An interesting look at color blindness from Aaron Tenbuuren, a designer living with it. He offers some great examples of good design for color blind users from Trello, Google, and more.
[W]hen designing apps, we should not look at individual colors and ask if they are ‘visible’, but rather look at groupings of colors, and see if they are distinguishable. Even then, we may require more visual aids to make sure that users will not mistake one color for another.
Still one of my favorite examples of reduced support improving usability (emphasis mine):
By contrast, the method used here at A List Apart (XHTML for structure, CSS for layout and design) ensures that every reader has access to the site’s text, but allows the design to “disappear” if the browser can’t handle it. No 4.0 browser can handle it.
We assume that those who choose to keep using 4.0 browsers have reasons for doing so; we also assume that most of those folks don’t really care about “design issues.” They just want information, and with this approach they can still get the information they seek. In fact, since we began hiding the design from non–compliant browsers in February 2001, ALA’s Netscape 4 readership has increased, from about 6% to about 11%.
This piece echoes much of what was said at Responsive Day Out: Step outside your bubble. Learn about how others experience the web. Design for a continuum and you will support more users with fewer headaches.
I had the great pleasure of delivering the closing keynote for the final Responsive Day Out. Here’s what I had to say.
Microsoft’s Frank Oliver has a nice write-up on the importance of browser interoperability and what the browser team has done with Microsoft Edge.
A bit from Akamai’s Guy Podjarny on the high cost of images and what you can (and should) do about it.
Images are also the single biggest resource type on a page, making up 63% of overall page weight. If we removed all images from the top 1,000 websites, these sites would load 30% faster on average over 3G.
The highlights:
The yawners:
Overall I’m kind of meh on the updates. I was hoping for more.
As a security precaution, Microsoft Edge uses network isolation by default. You can override it via the command line right now, but it will be in about:flags in the future.
I wonder how many app developers will needlessly flip this switch and cut off every iOS device that doesn’t have a 64 bit processor. Given that with every new phone release, sales of the old ones spike, the folks that buy the older models may be a little miffed to find out the apps they want to use have decided it’s inconvenient to support them.
The New York Times is training every employee that mobile matters. I wish more companies would do this!