To know how to deal with high traffic, you need to have a basic idea of what happens when a request comes into a web server. 24 ways is hosted on a single small virtual dedicated server with a great little hosting company in the UK. We run Apache with PHP and MySQL all on that one server. When a request comes in a new Apache process is started to deal with the request (or assigned if there’s one available not doing anything). Each process takes a bunch of memory, so there’s a finite number of processes that you can run, and therefore a finite number of pages you can serve at once before your server runs out of memory.

With our budget based on whatever is left over after beer, we need to get best performance we can out of the resources available. As the goal is to serve as many pages as quickly as possible, there are several approaches we can take:


	Reducing the amount of memory needed by each Apache process
	Reducing the amount of time each process is needed
	Reducing the number of requests made to the server


Yahoo! have published some information on what they call Exceptional Performance, which is well worth reading, and compliments many of my examples here. The Yahoo! guidelines very much look at things from a user perspective, which is always important.

Server tweaking

If you’re in the position of being able to change your server configuration (our set-up gives us root access to what is effectively a virtual machine) there are some basic steps you can take to maximise the available memory and reduce the memory footprint. Without getting too boring and technical (whole books have been written on this) there are a couple of things to watch out for.

Firstly, check what processes you have running that you might not need. Every megabyte of memory that you free up might equate to several thousand extra requests being served each day, so take a look at top and see what’s using up your resources. Quite often a machine configured as a web server will have some kind of mail server running by default. If your site doesn’t use mail (ours doesn’t) make sure it’s shut down and not using resources.

Secondly, have a look at your Apache configuration and particularly what modules are loaded. The method for doing this varies between versions of Apache, but again, every module loaded increases the amount of memory that each Apache process requires and therefore limits the number of simultaneous requests you can deal with.

The final thing to check is that Apache isn’t configured to start more servers than you have memory for. This is usually done by setting the MaxClients directive. When that limit is reached, your site is going to stop responding to further requests. However, if all else goes well that threshold won’t be reached, and if it does it will at least stop the weight of the traffic taking the entire server down to a point where you can’t even log in to sort it out.

Those are the main tidbits I’ve found useful for this site, although it’s worth repeating that entire books have been written on this subject alone.

Caching

Although the site is generated with PHP and MySQL, the majority of pages served don’t come from the database. The process of compiling a page on-the-fly involves quite a few trips to the database for content, templates, configuration settings and so on, and so can be slow and require a lot of CPU. Unless a new article or comment is published, the site doesn’t actually change between requests and so it makes sense to generate each page once, save it to a file and then just serve all following requests from that file.

We use QuickCache (or rather a plugin based on it) for this. The plugin integrates with our publishing system (Textpattern) to make sure the cache is cleared when something on the site changes. A similar plugin called WP-Cache is available for WordPress, but of course this could be done any number of ways, and with any back-end technology.

The important principal here is to reduce the time it takes to serve a page by compiling the page once and serving that cached result to subsequent visitors. Keep away from your database if you can.

Outsource your feeds

We get around 36,000 requests for our feed each day. That really only works out at about 7,000 subscribers averaging five-and-a-bit requests a day, but it’s still 36,000 requests we could easily do without. Each request uses resources and particularly during December, all those requests can add up. 

The simple solution here was to switch our feed over to using FeedBurner. We publish the address of the FeedBurner version of our feed here, so those 36,000 requests a day hit FeedBurner’s servers rather than ours. In addition, we get pretty graphs showing how the subscriber-base is building.



Off-load big files

Larger files like images or downloads pose a problem not in bandwidth, but in the time it takes them to transfer. A typical page request is very quick, a few seconds at the most, resulting in the connection being freed up promptly. Anything that keeps a connection open for a long time is going to start killing performance very quickly.

This year, we started serving most of the images for articles from a subdomain – media.24ways.org. Rather than pointing to our own server, this subdomain points to an Amazon S3 account where the files are held. It’s easy to pigeon-hole S3 as merely an online backup solution, and whilst not a fully fledged CDN, S3 works very nicely for serving larger media files. The roughly 20GB of files served this month have cost around $5 in Amazon S3 charges. That’s so affordable it may not be worth even taking the files back off S3 once December has passed.

I found this article on Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3 to be really useful in getting started. I upload the files via a Firefox plugin (mentioned in the article) and then edit the ACL to allow public access to the files. The way S3 enables you to point DNS directly at it means that you’re not tied to always using the service, and that it can be transparent to your users.

If your site uses photographs, consider uploading them to a service like Flickr and serving them directly from there. Many photo sharing sites are happy for you to link to images in this way, but do check the acceptable use policies in case you need to provide a credit or link back.

Off-load small files

You’ll have noticed the pattern by now – get rid of as much traffic as possible. When an article has a lot of comments and each of those comments has an avatar along with it, a great many requests are needed to fetch each of those images. In 2006 we started using Gravatar for avatars, but their servers were slow and were holding up page loads. To get around this we started caching the images on our server, but along with that came the burden of furnishing all the image requests.

Earlier this year Gravatar changed hands and is now run by the same team behind WordPress.com. Those guys clearly know what they’re doing when it comes to high performance, so this year we went back to serving avatars directly from them.

If your site uses avatars, it really makes sense to use a service like Gravatar where your users probably already have an account, and where the image requests are going to be dealt with for you. 

Know what you’re paying for

The server account we use for 24 ways was opened in November 2005. When we first hit the front page of Digg in December of that year, we upgraded the server with a bit more memory, but other than that we were still running on that 2005 spec for two years. Of course, the world of technology has moved on in those years, prices have dropped and specs have improved. For the same amount we were paying for that 2005 spec server, we could have an account with twice the CPU, memory and disk space.

So in November of this year I took out a new account and transferred the site from the old server to the new. In that single step we were prepared for dealing with twice the amount of traffic, and because of a special offer at the time I didn’t even have to pay the setup cost on the new server. So it really pays to know what you’re paying for and keep an eye out of ways you can make improvements without needing to spend more money.

Further steps

There’s nearly always more that can be done. For example, there are some media files (particularly for older articles) that are not on S3. We also serve our CSS directly and it’s not minified or compressed. But by tackling the big problems first we’ve managed to reduce load on the server and at the same time make sure that the load being placed on the server can be dealt with in the most frugal way.

Over the last 24 days we’ve served up articles to more than 350,000 visitors without breaking a sweat. On a busy day, that’s been nearly 20,000 visitors in just 24 hours. While in the grand scheme of things that’s not a huge amount of traffic, it can be a lot if you’re not prepared for it. However, with a little planning for the peaks you can help ensure that when the traffic arrives you’re ready to capitalise on it.

Of course, people only visit 24 ways for the wealth of knowledge and experience that’s tied up in the articles here. Therefore I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all our authors this year who have given their time as a gift to the community, and to wish you all a very happy Christmas.",2007,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2007-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/performance-on-a-shoe-string/,ux
127,Showing Good Form,"Earlier this year, I forget exactly when (it’s been a good year), I was building a client site that needed widgets which look like this (designed, incidentally, by my erstwhile writing partner, Cameron Adams):



Building this was a challenge not just in CSS, but in choosing the proper markup – how should such a widget be constructed?

Mmm … markup

It seemed to me there were two key issues to deal with:


	The function of the interface is to input information, so semantically this is a form, therefore we have to find a way of building it using form elements: fieldset, legend, label and input
	We can’t use a table for layout, even though that would clearly be the easiest solution!


Abusing tables for layout is never good – physical layout is not what table semantics mean. But even if this data can be described as a table, we shouldn’t mix forms markup with non-forms markup, because of the behavioral impact this can have on a screen reader:

To take a prominent example, the screen reader JAWS has a mode specifically for interacting with forms (cunningly known as “forms mode”). When running in this mode its output only includes relevant elements – legends, labels and form controls themselves. Any other kind of markup – like text in a previous table cell, a paragraph or list in between – is simply ignored. The user in this situation would have to switch continually in and out of forms mode to hear all the content. (For more about this issue and some test examples, there’s a  thread at accessify forum which wanders in that direction.)

One further issue for screen reader users is implied by the design: the input fields are associated together in rows and columns, and a sighted user can visually scan across and down to make those associations; but a blind user can’t do that. For such a user the row and column header data will need to be there at every axis; in other words, the layout should be more like this:



And constructed with appropriate semantic markup to convey those relationships. By this point the selection of elements seems pretty clear: each row is a fieldset, the row header is a legend, and each column header is a label, associated with an input.

Here’s what that form looks like with no CSS:



And here’s some markup for the first row (with most of the attributes removed just to keep this example succinct):

<fieldset>
	<legend>
		<span>Match points</span>
	</legend>
	<label>
		<span>Win</span>
		<input value=""3"" />
	</label>
	<label>
		<span>Draw</span>
		<input value=""1"" />
	</label>
	<label>
		<span>Lose</span>
		<input value=""0"" />
	</label>
	<label>
		<span>Played</span>
		<input value=""0"" />
	</label>
</fieldset>

The span inside each legend is because legend elements are highly resistant to styling! Indeed they’re one of the most stubborn elements in the browsers’ vocabulary. Oh man … how I wrestled with the buggers … until this obvious alternative occurred to me! So the legend element itself is just a container, while all the styling is on the inner span.

Oh yeah, there was some CSS too

I’m not gonna dwell too much on the CSS it took to make this work – this is a short article, and it’s all there in the demo [demo page, style sheet]

But I do want to touch on the most interesting bit – where we get from a layout with headers on every row, to one where only the top row has headers – or at least, so it appears to graphical browsers. For screen readers, as we noted, we need those headers on every row, so we should employ some cunning CSS to partly negate their visual presence, without removing them from the output.

The core styling for each label span is like this:

label span
{
	display:block;
	padding:5px;
	line-height:1em;
	background:#423221;
	color:#fff;
	font-weight:bold;
}

But in the rows below the header they have these additional rules:

fieldset.body label span
{
	padding:0 5px;
	line-height:0;
	position:relative;
	top:-10000em;
}

The rendered width of the element is preserved, ensuring that the surrounding label is still the same width as the one in the header row above, and hence a unified column width is preserved all the way down. But the element effectively has no height, and so it’s effectively invisible. The styling is done this way, rather than just setting the height to zero and using overflow:hidden, because to do that would expose an unrelated quirk with another popular screen reader! (It would hide the output from Window Eyes, as shown in this  test example at access matters.)

The finished widget

It’s an intricate beast allright! But after all that we do indeed get the widget we want:


	Demo page
	Style sheet


It’s not perfect, most notably because the legends have to have a fixed width; this can be in em to allow for text scaling, but it still doesn’t allow the content to break into multiple lines. It also doesn’t look quite right in Safari; and some CSS hacking was needed to make it look right in IE6 and IE7.

Still it worked well enough for the purpose, and satisfied the client completely. And most of all it re-assured me in my faith – that there’s never any need to abuse tables for layout. (Unless of course you think this content is a table anyway, but that’s another story!)",2006,James Edwards,jamesedwards,2006-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/showing-good-form/,ux
284,Subliminal User Experience,"The term ‘user experience’ is often used vaguely to quantify common elements of the interaction design process: wireframing, sitemapping and so on. UX undoubtedly involves all of these principles to some degree, but there really is a lot more to it than that.

Good UX is characterized by providing the user with constant feedback as they step through your interface. It means thinking about and providing fallbacks and error resolutions in even the rarest of scenarios. It’s about omitting clutter to make way for the necessary, and using the most fundamental of design tools to influence a user’s path. It means making no assumptions, designing right down to the most distinct details and going one step further every single time. In many cases, good UX is completely subliminal.

There are simple tools and subtleties we can build into our products to enhance the overall experience but, in order to do so, we really have to step beyond where we usually draw the line on what to design.

The purpose of this article is not to provide technical how-tos, as the functionality is, in most cases, quite simple and could be implemented in a myriad of ways. Rather, it will present a handful of ideas for enhancing the experience of an interface at a deeper level of design without relying on the container.

We’ll cover three elements that should get you thinking in the right mindset:


	progress activity and post-active states
	pseudo-class preloading
	buttons and their (mis)behaviour


Progress activity and the post-active state

We’ve long established that we can’t control the devices our products are viewed on, which browser they’ll run in or what connection speed will be used to access them. We accept this all as factual, so why is it so often left to the browser to provide feedback to the user when an event is triggered or an error encountered? The browser isn’t part of the interface — it’s merely a container. A simple, visual recognition of your users’ activity may be all it takes to make or break the product.

Let’s begin with a commonly overlooked case: progress activity.

A user moves their cursor over a hyperlink or button, which is clearly defined as one by the visual language of your content. Upon doing so, they trigger the :hover state to confirm this element is indeed interactive. So far, so good. What happens next is where it starts to fall apart: the user hits this link, presumably triggering an :active state, which is then returned to the normal state upon release. And then what?



From this point on, your user is in limbo. The link has fallen back to either its regular or :visited state. You’ve effectively abandoned them and are relying entirely on the browser they’re using to communicate that something is happening. This poses quite a few problems:


	The user may lose focus of what they were doing.
	There is little consistency between progress indication in browsers.
	The user may not even notice that their action has been acknowledged.


How many times have one or more of these events happened to you due to a lack of communication from the interface?

Think about the differences between Safari and Chrome in this area — two browsers that, when compared to each other, are relatively similar in nature, though this basic feature differs in execution.



Like all aspects of designing the user experience, there is no one true way to fix this problem, but we can introduce details that many users will unconsciously appreciate.

Consider the basic loading indicator. It’s nothing new — in fact, some would argue it’s quite a cliché. However, whether using a spinning wheel or a progress bar, a gif or JavaScript, or something more sophisticated, these simple tools create an illusion of movement, progress and activity. Depending on the implementation, progress indication graphics can significantly increase a user’s perception of the speed in which an event is taking place. Combine this with a cursor change and a lock over the element to prevent double-clicking or reloading, and your chances of keeping your user’s valuable attention have significantly increased.

Demo: Progress activity and the post-active state

This same logic applies to all aspects of defaulting in a browser, from micro-elements like this up to something as simple as a 404 page. The difference in a user’s reaction to hitting the default Apache 404 and a hand-crafted, branded page are phenomenal and there are no prizes for guessing which one they’re more likely to exit from.

Pseudo-class preloading

Another detail that it pays well to look after is the use and abuse of the :hover element and, more importantly, the content revealed by it. Chances are you’re using the :hover pseudo-class somewhere in almost every screen you create. If content is being revealed on :hover and that content takes some time to load, there will inevitably be a delay the first time it is initiated. It appears tacky and half-finished when a tooltip or drop-down loads instantly, only to have its background or supporting elements follow through a second or two later. So, let’s preload the elements we know we’ll need.

A very simple application of this would be to load each file into the default state of a visible element and offset them by a large number. This ensures our elements have loaded and are ready if and when they need to be displayed.

element {
    background: url(path/to/image.jpg) -9999em -9999em no-repeat;
    }
element .tooltip {
    display: none;
    }
element:hover .tooltip {
    display: block;
    background: url(path/to/image.jpg) 0 0;
    }

Background images are just one example. Of course, the same logic can apply to any form of revealed content. Using a sprite graphic can also be a clever — albeit tedious — method for achieving the same goal, so if you’re using a sprite, preloading in this way may not be necessary

The differences between preloading and not can only be visualized properly with an actual demonstration.

Demo: Preloading revealed content

Buttons and their (mis)behaviour

Almost all of the time, a button serves just one purpose: to be clicked (or tapped). When a button’s pressed, therefore, if anything other than triggering the desired event occurs, a user naturally becomes frustrated. I often get funny looks when talking about this, but designing the details of a button is something I consider essential.

It goes without saying that a button should always visually recognise :hover and :active states. We can take that one step further and disable some actions that get in the way of pressing the button.

It’s rare that a user would ever want to select and use the text on a button, so let’s cleanly disable it:

element {
    -moz-user-select: -moz-none;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    }

If the button is image-based or contains an image, we could also disable user dragging to make sure the image element stays locked to the button:

element {
    -moz-user-drag: -moz-none;
    -webkit-user-drag: none;
    user-drag: none;
    }

Demo: A more usable button

Disabling global features like this should be done with utmost caution as it’s very easy to cross the line between enhancement and friction. Cases where this is acceptable are very rare, but it’s a good trick to keep in mind nevertheless. Both Apple’s iCloud and Metalab’s Flow applications use these tools appropriately and to great extent.

You could argue that the visual feedback of having the text selected or image dragged when a user mis-hits the button is actually a positive effect, informing the user that their desired action did not work. However, covering for human error should be a designer’s job, not that of our users. We can (almost) ensure it does work for them by accommodating for errors like this in most cases.

Final thoughts

Designing to this level of detail can seem obsessive, but as a designer and user of many interfaces and applications, I believe it can be the difference between a good user experience and a great one.

The samples you’ve just seen are only a fraction of the detail we can design for. Keep in mind that the demonstrations, code and methods above outline just one way to do this. You may not agree with all of these processes or have the time and desire to consider them, but one fact remains: it’s not the technology, or the way it’s done that’s important — it’s the logic and the concept of designing everything.",2011,Chris Sealey,chrissealey,2011-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/subliminal-user-experience/,ux
267,Taming Complexity,"I’m going to step into my UX trousers for this one. I wouldn’t usually wear them in public, but it’s Christmas, so there’s nothing wrong with looking silly.

Anyway, to business. Wherever I roam, I hear the familiar call for simplicity and the denouncement of complexity. I read often that the simpler something is, the more usable it will be. We understand that simple is hard to achieve, but we push for it nonetheless, convinced it will make what we build easier to use. Simple is better, right?

Well, I’ll try to explore that. Much of what follows will not be revelatory to some but, like all good lessons, I think this serves as a welcome reminder that as we live in a complex world it’s OK to sometimes reflect that complexity in the products we build.

Myths and legends

Less is more, we’ve been told, ever since master of poetic verse Robert Browning used the phrase in 1855. Well, I’ve conducted some research, and it appears he knew nothing of web design. Neither did modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a later pedlar of this worthy yet contradictory notion. Broad is narrow. Tall is short. Eggs are chips. See: anyone can come up with this stuff.

To paraphrase Einstein, simple doesn’t have to be simpler. In other words, simple doesn’t dictate that we remove the complexity. Complex doesn’t have to be confusing; it can be beautiful and elegant. On the web, complex can be necessary and powerful. A website that simplifies the lives of its users by offering them everything they need in one site or screen is powerful. For some, the greater the density of information, the more useful the site.

In our decision-making process, principles such as Occam’s razor’s_razor (in a nutshell: simple is better than complex) are useful, but simple is for the user to determine through their initial impression and subsequent engagement. What appears simple to me or you might appear very complex to someone else, based on their own mental model or needs. We can aim to deliver simple, but they’ll be the judge.

As a designer, developer, content alchemist, user experience discombobulator, or whatever you call yourself, you’re often wrestling with a wealth of material, a huge number of features, and numerous objectives. In many cases, much of that stuff is extraneous, and goes in the dustbin. However, it can be just as likely that there’s a truckload of suggested features and content because it all needs to be there. Don’t be afraid of that weight.

In the right hands, less can indeed mean more, but it’s just as likely that less can very often lead to, well… less.

Complexity is powerful

Simple is the ability to offer a powerful experience without overwhelming the audience or inducing information anxiety. Giving them everything they need, without having them ferret off all over a site to get things done, is important.

It’s useful to ask throughout a site’s lifespan, “does the user have everything they need?” It’s so easy to let our designer egos get in the way and chop stuff out, reduce down to only the things we want to see. That benefits us in the short term, but compromises the audience long-term.

The trick is not to be afraid of complexity in itself, but to avoid creating the perception of complexity. Give a user a flight simulator and they’ll crash the plane or jump out. Give them everything they need and more, but make it feel simple, and you’re building a relationship, empowering people.

This can be achieved carefully with what some call gradual engagement, and often the sensible thing might be to unleash complexity in carefully orchestrated phases, initially setting manageable levels of engagement and interaction, gradually increasing the inherent power of the product and fostering an empowered community.

The design aesthetic

Here’s a familiar scenario: the client or project lead gets overexcited and skips most of the important decision-making, instead barrelling straight into a bout of creative direction Tourette’s. Visually, the design needs to be minimal, white, crisp, full of white space, have big buttons, and quite likely be “clean”. Of course, we all like our websites to be clean as that’s more hygienic.

But what do these words even mean, really? Early in a project they’re abstract distractions, unnecessary constraints. This premature narrowing forces us to think much more about throwing stuff out rather than acknowledging that what we’re building is complex, and many of the components perhaps necessary.

Simple is not a formula. It cannot be achieved just by using a white background, by throwing things away, or by breathing a bellowsful of air in between every element and having it all float around in space. Simple is not a design treatment. Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.

Recognizing this helps us empathize a little more with those most vocal of UX practitioners. They usually appreciate that our successes depend on a thorough understanding of the user’s mental models and expected outcomes. I personally still consider UX people to be web designers like the rest of us (mainly to wind them up), but they’re web designers that design every decision, and by putting the user experience at the heart of their process, they have a greater chance of finding simplicity in complexity. The visual design aesthetic — the façade — is only a part of that.

Divide and conquer

I’m currently working on an app that’s complex in architecture, and complex in ambition. We’ll be releasing in carefully orchestrated private phases, gradually introducing more complexity in line with the unavoidably complex nature of the objective, but my job is to design the whole, the complete system as it will be when it’s out of beta and beyond.

I’ve noticed that I’m not throwing much out; most of it needs to be there. Therefore, my responsibility is to consider interesting and appropriate methods of navigation and bring everything together logically.

I’m using things like smart defaults, graphical timelines and colour keys to make sense of the complexity, techniques that are sympathetic to the content. They act as familiar points of navigation and reference, yet are malleable enough to change subtly to remain relevant to the information they connect. It’s really OK to have a lot of stuff, so long as we make each component work smartly.

It’s a divide and conquer approach. By finding simplicity and logic in each content bucket, I’ve made more sense of the whole, allowing me to create key layouts where most of the simplified buckets are collated and sometimes combined, providing everything the user needs and expects in the appropriate places.

I’m also making sure I don’t reduce the app’s power. I need to reflect the scale of opportunity, and provide access to or knowledge of the more advanced tools and features for everyone: a window into what they can do and how they can help. I know it’s the minority who will be actively building the content, but the power is in providing those opportunities for all.

Much of this will be familiar to the responsible practitioners who build websites for government, local authorities, utility companies, newspapers, magazines, banking, and we-sell-everything-ever-made online shops. Across the web, there are sites and tools that thrive on complexity.

Alas, the majority of such sites have done little to make navigation intuitive, or empower audiences. Where we can make a difference is by striving to make our UIs feel simple, look wonderful, not intimidating — even if they’re mind-meltingly complex behind that façade.

Embrace, empathize and tame

So, there are loads of ways to exploit complexity, and make it seem simple. I’ve hinted at some methods above, and we’ve already looked at gradual engagement as a way to make sense of complexity, so that’s a big thumbs-up for a release cycle that increases audience power.

Prior to each and every release, it’s also useful to rest on the finished thing for a while and use it yourself, even if you’re itching to release. ‘Ready’ often isn’t, and ‘finished’ never is, and the more time you spend browsing around the sites you build, the more you learn what to question, where to add, or subtract. It’s definitely worth building in some contingency time for sitting on your work, so to speak.

One thing I always do is squint at my layouts. By squinting, I get a sort of abstract idea of the overall composition, and general feel for the thing. It makes my face look stupid, but helps me see how various buckets fit together, and how simple or complex the site feels overall.

I mentioned the need to put our design egos to one side and not throw out anything useful, and I think that’s vital. I’m a big believer in economy, reduction, and removing the extraneous, but I’m usually referring to decoration, bells and whistles, and fluff. I wouldn’t ever advocate the complete removal of powerful content from a project roadmap.

Above all, don’t fear complexity. Embrace and tame it. Work hard to empathize with audience needs, and you can create elegant, playful, risky, surprising, emotive, delightful, and ultimately simple things.",2011,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/,ux
144,"The Mobile Web, Simplified","A note from the editors:  although eye-opening in 2006, this article is no longer relevant to today’s mobile web.
                
                
                      
                Considering a foray into mobile web development? Following are four things you need to know before making the leap.

1. 4 billion mobile subscribers expected by 2010

Fancy that. Coupled with the UN prediction of 6.8 billion humans by 2010, 4 billion mobile subscribers (source) is an astounding 59% of the planet. Just how many of those subscribers will have data plans and web-enabled phones is still in question, but inevitably this all means one thing for you and me: A ton of potential eyes to view our web content on a mobile device.

2. Context is king

Your content is of little value to users if it ignores the context in which it is viewed. Consider how you access data on your mobile device.  You might be holding a bottle of water or gripping a handle on the subway/tube. You’re probably seeking specific data such as directions or show times, rather than the plethora of data at your disposal via a desktop PC.

The mobile web, a phrase often used to indicate “accessing the web on a mobile device”,  is very much a context-, content-, and component-specific environment. Expressed in terms of your potential target audience, access to web content on a mobile device is largely influenced by surrounding circumstances and conditions, information relevant to being mobile, and the feature set of the device being used. Ask yourself, What is relevant to my users and the tasks, problems, and needs they may encounter while being mobile? Answer that question and you’ll be off to a great start.

3. WAP 2.0 is an XHTML environment

In a nutshell, here are a few fundamental tenets of mobile internet technology:


	Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the protocol for enabling mobile access to internet content.
	Wireless Markup Language (WML) was the language of choice for WAP 1.0.
	Nearly all devices sold today are WAP 2.0 devices.
	With the introduction of WAP 2.0, XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML-MP) became the preferred markup language.
	XHTML-MP will be familiar to anyone experienced with XHTML Transitional or Strict.


Summary? The mobile web is rapidly becoming an XHTML environment, and thus you and I can apply our existing “desktop web” skills to understand how to develop content for it. With WML on the decline, the learning curve is much smaller today than it was several years ago. I’m generalizing things gratuitously, but the point remains: Get off yo’ lazy butt and begin to take mobile seriously.

I’ll even pass you a few tips for getting started. First, the DOCTYPE for XHTML-MP is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ""-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN""
""http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd"">

As for MIME type, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) specifies using the MIME type application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, but ultimately you need to ensure the server delivering your mobile content is configured properly for the MIME type you choose to use, as there are other options (see Setting up WAP Servers).

Once you’ve made it to the body, the XHTML-MP markup is not unlike what you’re already used to. A few resources worth skimming:


	Developers Home XHTML-MP Tutorial – An impressively replete resource for all things XHTML-MP
	XHTML-MP Tags List – A complete list of XHTML-MP elements and accompanying attributes


And last but certainly not least, CSS. There exists WAP CSS, which is essentially a subset of CSS2 with WAP-specific extensions. For all intents and purposes, much of the CSS you’re already comfortable using will be transferrable to mobile. As for including CSS in your pages, your options are the same as for desktop sites: external, embedded, and inline. Some experts will argue embedded or inline over external in favor of reducing the number of HTTP connections per page request, yet many popular mobilized sites and apps employ external linking without issue.

Stocking stuffers: Flickr Mobile, Fandango Mobile, and Popurls Mobile. A few sites with whom you can do the View Source song and dance for further study.

4. “Cell phone” is so DynaTAC

If you’re a U.S. resident, listen up: You must rid your vocabulary of the term “cell phone”. We’re one of the few economies on the planet to refer to a mobile phone accordingly. If you care to find yourself in any of the worthwhile mobile development circles, begin using terms more widely accepted: “mobile” or “mobile phone” or “handset” or “handy”. If you’re not sure which, go for “mobile”. Such as, “Yo dog, check out my new mobile.”

More importantly, however, is overcoming the mentality that access to the mobile web can be done only with a phone. Instead, “device” encourages us to think phone, handheld computer, watch, Nintendo DS, car, you name it.

Simple enough?",2006,Cameron Moll,cameronmoll,2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/the-mobile-web-simplified/,ux
96,Unwrapping the Wii U Browser,"The Wii U was released on 18 November 2012 in the US, and 30 November in the UK. It’s the first eighth generation home console, the first mainstream second-screen device, and it has some really impressive browser specs.

Consoles are not just for games now: they’re marketed as complete entertainment solutions. Internet connectivity and browser functionality have gone from a nice-to-have feature in game consoles to a selling point. In Nintendo’s case, they see it as a challenge to design an experience that’s better than browsing on a desktop.


	Let’s make a browser that users can use on a daily basis, something that can really handle everything we’ve come to expect from a browser and do it more naturally.
Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


With 11% of people using console browsers to visit websites, it’s important to consider these devices right from the start of projects. Browsing the web on a TV or handheld console is a very different experience to browsing on a desktop or a mobile phone, and has many usability implications.

Console browser testing

When I’m testing a console browser, one of the first things I do is run Niels Leenheer’s HTML5 test and Lea Verou’s CSS3 test. I use these benchmarks as a rough comparison of the standards each browser supports.

In October, IE9 came out for the Xbox 360, scoring 120/500 in the HTML5 test and 32% in the CSS3 test. The PS Vita also had an update to its browser in recent weeks, jumping from 58/500 to 243/500 in the HTML5 test, and 32% to 55% in the CSS3 test. Manufacturers have been stepping up their game, trying to make their browsing experiences better.

To give you an idea of how the Wii U currently compares to other devices, here are the test results of the other TV consoles I’ve tested. I’ve written more in-depth notes on TV and portable console browsers separately.


Year of releaseHTML5 scoreCSS3 scoreNotes
Wii U2012258/50048%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit).
Wii200689/500Wouldn’t runRuns an Opera browser.
PS3200668/50038%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit).
Xbox 3602005120/50032%A browser for the Xbox (IE9) was only recently released in October 2012. The Kinect provides voice and gesture support. There’s also SmartGlass, a second-screen app for platforms including Android and iOS.


The Wii U browser is Nintendo’s fifth attempt at a console browser. Based on these tests, it’s already looking promising.

Why console browsers used to suck

It takes a lot of system memory to run a good browser, and the problem of older consoles is that they don’t have much memory available. The original Nintendo DS needs a memory expansion pack just to run the browser, because the 4MB it has on board isn’t enough. I noticed that even on newer devices, some sites fail to load because the system runs out of memory.

The Wii came out six years ago with an Opera browser. Still being used today and with such low resources available, the latest browser features can’t reasonably be supported. There’s also pressure to add features such as tabs, and enable gamers to use the browser while a game is paused. Nintendo’s browser team have the advantage of higher specs to play with on their new console (1GB of memory dedicated to games, 1GB for the system), which makes it easier to support the latest standards. But it’s still a challenge to fit everything in.


	…even though we have more memory, the amount of memory we can use for the browser is limited compared to a PC, so we’ve worked in ways that efficiently allocates the available memory per tab. To work on this, the experience working on the browser for the Nintendo 3DS system under a limited memory constraint helped us greatly.
Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


In the box

The Wii U consists of a console unit which plugs into a TV (the first to support HD), and a wireless controller known as a gamepad. The gamepad is a lot bigger than typical TV console controllers, and it has a touchscreen on the front. The touchscreen is resistive, responding to pressure rather than electrical current. It’s intended to be used with a stylus (provided) but fingers can be used.

It might look a bit like one, but the gamepad isn’t a portable console designed to be taken out like the PS Vita. The gamepad can be used as a standalone screen with the TV switched off, as long as it’s within range of the console unit – it basically piggybacks off it.



It’s surprisingly lightweight for its size. It has a wealth of detectors including 9-axis control. Sensors wake the device from sleep when it’s picked up. There’s also a camera on the front, and a headphone port and speakers, with audio coming through both the TV and the gamepad giving a surround sound feel.

Up to six tabs can be opened at once, and the browser can be used while games are paused. There’s a really nice little feature here – the current game’s name is saved as a search option, so it’s really quick to look up contextual content such as walk-throughs.

Controls

Only one gamepad can be used to control the browser, but if there are Wiimotes connected, they can be used as pointers. This doesn’t let the user do anything except point (they each get a little hand icon with a number on it displayed on the screen), but it’s interesting that multiple people can be interacting with a site at once.



See a bigger version

The gamepad can also be used as a simple TV remote control, with basic functions such as bringing up the programme guide, adjusting volume and changing channel. I found the simplified interface much more usable than a full-featured remote control.



I’m used to scrolling being sluggish on consoles, but the Wii U feels almost as snappy as a desktop browser. Sites load considerably faster compared with others I’ve tested.

Tilt-scroll

Holding down ZL and ZR while tilting the screen activates an Instapaper-style tilt to scroll for going up and down the page quickly, useful for navigating very long pages.

Second screen

The TV mirrors most of what’s on the gamepad, although the TV screen just displays the contents of the browser window, while the gamepad displays the site along with the browser toolbar.

When the user with the gamepad is typing, the keyboard is hidden from the TV screen – there’s just a bit of text at the top indicating what’s happening on the gamepad.

Pressing X draws an on-screen curtain over the TV, hiding the content that’s on the gamepad from the TV. Pressing X again opens the curtains, revealing what’s on the gamepad. Holding the button down plays a drumroll before it’s released and the curtains are opened. I can imagine this being used in meetings as a fun presentation tool.




	In a sense, browsing is a personal activity, but you get the idea that people will be coming and going through the room. When I first saw the curtain function, it made a huge impression on me. I walked around with it all over the company saying, “They’ve really come up with something amazing!”
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


Text

Writing text

Unlike the capacitive screens on smartphones, the Wii U’s resistive screen needs to be pressed harder than you’re probably used to for registering a touch event. The gamepad screen is big, which makes it much easier to type on this device than other handheld consoles, even without the stylus. It’s still more fiddly than a full-sized keyboard though. When you’re designing forms, consider the extra difficulty console users experience.



Although TV screens are physically big, they are typically viewed from further away than desktop screens. This makes readability an issue, so Nintendo have provided not one, but four ways to zoom in and out:


	Double-tapping on the screen.
	Tapping the on-screen zoom icons in the browser toolbar.
	Pressing the + and - buttons on the device.
	Moving the right analogue stick up and down.


As well as making it easy to zoom in and out, Nintendo have done a few other things to improve the reading experience on the TV.

System font

One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that the browser lacks all the fonts we’re used to falling back to. Serif fonts are replaced with the system’s sans-serif font. I couldn’t get Typekit’s font loading method to work but Fontdeck, which works slightly differently, does display custom fonts.

 The system font has been optimised for reading at a distance and is easy to distinguish because the lowercase e has a quirky little tilt.

Don’t lose :focus

Using the D-pad to navigate is similar to using a keyboard. Individual links are focused on, with a blue outline drawn around them.

The recently redesigned An Event Apart site is an example that improves the experience for keyboard and D-pad users. They’ve added a yellow background colour to links on focus. It feels nicer than the default blue outline on its own.



Media

This year, television overtook PCs as the primary way to watch online video content. TV is the natural environment for video, and 42% of online TVs in the US are connected to the internet via a console. Unfortunately, the <video> tag isn’t supported in most console browsers, and those that have Flash installed often have such an old version that the video won’t play.

I suspect this has been a big driver in getting console browsers to support web standards. The Wii U is designed with video content in mind. It doesn’t support Flash but it does support the HTML5 <video> tag.

Some video formats can’t be played, but those that are supported bring up an optimised interface with a custom scrub bar. This is where the device switches from mirroring the TV to being a second screen. The full-screen video is displayed on the TV, and the interface on the gamepad.

The really clever bit is that while a video is playing, the gamepad user can keep the video playing on the TV screen while searching for another video or browsing the web. This is the same for images too.

On the left, the video is being shown full-screen on the TV and gamepad. Only the gamepad gets the scrub bar. Clicking the slide up/down button (circled) lets the gamepad user browse the web while the video on the TV continues to play full-screen, as shown in the image on the right.

There’s support for SVG images, and they look great on a high-definition TV screen. However, there’s currently no way to save or download files.

Preparing for console users

I wasn’t expecting to be quite as impressed as I am by this browser. It’s encouraging to see console makers investing time into improving the experience as well as the standards support. In the same way there was an explosion in mobile browser use as the experience got better, I’m sure we’ll see the same with console browsers as the experience improves.

The value of detection

Consoles offer a range of inputs including gesture, voice and controller buttons. That means we have to think about more diverse methods of input than just touch and click.

This is where I could tell you to add some detection methods such as user agent string sniffing to target a different experience for console users. But the majority of the time, that really isn’t necessary. TV console browsers are getting a lot better at compensating for the living room environment, and they’re designed to work with websites that haven’t been optimised for this context.

Rather than tighten our grip on optimising experiences for every device out there, we’ve got to be pragmatic. There are so many new devices coming out every week, our designs need to be future-proof rather than fixed to a particular device in time.

Even fuzzy device detection isn’t reliable – the PS Vita declares itself to be mobile, a mobile device and a Kindle Fire tablet, while the two DS devices state they’re neither mobile nor mobile phones nor tablets, but computers. They’re weird outliers, but they’re still important devices to consider.

Thinking broadly about how our designs will be interacted with and viewed on a TV screen can help improve that experience for everyone. This is about accessibility. Considering how someone uses a site with a D-pad, we can improve the experience for keyboard users. When we think about colour contrast and text legibility on TV screens, we can apply that for anyone who reads content on the web. So why just offer this to the TV users?

Playing with the browser


	…we want to prove to them through this Wii U Internet Browser that browsing itself can be an entertainment.
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


Although I’m cautious about designing experiences for specific devices, it’s fun to experiment with the technology available. Nintendo have promised web developers access to the Wii U’s buttons and sensors. There’s already some JavaScript documentation, and a demo for you to try.

If you’re interested in making your own games, thanks to web standards, a lot of HTML5 games work already on the device. Matt Hackett wrote up his experience of testing the game he built, and he talks about some of features the browser lacks. There’s certainly an incentive there for console manufacturers to improve their HTML5 support so more games can be played in their browser.

What excites me about consoles is that it’s like looking at what might be available to us in future browsers. As well as thinking about how our sites work on small screens, we should also consider big screens. We’re already figuring out how images should work at different screen widths and connection speeds, but we’ve also got some interesting challenges ahead of us catering for second screen experiences and 3D-enabled devices. 

So, this Christmas, if you’re huddled round the game console or a smart TV, give the browser in it a try.",2012,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2012-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/unwrapping-the-wii-u-browser/,ux
245,Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update,"Happy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2018! The United Nations chose “Empowering persons with disabilities and ensuring inclusiveness and equality” as this year’s theme. We’ve seen great examples of that in 2018; for example, Paul Robert Lloyd has detailed how he improved the accessibility of this very website. 
On social media, US Congressmember-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started using the Clipomatic app to add live captions to her Instagram live stories, conforming to success criterion 1.2.4, “Captions (Live)” of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (figure 1) …and British Vogue Contributing Editor Sinéad Burke has used the split-screen feature of Instagram live stories to invite an interpreter to provide live Sign Language interpretation, going above and beyond success criterion 1.2.6, “Sign Language (Prerecorded)” of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (figure 2).

Figure 1: Screenshot of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story with live captionsFigure 2: Screenshot of Sinéad Burke’s Instagram story with Sign Language Interpretation
That theme chimes with this year’s publication of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. In last year’s “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them”, I mentioned the scale of the project to produce this update during 2018: “the editors have to update the guidelines to cover all the new ways that people interact with new technologies, while keeping the guidelines backwards-compatible”. 
The WCAG working group have added 17 success criteria to the 61 that they released way back in 2008—for context, that was 1½ years before Apple released their first iPad! These new criteria make it easier than ever for us web geeks to produce work that is more accessible to people using mobile devices and touchscreens, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities. 
Once again, let’s rip off all the legalese and ambiguous terminology like wrapping paper, and get up to date.
Can your users perceive the information on your website?
The first guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “What the **** is this thing here supposed to be?” We’ve seven new criteria for this guideline.
1.3.4 Some people can’t easily change the orientation of the device that they use to browse the web, and so you should make sure that your users can use your website in portrait orientation and in landscape orientation. Consider how people slowly twirl presents that they have plucked from under the Christmas tree, to find the appropriate orientation—and expect your users to do likewise with your websites and apps. We’ve had 18½ years since John Allsopp’s revelatory Dao of Web Design enlightened us to “embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints” as printed pages, and to “design for this flexibility”. So, even though this guideline doesn’t apply to websites where “a specific display orientation is essential,” such as a piano tutorial, always ask yourself, “What would John Allsopp do?”
1.3.5 You should help the user’s browser to automatically complete–or not complete–form fields, to save the user some time and effort. The surprisingly powerful and flexible autocomplete attribute for input elements should prove most useful here. If you’ve used microformats or microdata to mark up information about a person, the autocomplete attribute’s range of values should seem familiar. I like how the W3’s “Using HTML 5.2 autocomplete attributes” says that autocompleted values in forms help “those with dexterity disabilities who have trouble typing, those who may need more time, and anyone who wishes to reduce effort to fill out a form” (emphasis mine). Um…🙋‍♂️
1.3.6 I like this one a lot, because it can help a huge audience to overcome difficulties that might prevent them from ever using the web. Some people have cognitive difficulties that affect their memory, focus, attention, language processing, and/or decision-making. Those users often rely on assistive technologies that present information through proprietary symbols, summaries of content, and keyboard shortcuts. You could use ARIA landmarks to identify the regions of each webpage. You could also keep an eye on the W3C’s ongoing work on Personalisation Semantics.
1.4.10 If you were to find a Nintendo Switch and “Super Mario Odyssey” under your Christmas tree, you would have many hours of enjoyably scrolling horizontally and vertically to play the game. On the other hand, if you had to zoom a webpage to 400% so that you could read the content, you might have many hours of frustratedly scrolling horizontally and vertically to read the content. Learned reader, I assume you understand the purpose and the core techniques of Responsive Web Design. I also assume you’re getting up to speed with the new Grid, Flexbox, and Box Alignment techniques for layout, and overflow-wrap. Using those skills, you should make sure that all content and functionality remain available when the browser is 320px wide, without your user needing to scroll horizontally. (For vertical text, you should make sure that all content and functionality remain available when the browser is 256px high, without your user needing to scroll vertically.) You don’t have to do this for anything that would lose meaning if you restructured it into one narrow column. That includes some images, maps, diagrams, video, games, presentations, and data tables. Remember to check how your media queries affect font size: your user might find that text becomes smaller as they zoom into the webpage. So, test this one on real devices, or—better yet—test it with real users.
1.4.11 In “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them”, I recommended bookmarking Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio calculator for checking that text contrasts enough with its background (for success criteria 1.4.3 and 1.4.6), so that more people can read it more easily. For this update, you should make sure that form elements and their focus states have a 3:1 contrast ratio with the colour around them. This doesn’t apply to controls that use the browser’s default styling. Also, you should make sure that graphics that convey information have a 3:1 contrast ratio with the colour around them.
1.4.12 Some people, due to low vision or dyslexia, might need to modify the typography that you agonised over. Research indicates that you should make sure that all content and functionality would remain available if a user were to set:

line height to at least 1½ × the font size;
space below paragraphs to at least 2 × the font size;
letter spacing to at least 0.12 × the font size;
word spacing to at least 0.16 × the font size.

To test this, check for text overlapping, text hiding behind other elements, or text disappearing.
1.4.13 Sometimes when visiting a website, you hover over—or tab on to—something that unleashes a newsletter subscription pop-up, some suggested “related content”, and/or a GDPR-related pop-up. On a well-designed website, you can press the Esc key on your keyboard or click a prominent “Close” button or “X” button to vanquish such intrusions. If the Esc key fails you, or if you either can’t see or can’t click the “Close” button…well, you’ll probably just close that browser tab. This situation can prove even more infuriating for users with low vision or cognitive disabilities. So, if new content appears when your user hovers over or tabs on to some element, you should make sure that:

your user can dismiss that content without needing to move their pointer or tab on to some other element (this doesn’t apply to error warnings, or well-behaved content that doesn’t obscure or replace other content);
the new content remains visible while your user moves their cursor over it;
the new content remains visible as long as the user hovers over that element or dismisses that content—or until the new content is no longer valid.

This doesn’t apply to situations such as hovering over an element’s title attribute, where the user’s browser controls the display of the content that appears.
Can users operate the controls and links on your website?
The second guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “How the **** does this thing work?” We’ve nine new criteria for this guideline.
2.1.4 Some websites offer keyboard shortcuts for users. For example, the keyboard shortcuts for Gmail allow the user to press the ⇧ key and u to mark a message as unread. Usually, shortcuts on websites include modifier keys, such as Ctrl, along with a letter, number, or punctuation symbol. Unfortunately, users who have dexterity challenges sometimes trigger those shortcuts by accident, and that can make a website impossible to use. Also, speech input technology can sometimes trigger those shortcuts. If your website offers single-character keyboard shortcuts, you must allow your user to turn off or remap those shortcuts. This doesn’t apply to single-character keyboard shortcuts that only work when a control, such as drop-down list, has focus.
2.2.6 If your website uses a timeout for some process, you could store the user’s data for at least 20 hours, so that users with cognitive disabilities can take a break or take longer than usual to complete the process without losing their place or losing their data. Alternatively, you could warn the user, at the start of the process, about that the website will timeout after whatever amount of time you have chosen. 
2.3.3 If your website has some non-essential animation (such as parallax scrolling) that starts when the user does some particular action, you could allow the user to turn off that animation so that you avoid harming users with vestibular disorders. The prefers-reduced-motion media query currently has limited browser support, but you can start using it now to avoid showing animations to users who select the “Reduce Motion” setting (or equivalent) in their device’s operating system:
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
  .MrFancyPants {
    animation: none;
  }
}
2.5.1 Some websites let users use multi-touch gestures on touchscreen devices. For example, Google Maps allows users to pinch with two fingers to zoom out and “unpinch” with two fingers to zoom in. Also, some websites allow users to drag a finger to do some action, such as changing the value on an input element with type=""range"", or swiping sideways to the next photograph in a gallery. Some users with dexterity challenges, and some users who use a head pointer, an eye-gaze system, or speech-controlled mouse emulation, might find multi-touch gestures or dragging impossible. You must make sure that your website supports single-tap alternatives to any multi-touch gestures or dragging actions that it provides. For example, if your website lets someone pinch and unpinch a map to zoom in and out, you must also provide buttons that a user can tap to zoom in and out.
2.5.2 This might be my favourite accessibility criterion ever! Did you ever touch or press a “Send” button but then immediately realise that you really didn’t want to send the message, and so move your finger or cursor away from the “Send” button before lifting your finger?! Imagine how many arguments that functionality has prevented. 😌 You must make sure that touching or pressing does not cause anything to happen before the user raises their finger or cursor, or make sure that the user can move their finger or cursor away to prevent the action. In JavaScript, prefer onclick to onmousedown, unless your website has actions that need onmousedown. Also, this doesn’t apply to actions that need to happen as soon as the user clicks or touches. For example, a user playing a “Whac-A-Mole” game or a piano emulator needs the action to happen as soon as they click or touch the screen.
2.5.3 Recently, entrepreneur and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk has emphasised the rise of audio and voice as output and input. He quotes a Google statistic that says one in five search queries use voice input. Once again, users with disabilities have been ahead of the curve here, having used screen readers and/or dictation software for many years. You must make sure that the text that appears on a form control or image matches how your HTML identifies that form control or image. Use proper semantic HTML to achieve this:

use the label element to pair text with the corresponding input element;
use an alt attribute value that exactly matches any text that appears in an image;
use an aria-labelledby attribute value that exactly matches the text that appears in any complex component.

2.5.4 Modern Web APIs allow web developers to specify how their website will react to the user shaking, tilting, or gesturing towards their device. Some users might find those actions difficult, impossible, or embarrassing to perform. If you make any functionality available when the user shakes, tilts, or gestures towards their device, you must provide form controls that make that same functionality available. As usual, this doesn’t apply to websites that require shaking, tilting, or gesturing; this includes some games and music programmes. John Gruber describes the iPhone’s “Shake to Undo” gesture as “dreadful — impossible to discover through exploration of the on-screen [user interface], bad for accessibility, and risks your phone flying out of your hand”. This accessibility criterion seems to empathise with John: you must make sure that your user can prevent your website from responding to shaking, tilting and/or gesturing towards their device.
2.5.5 Homer Simpson’s telephone famously complained, “The fingers you have used to dial are too fat.” I think we’ve all felt like that when using phones and tablets, particularly when trying to dismiss pop-ups and ads. You could make interactive elements at least 44px wide × 44px high. Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines” agree: “Provide ample touch targets for interactive elements. Try to maintain a minimum tappable area of 44pt x 44pt for all controls.” This doesn’t apply to links within inline text, or to unsoiled elements.
2.5.6 Expect your users to use a variety of input devices they want, and to change from one to another whenever they please. For example, a user with a tablet and keyboard might jab icons on the screen while typing on the keyboard, or a user might dictate text while alone and then type on a keyboard when a colleague arrives. You could make sure that your website allows your users to use whichever available input modality they choose. Once again, this doesn’t apply to websites that require a specific modality; this includes typing tutors and music programmes.
Can users understand your content?
The third guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “What the **** does this mean?” We’ve no new criteria for this guideline. 
Have you made your website robust enough to work on your users’ browsers and assistive technologies?
The fourth and final guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking, “Why the **** doesn’t this work on my device?” We’ve one new criterion for this guideline.
4.1.3 Sometimes you need to let your user know the status of something: “Did it work OK? What was the error? How far through it are we?” However, you should avoid making your user lose their place on the webpage, and so you should let them know the status without opening a new window, focusing on another element, or submitting a form. To do this properly for assistive technology users, choose the appropriate ARIA role for the new content; for example:  

if your user needs to know, “Did it work OK?”, add role=""status”;
if your user needs to know, “What was the error?”, add role=""alert”;
if you user needs to know, “How far through it are we?”, add role=""log"" (for a chat window) or role=""progressbar"" (for, well, a progress bar).

Better design for humans
My favourite of Luke Wroblewski’s collection of Design Quotes is, “Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one solution remains,”   from that most prolific author, “Unknown”. I’ve always viewed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as people-based constraints, and liked how they help the design process. With these 17 new web content accessibility criteria, go forth and create solutions that more people than ever before can use.
Spending those book vouchers you got for Christmas
What next? If you’re looking for something to do to keep you busy this Christmas, I thoroughly recommend these four books for increasing your accessibility expertise:

“Pro HTML5 Accessibility” by Joshue O Connor (Head of Accessibility (Interim) at the UK Government Digital Service, Director of InterAccess, and one of the editors of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1): Although this book is six years old—a long time in web design—I find it an excellent go-to resource. It begins by explaining how people with disabilities use the web, and then expertly explains modern HTML in that context.
“A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences” by Sarah Horton (the Paciello Group’s UX Strategy Lead) and Whitney Quesenbery (the Center for Civic Design’s co-director): This book covers the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, the principles of Universal Design, and design thinking. Its personas for Accessible UX and its profiles of well-known industry figures—including some 24ways authors—keep its content practical and relevant throughout.
“Accessibility For Everyone” by Laura Kalbag (Ind.ie’s co-founder and designer, and 24ways author): This book is just over a year old, and so serves as a great resource for up-to-date coverage of guidelines, laws, and accessibility features of operating systems—as well as content, design, coding, and testing. The audiobook, which Laura narrates, can help you and your colleagues go from having little or no understanding of web accessibility, to becoming familiar with all aspects of web accessibility—in less than four hours.
“Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design” by Shawn Lawton Henry (the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)’s Outreach Coordinator): Although this book is 11½ years old, the way it presents accessibility as part of the User-Centered Design process is timeless. I found its section on Usability Testing with people with disabilities particularly useful.",2018,Alan Dalton,alandalton,2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/wcag-for-people-who-havent-read-the-update/,ux