Dispatches From The Internets

Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error

In a green field filled with only yellow flowers, a cute robot has found a single red flower, digital art

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.




Equality vs. Equity

Pencil and watercolor illustration of an Indian man stepping off a city bus with a bag of groceries

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.



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.