The Best Of The Internets

WAI-ARIA basics

A quick and dirty overview of how to make Accessible Rich Internet Applications.


Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners

I love stuff like this!

Imagine you are working on a website design, and have just completed a usability test with 20 users. One task involved using the website’s search function, so you now have a numerical measurement of how many users were able to find and use the search function.

The task results could be stated in 2 different ways:

  • 4 out of 20 users could not find the search function on the website.
  • 16 out of 20 users found the search function on the website.

Logically, both of these statements describe exactly the same result, which is an objective data point. But if you’re like most people, the conclusions you come to might be very different depending on which phrasing is used.

Biases affect our work; awareness helps us mitigate them, to a degree.




Progressive enhancement and team memberships

Iris Faraway discusses progressively enhancing a feature for the University of Bath. It’s a simple, straightforward example of how to create a universal baseline and improve (dramatically) on the experience using JavaScript.



Resilient Web Design

Jeremy Keith’s latest book. Free to read on any device you own. Installable as a progressive web app too (naturally).



ClickClickClick

Ever wonder if websites can track your every move?

Privacy matters.


Les défis du “progressive enhancement”

This is a nice overview (in French) of how Hopwork handles progressive enhancement in their SaaS product. Their back-end is Java too. It’s nice to see folks talking about how to progressively enhance products in that language; we don’t hear about that often enough.