Ongoing education in our industry is a must. Attending conferences is a great way to learn and network with other industry professionals. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to attend conferences, but have no fear! Many of the best conferences post videos online, giving our community an easy way to learn on our own time from anywhere in the world. Our first video in this series is a talk by Sarah Parmenter titled “Designing Using Data” given at An Event Apart Orlando.
In her presentation, Sarah Parmenter walks us through a journey of using research throughout the design process to make informed decisions. While she is known for her work in user interface design, she goes beyond designing screens and showcases how she created a successful (non-web design) business by focusing on every detail of a customer’s experience.
I’ve personally struggled with accepting data from tools like analytics and a/b testing at face value. While the raw data is reliable, the human interpretation and organization of that data to provide meaningful insight is where my hesitation begins. I’ve seen experts rely far too heavily on data without considering the context of their visitor’s situation, emotional state and more. Sarah’s talk showcases how you can use both research and experience to create the best results.
How do you use research to help you make design decisions? Let us know by sending us a message via Twitter.
Display color gamut ranges and more
OddContrast, OddBird’s color format converter and contrast checker, gets new features – including the ability to swap background and foreground colors, and display color gamut ranges on the color sliders. Contrast ratios now incorporate foreground color alpha values.
Start using author-defined functions
There’s been a lot of progress in the CSS Working Group lately, but I want to draw your attention to a prototype that landed in Chromium ‘Canary’ (v136+) browsers with the experimental platform features flag enabled. Author-defined Functions are coming to CSS, and you can start to experiment with them…
There are several proposals, but one major road block
We’re trying to make progress on shorthand syntax for CSS logical properties. But the path forward depends on where we hope to be a decade from now.