As you’d expect, Vitaly’s deep dive into error message UX is a treasure trove of excellent, practical advice to make data entry better for your customers.
Dispatches From The Internets
Designing Better Error Messages UX
Why and How to Create Accessible Social Media and Website Content
This article contains so much excellent advice. It focuses on social media, but the lessons it shares are applicable well beyond social media.
Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error
While filling out a long form the other day, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t submitting. Turns out I’d forgotten to fill in a field, but I didn’t know that because it had scrolled out of the viewport. This is a common problem on the web, but easily remedied with a little bit of JavaScript.
Locking down your GitHub-hosted Domains
The other day someone claimed a hostname on a domain I own and it took me a while to track down how. After a lot of digging around, trying to figure out how the hijack was accomplished, it turns out it was via GitHub Pages.
No Comment 2: The Webmentioning
You can now use webmentions in Eleventy via a plugin rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.
Equality vs. Equity
Over the last few years, I’ve been quietly leading training efforts within Microsoft focused on leveling up folks’ allyship skills. There are a ton of really important lessons to be learned form the curriculum my team and I developed, but one folks ofter struggle with is the concept of “equality” as compared to “equity.”
When Equal Isn’t Equitable
This is an important insight from the Microsoft design research team regarding boosting the signal from historically excluded communities:
The trick is… the system is built on inequity, so finding customers who have been historically excluded means that you can’t expect to find them in the system itself.
A Bittersweet Goodbye
June 3rd was my last day on the Edge team. It’s been an absolute honor and privilege to work with such an amazing team all these years, moving from Internet Explorer (IE) to “Spartan” Edge and, finally, to “Anaheim” Edge.
Beyond WCAG: Losing Spoons Online
Have you ever considered that your website might be an energy vampire?
This excellent piece from Lē McNamara takes you on a brief tour of design patterns that actively deplete the mental and physical stamina of your users, potentially incapacitating them for days.
You need to read this.
Make Beautifully Resilient Apps With Progressive Enhancement
A good walkthrough on how to build a form that hooks into an API and works either with or without JavaScript.
One note however: Austin in incorrect in that you absolutely can define nested objects in your forms. I’ve done it many times. Your field names just need to use bracket notation like this:
<input name="foo['bar']['baz']">That will pipe through as the value for the baz property of bar within foo.