Rock Solid WordPress Security: Keeping Your Business Safe

Development By Simon Sterne Today WordPress is the web’s favourite CMS (content management system), renowned for its low-entry level and vast array of themes and plugins. WordPress’s open-source nature allows for endless flexibility, catering to diverse needs and technical skills. Unfortunately, 10,950,000 websites are hacked yearly, and 4,708,500 of those belong to small businesses. WordPress’s… Continue reading Rock Solid WordPress Security: Keeping Your Business Safe

Good design is subjective, contextual, and intentional

Urban planners have been designing for human experiences for nearly 200 years, and UI/UX designers can learn from this. Examples of The Chicago School of Architecture | Photo Credit: Tom Seiple When I finished my graduate degree, I was lucky to find my first job in Chicago. From a very early age, I had always hoped to… Continue reading Good design is subjective, contextual, and intentional

Design Systems Teams: Understand Your Users So They Can Serve Theirs

Welcome to the next edition of my Design Strategy blog series. Today, I’ll be sharing a story from some recent client visits that will help y’all recognize WHY you should do things differently to mature and scale your digital accessibility program quickly. I will once again skip the “how-to” dry laundry lists of tactical “do… Continue reading Design Systems Teams: Understand Your Users So They Can Serve Theirs

3 Common Color Accessibility Issues One Can Easily Avoid

Color is often used to evoke emotions and emphasis. That’s one of the reasons why designers see color as an important element in their work. Colors communicate messages on both psychological and visual level. The importance of color is undeniable, but is basing the message solely on color the right thing to do? This post… Continue reading 3 Common Color Accessibility Issues One Can Easily Avoid

Name/Role/Value – Whose Role Is It Anyway?

Welcome to the next edition of my Design Strategy blog series. Today, I’m sharing a client story with the hope that y’all will focus on thinking about WHY you should do things differently so that your program can rapidly mature and scale quickly. I will once again skip the “how-to” article formula and dry laundry… Continue reading Name/Role/Value – Whose Role Is It Anyway?

The extended designer, and the design machine

The Extended Designer spends less time making products, and more time making progress. The Extended Designer spends less time making products, and more time making progress. 2023 has been Generative AI’s breakout year, but that has been greeted by some fairly mixed responses, particularly from Designers. As the terrain we all live on reconfigures around… Continue reading The extended designer, and the design machine

Designing safe and trustworthy AI systems

Designing for safe and trustworthy AI Why human oversight to make up for AI errors doesn’t work and what we can do instead Illustration created by Cara Storath in Midjourney As much as AI is powerful, in some cases it can be misleading or wrong. A realization that came too late to a New York lawyer,… Continue reading Designing safe and trustworthy AI systems

Give Your Site Some Focus! Tips for Designing Useful and Usable Focus Indicators

What Are Focus Indicators? Have you ever noticed the blue outlines that sometimes show up around buttons or form fields? What about when you click on a menu item? Have you ever tried to make those outlines disappear? Here’s a hint: by default, browsers use the :focus css pseudo class to give outlines to form… Continue reading Give Your Site Some Focus! Tips for Designing Useful and Usable Focus Indicators

Risk tolerance: why some countries prefer more complex UIs

An analysis of Uncertainty Avoidance and Amazon’s website in various countries Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash What do Switzerland, the US, Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands have in common? They are all rich, protestant, relatively cold countries where a big part of the population consists of (former) immigrants. They also form the top 5 of… Continue reading Risk tolerance: why some countries prefer more complex UIs

How Serious Is Your Design Practice About Learning?

Today I’m sharing a strategic approach that enables your design practice to learn more from the accessibility-related data you already have. I will again skip the “how to” article formula and dry laundry lists of tactical “do this/don’t do that” mechanics. Instead, I’ll focus on helping you think about WHY you should do things differently… Continue reading How Serious Is Your Design Practice About Learning?

Design for meaningful outcomes

Aim for quality outcomes, not just outputs — that’s how we can drive customer and business value! Designing for outcomes enables us to focus on customer needs and meaningful business results. “Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs once said. To write a compelling story, start with the ending as a meaningful destination.… Continue reading Design for meaningful outcomes

The data delivery checklist: principles to design data products

We have flagged selling energy to the grid for the first time as not available for a direct user of Tesla and crypto. Being available is one of the five principles in the Data Delivery Checklist. Where does an end-user fit into this? For the issue Bard has given us, let’s imagine a new smart… Continue reading The data delivery checklist: principles to design data products

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Unveiling the experience wheel of true fortune

Our tendency to focus on negative experiences has prevented us from recognizing and seizing the opportunities of another loop. This is better known as the flywheel effect, and the key ingredient is how success can be replicated through a series of logical but effective steps until it links as a chain. (Image source: Neil Webb) Would… Continue reading Unveiling the experience wheel of true fortune

How you can create non-obvious UX research insights

6 tips to sidestep “we already knew it” feedback on a research report Image on https://www.nirandfar.com/hindsight-bias/ Every UX researcher wonders how they can create amazing insights that go beyond expectations and elicit a ‘wow!’ reaction from their audience. Despite conducting numerous rounds of interviews, sometimes our research reports can seem too plain and bland if they… Continue reading How you can create non-obvious UX research insights

Words: the new data commodity

The AI and LLM industry is changing and developing rapidly. How will the industry move forward, become regulated and adjust to this new reality of words as a commodity? We’re starting a new chapter of data commodification through access to and the commodification of words. In a yet unregulated space, product teams need to self-regulate… Continue reading Words: the new data commodity

Finding value at the bookends

Improving the design of solutions by conducting foundational pre-design research and post-launch analyses. The UX research field is experiencing a significant transformation as it becomes increasingly prevalent and expands beyond dedicated user researchers. Both user researchers and “people who do research” are engaging in more user interviews, surveys, and other forms of data collection, recognizing… Continue reading Finding value at the bookends

Apple Vision Pro: how to turn people into 24/7 surveillance agents for capitalism

From Apple.com In the world of tech, innovation is a double-edged sword. On one side, we have the allure of cutting-edge technology, promising to revolutionize our lives. But what happens when this revolution infringes on our privacy? The latest product from Apple, the Vision Pro AR headset, is a perfect example of this dichotomy. The… Continue reading Apple Vision Pro: how to turn people into 24/7 surveillance agents for capitalism

Design Risks: How to Assess, Mitigate, and Manage Them

It’s impossible to see into the future and anticipate every possible outcome of our design decisions. As a result, every major design decision comes with risks: risk that the design will be unfamiliar or hard to use or unpopular, risk that it will cost too much money, or risk that it will be abused or… Continue reading Design Risks: How to Assess, Mitigate, and Manage Them

Good UX is not enough without a proper communication plan

To make a design thrive, you should support it with strategies to make it even more robust and accepted. There should be a coexistence between a practical design that should be free of explanation (invisibility) and effective communication (notoriety) Like many designers, I’ve been practicing this mantra all my career: “Good design is invisible,” but… Continue reading Good UX is not enough without a proper communication plan

The purpose of a system is how we shape it

We are not masters of our information, but we can be if we build information systems shaped like human consciousness. Why are our information systems places where ideas go to die? Why are they clogged with shallow, soulless filler? Why can so few of us, and fewer organizations, gain any level of mastery over our… Continue reading The purpose of a system is how we shape it

Starting design work in a spreadsheet

In the early phases of a project a spreadsheet can be a more useful design tool than Figma. If you’re redesigning an existing website there are huge benefits in getting to know the content you’ll be working with. The earlier in the project the better. A little upfront investigation will help you make informed design decisions.… Continue reading Starting design work in a spreadsheet

3 Secure Practices For Business File Sharing

Technology has helped shape today’s business environment. It has made it easier for businesses to interact and engage with customers and other organizations. For one, it allows an organization to share and receive important documents seamlessly. File sharing significantly contributes to a business’s operation. It allows you to share files and access information and documents… Continue reading 3 Secure Practices For Business File Sharing

Getting Started with HTML Tables — SitePoint

HTML tables are intended for displaying tabular data on a web page. They’re great for displaying information in an organized way, and can be styled with CSS to match the look and feel of our website. In this tutorial, we’ll cover the basics of creating HTML tables and adding styles to make them responsive and… Continue reading Getting Started with HTML Tables — SitePoint