Dispatches From The Internets

WAI-ARIA basics

A quick and dirty overview of how to make Accessible Rich Internet Applications.

Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners

I love stuff like this!

Imagine you are working on a website design, and have just completed a usability test with 20 users. One task involved using the website’s search function, so you now have a numerical measurement of how many users were able to find and use the search function.

The task results could be stated in 2 different ways:

  • 4 out of 20 users could not find the search function on the website.
  • 16 out of 20 users found the search function on the website.

Logically, both of these statements describe exactly the same result, which is an objective data point. But if you’re like most people, the conclusions you come to might be very different depending on which phrasing is used.

Biases affect our work; awareness helps us mitigate them, to a degree.

Lessons in Averaging

In the work that we do on the Web (as well as in our daily lives), we’re often confronted, informed, or judged based on averages. I never really stopped to think about it, beyond being bugged by the fact that averages aren’t truly representative of reality. Then I listened to 99% Invisible’s episode “On Average”. It was incredibly enlightening and the stories shared in that episode provide sage wisdom that is very relevant to the work that we do.

Progressive enhancement and team memberships

Iris Faraway discusses progressively enhancing a feature for the University of Bath. It’s a simple, straightforward example of how to create a universal baseline and improve (dramatically) on the experience using JavaScript.

Resilient Web Design

Jeremy Keith’s latest book. Free to read on any device you own. Installable as a progressive web app too (naturally).

[Insert Clickbait Headline About Progressive Enhancement Here]

Late last week, Josh Korr, a project manager at Viget, posted at length about what he sees as a fundamental flaw with the argument for progressive enhancement. In reading the post, it became clear to me that Josh really doesn’t have a good grasp on progressive enhancement or the reasons its proponents think it’s a good philosophy to follow. Despite claiming to be “an expert at spotting fuzzy rhetoric and teasing out what’s really being said”, Josh makes a lot of false assumptions and inferences. My response would not have fit in a comment, so here it is…