While listening to Radiolab’s “The Trust Engineers”, I’ll admit I got a little excited when they started talking about web form performance. And no, not “performance” in the time-to-download sense, but “performance” in terms of how well the forms performed in attempting to capture meaningful, actionable data.
Dispatches From The Internets
Consider How Your Forms Read
Who Should Pay?
In more than a handful of conversations lately, it’s become quite clear that we, the web development community, are prioritizing our own convenience and our own time over that of our users. With our industry’s focus on “user-centered design”, you might find that hard to believe, but it’s true.
I Don’t Want to Teach the World to Code… I Want to Teach the World to Problem Solve
It seems that every other day a new code school opens it doors. In my mid-sized city, Chattanooga, there are no fewer than three businesses centered around teaching “coding” classes that I am aware of. And there are at least a half-dozen free or community driven programs and camps on top of that. Most are aimed at youth, but some offer adult education as well. And that, of course, is over and above what’s available in our public and private schools (which is considerable) and a plethora of online options.
Three Worthwhile Posts on Progressive Enhancement
Jason Garber has penned a series of posts on progressive enhancement. Here’s a quick rundown on what they cover and why you should read them.
Client-side MVC’s Major Bug
Astute observations (as always) from Tim Kadlec. I’ll let Tim set the scene:
Over the past year I conducted performance audits on a handful of sites that all used client-side MVC’s, typically Angular but not always. Each site had their own optimizations that needed to take place to improve performance. Yet a pattern emerged: client-side MVC’s were the major bottleneck for each. It slowed down the initial rendering of the page (particularly on mobile) and it limited our ability to optimize the critical path.
Obviously Tim knows what he’s talking about.
He goes on to bring in the voices of the Filament Group and PPK (both of whom I’ve linked to previously for the same reasons): lots of smart people have come to the conclusion that relying on client-side generation of web pages is a bad idea. Tim goes so far as to say “if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug” and I can’t help but agree.
His post is great, you should read it. Frankly, I wish I’d written it.
Five Easy Ways to Be a Better Web Professional
My old friend Jason Garber—who I, sadly, haven’t seen in probably a decade—came up with a great list of “professional self-improvement tips for anyone working on the Web today”. I’ll give you the synopses, but you should do yourself a favor and read the full post for the background:
- Know Your History
- Know Your Medium
- Respect Those Who Came Before You
- Respect Your Audience
- Get Involved
I would absolutely echo these to anyone looking to become (or improve as) a web professional.
Accessible toggle-style checkbox
This is, by far, the best implementation of a toggle slider checkbox replacement I’ve seen.
Let’s Write Fast JavaScript
You may have already seen this piece from Mahdi Dibaiee, but if you haven’t it’s definitely worth a read. I also highly recommend Nicholas Zakas’ High Performance JavaScript and Amy Hoy & Thomas Fuchs’ JavaScript Performance Rocks.
This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition
I am incredibly excited about the future of voice-based user experiences, but I also fully recognize that we’ve got a long way to go. This post from Zach Holman does a great job illustrating the issues we are currently dealing with. And it’s a fun read to boot!
Social Class, Power, and Selfishness: When and Why Upper and Lower Class Individuals Behave Unethically
In this fascinating paper, David Dubois, Derek Rucker, and Adam Galinsky explore the interplay between socioeconomic status and selfishness (or cheating). In the course of their study, they discovered that people at both ends of the spectrum cheat, but for different ends:
[S]ocial class positively predicted unethical behavior; however, this relationship was only observed when that behavior was self-beneficial. When unethical behavior was performed to benefit others, social class negatively predicted unethical behavior; lower class individuals were more likely than upper class individuals to engage in unethical behavior. Overall, social class predicts people’s tendency to behave selfishly, rather than predicting unethical behavior per se.
The second thing they discovered was that the cause of selfishness came from an individuals’ sense of power:
Evidence for this relationship was provided in three forms. First, income, but not education level, predicted unethical behavior. Second, feelings of power mediated the effect of social class on unethical behavior, but feelings of status did not. Third, two distinct manipulations of power produced the same moderation by self-versus-other beneficiary as was found with social class.
Fascinating stuff!