Earlier this week, my colleagues on the Microsoft Edge team put on the second of what has now become an annual event: the Edge Web Summit. The format was a little different this year, with team members from across the organization delivering quick, punchy 30-minute talks on topics ranging from standard implementations to the user experience of a browser to real-time communications. I live-tweeted quite a few of the talks, but I thought I’d provide a bit of a round-up of what was revealed, discussed, and more so you can read it all in one place.
Dispatches From The Internets
My Top Takeaways From the 2016 Edge Web Summit
‘Touch Keyboard’ Implementations Have Improved Just 9% Since 2013 (60% Still Get it Wrong)
This post is pure gold in terms of recommendations for tailoring your web forms for modern contexts. Read it, then go forth and improve your forms!
Learning to Code Gives You Advantages as a UX Designer
This is a great post from Jess on how it can be advantageous for UX-ers to pick up front-end coding skills.
Decades of computer vision research, one ‘Swiss Army knife’
Wow. Just wow. Be sure to watch the video. This is amazing!
Offline First: Love the Idea, Hate the Name
Back in 2014, I had the great pleasure of listening to Ola Gasidlo of Hood.ie discuss the importance of offline at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her excellent talk was my introduction to the “Offline First” movement and, while I can get behind the idea, I’ve had some serious issues with the name. And with the rise of Service Workers as a simple, usable means of making our content available offline, I thought it worth revisiting the idea of “offline first”, if only to address its core fallacy.
An Event Apart Nashville 2016, Day One
Unfortunately, I was unable to spend Tuesday in Nashville for An Event Apart (for reasons that will be revealed in about a month), but I did catch Monday and it was amazing.
Learn from the Past, Enhance for the Future
I had the great pleasure of delivering the closing keynote for the first EnhanceConf. I wanted to talk about voice and the future of “headless” user interfaces. Here’s what I had to say.
A Design System isn’t a Project. It’s a Product, Serving Products.
Excellent post from Nathan Curtis. You need to read this:
A design system’s value is realized when products ship features using parts from the system.
Atomic Classification
We’ve run into similar issues with Pattern Lab’s enforced groupings on a large client project. Some just didn’t make sense, causing a little confusion for our team, but way more confusion for the client’s team. It added way more cognitive overhead than was really necessary for the project. The tool made testing components easy, but we eventually ended up leaving some buckets empty.
Planning Adaptive Interfaces: The Workshop
For the last few years I’ve been running a workshop alternately titled “Planning Adaptive Interfaces” or “Beyond Responsive”, depending on the conference. It’s been one of my favorite workshops to run for a number of reasons, but before I get into that, let me explain what it is and how it works.