RWD Weekly #429

Hello and welcome to RWD weekly newsletter edition 429.

This week (and last) I’ve been battling a cold that my daughter brought home from school.  Don’t be alarmed, it isn’t Covid-19, but it seems like the lack of exposure to bugs over the past 6 months has meant that this has hit me harder than I’d expect… or maybe I’m just older :)

This week we’re taking a look at onboarding into a new tech job while working remote, we get technical around the cloudflare edge workers and improved performance, and take a look at whether bi-directional scrolling is the right answer. There’s also a great resource with a number of accessibility tools which I think you’ll find super helpful.

Let’s get linking.

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Article

Virtual onboarding in the time of COVID-19: The new hire’s new normal

Anyone who started their career through Covid-19 will have had a completely different onboarding expereince than most. This is a detailed review from Cindy Zhang about her process with Pinterest.

Bringing the browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code

VS code now supports the elements and networks tab within the coding environment itself.

Exploring Site Speed Optimisations With WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers

Andy looks at using Cloudflare workers (service workers but on the edge CDN) test and improve upon website performance. This isn’t exaclty a ‘getting started’ tutorial by any means but he paves the way for you to do a little bit of experimentation youself.

Bidirectional scrolling: what’s not to like

We looked into some bi-directional scrolling for an update to one of our client websites. Despite the rationale of “Netflix does it” we’re still going through user testing. The intial batch of people (internal) loved it, but I’m keen to put it out to a focus group of real users and see what they think.  What do you think? Scroll or click to see more?

VoiceOver on iOS 14 Supports Description Lists

Voiceover has changed in iOS 14 and will allow definition lists to be read out with the term and definitions being flagged separately.  There are some quirks to it though, if you are customising the display using CSS it may also read out that bullet which isn’t great.  Adrian has looked at a few options that you have when using this.

Tutorials

Accessible Animation – Designing in the Browser

In this video Una shows you how you can use Prefers Reduced Motion to ensure that your animations are great when people want to see them and not overbearing when they don’t.

Seeing the Forest: Using Treejack for Multi-language Navigation Testing

A great example on how to run an information architecture process (especially for the same website across multiple languages).

Buttons that Spark Joy

I was fortunate to be able to catch Aarron Walter discuss about emotion in design earlier this week as part of the BT Stay Curious series. he spoke about the high five that the mailchimp monkey used to give you when you sent a capaign and how successful it was for the product, having things like this on buttons can also help spark that joy with your customers.

5 Ways Google Analytics Helps Web Developers In UI/UX Design

You probably all use Google Analytics on your site but are you aware of some of these additional features that you can enable ontop of the regular implementation?

Resources

a11yresources

The Accessibility Resources is a growing list of more than 200+ hand-curated accessibility plugins, tools, articles, case studies, design patterns, assistive technologies, design resources and accessibility standards.

Finally

That’s all for this week. If you’ve come across any interesting/helpful articles or you’ve written something yourself please hit reply and let me know about them.

See you all next week!

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Justin.