Some good thought morsels from Robin on product design:
Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of.
There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.
Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.
JavaScript is fickle. It can fail to load. It can be disabled. It can be blocked. It can fail to run. It probably is fine most of the time, but when it fails, everything tends to go bad. And having such a hard point of failure is not ideal.
This is a very important point:
It’s important not to try making the no-JS experience work like the full one. The interface has to be revisited. Some features might even have to be removed, or dramatically reduced in scope. That’s also okay. As long as the main features are there and things work nicely, it should be fine that the experience is not as polished.
This is an excellent case study!
The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
An excellent level-headed evaluation of styling and scripting form controls, weighing up the benefits and trade-offs. The more tightly you control the appearance, the less you get to benefit from the functionality (and accessibility) that the browser gives you for free …meaning you’ve now to got to work harder to replace it.
HTML elements like check buttons, radio buttons or select options can be hard to style with CSS in a custom design. There are many workarounds for this, but are they accessible?
This is a very thoughtful analysis of different approaches to writing maintainable CSS, which—let’s face it—is the hard bit.
I often joke that I don’t want to hire a code ninja. Ninjas come in the middle of the night and leave a bloody mess.
I want a code janitor. Someone who walks the hallways of code, cleaning up pieces, dusting up neglected parts, shinning up others, tossing unnecessary bits. I prefer this gentler, more accurate analogy. This is the person you want on your team. This is a person you want in your code reviews.
Also, can I just say how refreshing it is to read an article that doesn’t treat the cascade like a disease to be wiped out? This article even goes so far as to suggest that the cascade might actually be a feature—shock! horror!
The cascade can help, if you understand and organize it. This is the same as any sophisticated software design. You can look at what you’re building and make responsible decisions on your build and design. You decide what can be at a top-level and needs to be inherited by other, smaller, pieces.
There’s a lot of really good stuff in here to mull over.
My hope for this article is to encourage developers to think ahead. We’re all in this together, and the best we can do is learn from one another.
A classic of writing on the fundamental differences between programming languages.