Dispatches From The Internets

Documenting the Web together

This is great news! Microsoft, Google, the W3C, and Samsung are all joining Mozilla in the maintenance and curation of MDN. Finally, we’ll have one always up-to-date source of docs on web standards!

Be a Mentor

Your knowledge and experience is valuable, no matter where you are in your career; you should share that knowledge with others. The web is what it is today because we shared our code and learned from each other. Be a part of that legacy. Brandon Gregory will show you the way.

A Different Kind of Intolerance

Nearly two decades ago, Kelly unravelled the mystery of my digestive tract that had eluded me for a number of years. It had become commonplace for me to get an upset stomach after eating. I didn’t think much of it really, but Kelly noticed a pattern: it only happened after meals that involved milk of some kind. “I bet you’re lactose intolerant.” Turns out she was right. Kind of.

Betting on the Web

Excellent post from Henrik Joreteg on PWAs and why they (and the Web) matter. I wish I could have seen the talk this post is based on.

Flat UI Elements Attract Less Attention and Cause Uncertainty

Beware the “weak signifier”:

When we compared average number of fixations and average amount of time people spent looking at each page, we found that:

  • The average amount of time was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average participants spent 22% more time (i.e., slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers.
  • The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25% more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.

(Both findings were significant by a paired t-test with sites as the random factor, p < 0.05.)

This means that, when looking at a design with weak signifiers, users spent more time looking at the page, and they had to look at more elements on the page. Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more “engaged” with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.