Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 35

More UX London speaker updates

It wasn���t that long ago that I told you about some of the speakers that have been added to the line-up for UX London in June: Steph Troeth, Heldiney Pereira, Lauren Pope, Laura Yarrow, and Inayaili Le��n. Well, now I���ve got another five speakers to tell you about!

Aleks Melnikova will be giving a workshop on day one, June 28th���that���s the day with a focus on research.

Stephanie Marsh���who literally wrote the book on user research���will also be giving a workshop that day.

Before those workshops though, you���ll get to hear a talk from the one and only Kat Zhou, the creator of Design Ethically. By the way, you can hear Kat talking about deceptive design in a BBC radio documentary.

Day two has a focus on content design so who better to deliver a workshop than Sarah Winters, author of the Content Design book.

Finally, on day three���with its focus on design systems���I���m thrilled to announce that Adekunle Oduye will be giving a talk. He too is an author. He co-wrote the Design Engineering Handbook. I also had the pleasure of talking to Adekunle for an episode of the Clearleft podcast on design engineering.

So that���s another five excellent speakers added to the line-up:

Aleks MelnikovaStephanie MarshKat ZhouSarah WintersAdekunle Oduye

That���s a total of fifteen speakers so far with more on the way. And I���ll be updating the site with more in-depth descriptions of the talks and workshops soon.

If you haven���t yet got your ticket for UX London, grab one now. You can buy tickets for individual days, or to get the full experience and the most value, get a ticket for all three days.

Upcoming events

I see that Russell is planning to bring back Interesting this year. This makes me happy. Just seeing the return of in-person gatherings���run safely���is giving me life.

I don���t think I���m alone in this. I think that lots of people are yearning for some in-person contact after two years of online events. The good news is that there are some excellent in-person web conferences on the horizon.

Beyond Tellerrand is back in D��sseldorf on May 2nd and 3rd. Marc ran some of the best online events during lockdown with his Stay Curious caf��s, but there���s nothing beats the atmosphere of Beyond Tellerrand on its home turf.

If you can���t make it D��sseldorf���I probably can���t because I���m getting my passport renewed right now���there���s All Day Hey in Leeds on May 5th. Harry has put a terrific line-up together for this one-day, very affordable event.

June is shaping up to be a good month for events too. First of all, there���s CSS Day in Amsterdam on June 9th and 10th. I really, really like this event. I���m not just saying that because I���m speaking at this year���s CSS Day. I just love the way that the conference treats CSS with respect. If you self-identigy as a CSS person, then this is the opportunity to be with your people.

But again, if you can���t make it Amsterdam, never fear. The Pixel Pioneers conference returns to Bristol on June 10th. Another one-day event in the UK with a great line-up.

Finally, there���s the big one at the end of June. UX London runs from June 28th to June 30th:

Bringing the UX community back together

Yes, I���m biased because I���m curating the line-up but this is shaping up to be unmissable! It���s going to be so good to gather with our peers and get our brains filled by the finest of design minds.

Declarative design

I feel like in the past few years there���s been a number of web design approaches that share a similar mindset. Intrinsic web design by Jen; Every Layout by Andy and Heydon; Utopia by Trys and James.

To some extent, their strengths lie in technological advances in CSS: flexbox, grid, calc, and so on. But more importantly, they share an approach. They all focus on creating the right inputs rather than trying to control every possible output. Leave the final calculations for those outputs to the browser���that���s what computers are good at.

As Andy puts it:

Be the browser���s mentor, not its micromanager.

Reflecting on Utopia���s approach, Jim Nielsen wrote:

We say CSS is ���declarative���, but the more and more I write breakpoints to accommodate all the different ways a design can change across the viewport spectrum, the more I feel like I���m writing imperative code. At what quantity does a set of declarative rules begin to look like imperative instructions?

In contrast, one of the principles of Utopia is to be declarative and ���describe what is to be done rather than command how to do it���. This approach declares a set of rules such that you could pick any viewport width and, using a formula, derive what the type size and spacing would be at that size.

Declarative! Maybe that���s the word I���ve been looking for to describe the commonalities between Utopia, Every Layout, and intrinsic web design.

So if declarative design is a thing, does that also mean imperative design is also a thing? And what might the tools and technologies for imperative design look like?

I think that Tailwind might be a good example of an imperative design tool. It���s only about the specific outputs. Systematic thinking is actively discouraged; instead you say exactly what you want the final pixels on the screen to be.

I���m not saying that declarative tools���like Utopia���are right and that imperative tools���like Tailwind���are wrong. As always, it depends. In this case, it depends on the mindset you have.

If you agree with this statement, you should probably use an imperative design tool:

CSS is broken and I want my tools to work around the way CSS has been designed.

But if you agree with this statement, you should probably use a declarative design tool:

CSS is awesome and I want my tools to amplify the way that CSS had been designed.

If you agree with the first statement but you then try using a declarative tool like Utopia or Every Layout, you will probably have a bad time. You���ll probably hate it. You may declare the tool to be ���bad���.

Likewise if you agree with the second statement but you then try using an imperative tool like Tailwind, you will probably have a bad time. You���ll probably hate it. You may declare the tool to be ���bad���.

It all depends on whether the philosophy behind the tool matches your own philosophy. If those philosophies match up, then using the tool will be productive and that tool will act as an amplifier���a bicycle for the mind. But if the philosophy of the tool doesn���t match your own philosophy, then you will be fighting the tool at every step���it will slow you down.

Knowing that this spectrum exists between declarative tools and imperative tools can help you when you���re evaluating technology. You can assess whether a web design tool is being marketed on the premise that CSS is broken or on the premise that CSS is awesome.

I wonder whether your path into web design and development might also factor into which end of the spectrum you���d identify with. Like, if your background is in declarative languages like HTML and CSS, maybe intrisic web design really resonates. But if your background is in imperative languages like JavaScript, perhaps Tailwind makes more sense to you.

Again, there���s no right or wrong here. This is about matching the right tool to the right mindset.

Personally, the declarative design approach fits me like a glove. It feels like it���s in the tradition of John���s A Dao Of Web Design or Ethan���s Responsive Web Design���ways of working with the grain of the web.

69420

This is going to make me sound like an old man in his rocking chair on the front porch, but let me tell you about the early days of Twitter…

The first time I mentioned Twitter on here was back in November 2006:

I���ve been playing around with Twitter, a neat little service from the people who brought you Odeo. You send it little text updates via SMS, the website, or Jabber.

A few weeks later, I wrote about some of its emergent properties:

Overall, Twitter is full of trivial little messages that sometimes merge into a coherent conversation before disintegrating again. I like it. Instant messaging is too intrusive. Email takes too much effort. Twittering feels just right for the little things: where I am, what I���m doing, what I���m thinking.

That���s right; back then we didn���t have the verb ���tweeting��� yet.

In those early days, some of the now-ubiquitous interactions had yet to emerge. Chris hadn���t yet proposed hashtags. And if you wanted to address a message to a specific person���or reply to a tweet of theirs���the @ symbol hadn���t been repurposed for that. There were still few enough people on Twitter that you could just address someone by name and they���d probably see your message.

That���s what I was doing when I posted:

It takes years off you, Simon.

I���m assuming Simon Willison got a haircut or something.

In any case, it���s an innocuous and fairly pointless tweet. And yet, in the intervening years, that tweet has received many replies. Weirdly, most of the replies consisted of one word:

nice

Very puzzling.

Then a little while back, I realised what was happening. This is the URL for my tweet:

twitter.com/adactio/status/69420

69420.

69.

420.

Pesky kids with their stoner sexual-innuendo numerology!

Starting and finishing

Someone was asking recently about advice for public speaking. This was specifically for in-person events now that we���re returning to actual live conferences.

Everyone���s speaking style is different so there���s no universal advice. That said, just about everyone recommends practicing. Practice your talk. Then practice it again and again.

That���s good advice but it���s also quite time-consuming. Something I���ve recommended in the past is to really concentrate on the start and the end of the talk.

You should be able to deliver the first five minutes of your talk in your sleep. If something is going to throw you, it���s likely to happen at the beginning of your talk. Whether it���s a technical hitch or just the weirdness and nerves of standing on stage, you want to be able to cruise through that part of the talk on auto-pilot. After five minutes or so, your nerves will have calmed and any audio or visual oddities should be sorted.

Likewise you want to really nail the last few minutes of your talk. Have a good strong ending that you can deliver convincingly.

Make it very clear when you���re done���usually through a decisive ���thank you!������to let the audience know that they may now burst into rapturous applause. Beware the false ending. ���Thank you …and this is my Twitter handle. I always like hearing from people. So. Yeah.��� Remember, the audience is on your side and they want to show their appreciation for your talk but you have to let them know without any doubt when the talk is done.

At band practice we sometimes joke ���Hey, as long as we all start together and finish together, that���s what matters.��� It���s funny because there���s a kernel of truth to it. If you start a song with a great intro and you finish the song with a tight rock���n���roll ending, nobody���s going to remember if somebody flubbed a note halfway through.

So, yes, practice your talk. But really practice the start and the end of your talk.

UX London speaker updates

If you���ve signed up to the UX London newsletter then this won���t be news to you, but more speakers have been added to the line-up.

Steph Troeth will be giving a workshop on day one. That���s the day with a strong focus on research, and when it comes to design research, Steph is unbeatable. You can hear some of her words of wisdom in an episode of the Clearleft podcast all about design research.

Heldiney Pereira will be speaking on day two. That���s the day with a focus on content design. Heldiney previously spoke at our Content By Design event and it was terrific���his perspective on content design as a product designer is invaluable.

Lauren Pope will also be on day two. She���ll be giving a workshop. She recently launched a really useful content audit toolkit and she���ll be bringing that expertise to her UX London workshop.

Day three is going to have a focus on design systems (and associated disciplines like design engineering and design ops). Both Laura Yarrow and Inayaili Le��n will be giving talks on that day. You can expect some exciting war stories from the design system trenches of HM Land Registry and GitHub.

I���ve got some more speakers confirmed but I���m going to be a tease and make you wait a little longer for those names. But check out the line-up so far! This going to be such an excellent event (I know I���m biased, but really, look at that line-up!).

June 28th to 30th. Tobacco Dock, London. Get your ticket if you haven���t already.

Eventing

In person events are like buses. You go two years without one and then three come along at once.

My buffer is overflowing from experiencing three back-to-back events. Best of all, my participation was different each time.

First of all, there was Leading Design New York, where I was the host. The event was superb, although it���s a bit of a shame I didn���t have any time to properly experience Manhattan. I wasn���t able to do any touristy things or meet up with my friends who live in the city. Still the trip was well worth it.

Right after I got back from New York, I took the train to Edinburgh for the Design It Build It conference where I was a speaker. It was a good event. I particularly enjoyed Rafaela Ferro talk on accessibility. The last time I spoke at DIBI was 2011(!) so it was great to make a return visit. I liked that the audience was seated cabaret style. That felt safer than classroom-style seating, allowing more space between people. At the same time, it felt more social, encouraging more interaction between attendees. I met some really interesting people.

I got from Edinburgh just in time for UX Camp Brighton on the weekend, where I was an attendee. I felt like a bit of a moocher not giving a presentation, but I really, really enjoyed every session I attended. It���s been a long time since I���ve been at a Barcamp-style event���probably the last Indie Web Camp I attended, whenever that was. I���d forgotten how well the format works.

But even with all these in-person events, online events aren���t going anywhere anytime soon. Yesterday I started hosting the online portion of Leading Design New York and I���ll be doing it again today. The post-talk discussions with Julia and Lisa are lots of fun!

So in the space of just of a couple of weeks I���ve been a host, a speaker, and an attendee. Now it���s time for me to get my head back into one other event role: conference curator. No more buses/events are on the way for the next while, so I���m going to be fully devoted to organising the line-up for UX London 2022. Exciting!

Hosting Leading Design New York

I went to New York to host the Leading Design conference. It was weird and wonderful.

Weird, because it felt strange and surreal to be back in a physical space with other people all sharing the same experience.

Wonderful, for exactly the same reasons.

This was a good way to ease back into live events. It wasn���t a huge conference. Just over a hundred people. So it felt intimate, while still allowing people to quite literally have space to themselves.

I can���t tell you much about the post-talk interviews I conducted with the speakers. That���s because what happens at Leading Design stays at Leading Design, at least when it comes to the discussions after the talks. We made it clear that Leading Design was a safe place for everyone to share their stories, even if���especially if���those were stories you wouldn���t want to share publicly or at work.

I was bowled over by how generous and open and honest all the speakers were. Sure, there were valuable lessons about management and leadership, but there were also lots of very personal stories and insights. Time and time again I found myself genuinely moved by the vulnerability that the speakers displayed.

Leadership can be lonely. Sometimes very lonely. I got the impression that everyone���speakers and attendees alike���really, really appreciated having a non-digital space where they could come together and bond over shared travails. I know it���s a clich�� to talk about ���connecting��� with others, but at this event it felt true.

The talks themselves were really good too. I loved seeing how themes emerged and wove themselves throughout the two days. Rebecca did a fantastic job of curating the line-up. I���ve been to a lot of events over the years and I���ve seen conference curation of varying degrees of thoughtfulness. Leading Design New York 2022 is right up there with the best of them. It was an honour to play the part of the host (though I felt very guilty when people congratulated me on such a great event������Don���t thank me���, I said, ���Thank Rebecca���I���m just the public face of the event; she did all the work!���)

My hosting duties aren���t over. This week we���ve got the virtual portion of Leading Design New York. There���ll be two days of revisiting some of the conference talks, and one day of workshops.

For the two days of talks, I���m going to be joined by two brilliant panelists for post-talk discussions���Julia Whitney and Lisa Welchman. This should be fun!

Best of all, for this portion of the event I don���t need to get into an airplane and cross the Atlantic.

That said, the journey was totally worth it for Leading Design New York. Also, by pure coincidence, the event coincided with St. Patrick���s Day. For the first time in two years, New York hosted its legendary parade and it was just a block or two away from the conference venue.

I nipped out during the lunch break to cheer on the marching bands. Every county was represented. When the representatives from county Cork went by, there���d be shouts of ���Up Cork!��� When the county Donegal delegation went by, it was ���Up Donegal!���

It���s just a shame I couldn���t stick around for the representatives from county Down.

Going to New York

I���m flying to New York on Monday. That still sounds a little surreal to me, but it���s happening.

I���ll be hosting Leading Design New York. Even a month ago it wasn���t clear if the in-person event would even be going ahead. But there was a go/no-go decision and it was ���go!��� Now, as New York relaxes its mandates, it���s looking more and more like the right decision. It���s still probably going to feel a bit weird to be gathering together with other people …but it���s also going to feel long overdue.

Rebecca has put together a fantastic line-up of super-smart design leaders. My job will be to introduce them before they speak and then interview them afterwards, also handling questions from the audience.

I���m a little nervous just because I want to do a really good job. But I���ve been doing my homework. And given how well the hosting went for UX Fest, I���m probably being uneccesarily worried. I need to keep reminding myself to enjoy it. It���s a real privilege that I get to spend two days in the company of such erudite generous people. I should make the most of it.

If you���re going to be at Leading Design New York, I very much look forward to seeing you there.

If you���re not coming to Leading Design but you���re in the neighbourhood, let me know if you���ve got any plans for St. Patrick���s Day. I���ve already got my green paisley shirt picked out for my on-stage duties that day.

When should there be a declarative version of a JavaScript API?

I feel like it���s high time I revived some interest in my proposal for button type="share". Last I left it, I was gathering use cases and they seem to suggest that the most common use case for the Web Share API is sharing the URL of the current page.

If you want to catch up on the history of this proposal, here���s what I���ve previously written:

A declarative Web Share APIA polyfill for button type=”share”The reason for a share button type

Remember, my proposal isn���t to replace the JavaScript API, it���s to complement it with a declarative option. The declarative option doesn���t need to be as fully featured as the JavaScript API, but it should be able to cover the majority use case. I think this should hold true of most APIs.

A good example is the Constraint Validation API. For the most common use cases, the required attribute and input types like ���email���, ���url���, and ���number��� have you covered. If you need more power, reach for the JavaScript API.

A bad example is the Geolocation API. The most common use case is getting the user���s current location. But there���s no input type="geolocation" (or button type="geolocation"). Your only choice is to use JavaScript. It feels heavy-handed.

I recently got an email from Taylor Hunt who has come up with a good litmus test for JavaScript APIs that should have a complementary declarative option:

I���ve been thinking about how a lot of recently-proposed APIs end up having to deal with what Chrome devrel���s been calling the ���user gesture/activation budget���, and wondering if that���s a good indicator of when something should have been HTML in the first place.

I think he���s onto something here!

Think about any API that requires a user gesture. Often the documentation or demo literally shows you how to generate a button in JavaScript in order to add an event handler to it in order to use the API. Surely that���s an indication that a new button type could be minted?

The Web Share API is a classic example. You can���t invoke the API after an event like the page loading. You have to invoke the API after a user-initiated event like, oh, I don���t know …clicking on a button!

The Fullscreen API has the same restriction. You can���t make the browser go fullscreen unless you���re responding to user gesture, like a click. So why not have button type="fullscreen" in HTML to encapsulate that? And again, the fallback in non-supporting browsers is predictable���it behaves like a regular button���so this is trivial to polyfill. I should probably whip up a polyfill to demonstrate this.

I can���t find a list of all the JavaScript APIs that require a user gesture, but I know there���s more that I���m just not thinking of. I���d love to see if they���d all fit this pattern of being candidates for a new button type value.

The only potential flaw in this thinking is that some APIs that require a user gesture might also require a secure context (either being served over HTTPS or localhost). But as far as I know, HTML has never had the concept of features being restricted by context. An element is either supported or it isn���t.

That said, there is some prior art here. If you use input type="password" in a non-secure context���like a page being served over HTTP���the browser updates the interface to provide scary warnings. Perhaps browsers could do something similar for any new button types that complement secure-context JavaScript APIs.