UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
June//11//2021
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
A Guide to Core Web Vitals. As search algorithms change, so do the ways web products get assessed, analyzed and ranked. This interesting article looks at the topic of Core Web Vitals, focusing on factors such as performance, security, mobile friendliness, safe browsing, to name but a few. It’s an insightful article which calls out attention to the overall ergonomics of Web products, and how that will impact their performance and ranking moving forward. Highlight of the article includes:
“Core Web Vitals is a new set of assessments based on field data (anonymized data collected from actual visits to your sites) designed to standardize and simplify how site owners monitor three key elements that impact site performance: loading time, interactivity and visual stability. Because these metrics are based on actual user data, Core Web Vitals scores are fluid and change as users interact with your site. Core Web Vitals assessments are shown as both numerical scores and simple labels, so you can see at a glance how well your site is performing.”
2.
AI and User Experience. AI has been highlighted in this newsletter before, but it’s a topic always worth revisiting, since it now more than ever, it has and will continue to impact technology driven solutions. AI has profound impacts across these different aspects, namely: understanding users at a scale, predicting and personalizing features, optimizing permutations, identifying opportunities and also producing new interfaces. This article looks at different aspects in which AI has an impact on the product experience, both as a background engine and as a foreground experience, to name but a few. Well worth a read. Highlight of the article includes:
“The best implementations of AI help users with the actions they want to complete without forcing the developer’s agenda on them. As the digital landscape has grown, more companies have tried to take shortcuts to achieve metric growth in ways that have been harmful to their users. Using AI is not the way to get users to perform an action they’re not interested in performing — it’s a dark pattern. Artificial intelligence is only meaningful to a user as long as it’s in their interests. After all, an assistant that tries to push you in a direction you’re not interested in isn’t a very good assistant.”
3.
Understanding Links. Very thorough article hailing from author Rian Rietveld, focused on hyperlinks. Links are of course one of the pillar and fundamental aspects of working in interactive products of any sorts. This article goes into details, on how they can and should be tackled, taking into consideration aspects such as immediacy, accessibility and usefulness. Also when it comes to Links, the rule of the 4S should always be kept in mind: make it Substantial, Sincere, Specific and Succinct. Highlight of the article includes:
“Using an image or a font icon for a link is common. Links to social media are often just the logo of the medium concerned, such as the Twitter logo. If you can see, that logo would be the obvious choice. When you depend on a screen reader, you need to have things spelled out more clearly. Screen readers announce the content on a website, so there must be actual content to announce, in the form of text: an “accessible name”, as it is called.”
