UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
March//15//2024
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Avoiding Common Digital Accessibility Issues. One of my favorite topics to include in the newsletter is accessibility. This article from Fabio Bindels for the A11Y collective is a good summarization of what to keep in mind when thinking of accessibility for digital products. Some of the highlights of the article include Color Contrast, Alt Text, Incorrect Usage of Headings, Lack of Keyboard Accessibility, Inaccessible Forms, to name but a few. To learn more about these topics, please leverage the W3C and WCAG website for more information. Highlight of the article includes:
“Headings structure your content, making it navigable for both sighted and visually impaired users. While users use visual cues to quickly scan the text to find the information they are looking for, people who are blind can’t do this. Instead, they can use headings to quickly navigate to certain sections of a page and read only the information that is relevant to them.”
2.
https://www.figma.com/blog/six-myths-holding-you-back-from-embracing-design-systems/
Embracing Design Systems. This brief but effective article hails from Figma’s blog and author Ana Boyer. In it the author clarifies myths that may prevent professionals in Digital Design from adopting design systems. Some of those myths includes creativity stifling, or leveraging Google’s Material Design since it’s so widely adopted. As I mentioned in prior articles, Design Systems are living organisms, languages, which demonstrate an organization’s perspective on what they deliver to their client base (be it external or internal). As most languages, it needs to be maintained, to be updated, in order to stay relevant and be embraced. It’s not a blocking element, but instead it’s something to leverage to better communicate with consistency and efficiency. Highlight of the article includes:
“Google’s Material Design is often considered the industry standard when it comes to design systems, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Your design system needs to be a reflection of your brand’s unique identity, tailored to your users’ needs and your organizational goals. It’s about finding a balance between industry standards and the best possible approach for your organization at this distinct point in time.”
3.
5 KPIs for Product Managers to Track. Brief article from the Pendo blog and author Nat Brown, on KPIs that Product Managers should keep in mind when measuring an initiative’s success. This includes the following: Application Adoption, Support Deflection, Workflow Productivity, to name just a few. This article of course serves a point to support Pendo’s analytics services, but it also illustrates just as importantly, how this visibility to different parts of a product’s experience ultimately informs on where investments should be made in order to continue relevance on the market. Well worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“The best way to keep a finger on the pulse of app adoption is through the rich analytics that the best digital adoption solutions offer. Those insights will help answer important questions. Is there a user subset with markedly low adoption rates, or is the problem organization-wide? Depending on the answers to these and other questions, internal PMs can take actions to increase adoption via in-app guidance and alerts or by collecting feedback in the app to better discern what the problem is.”
