Author Archives: samanthaalandes

To clarify, gender identity is the person’s sense of self: do they percieve themselves as male or female? Sex is the gender you were assigned at birth. To say gender identity and sex is the same thing is erasing many people. Not the majority of people, but a significant amount of people who deserve toContinue reading “Accessibility and Gender Identity”

Neumorphism is a new design trend that is basically “no harsh edges, only shadows”. It looks gorgeous (see below). However, this isn’t accessible! It is bad for visually impaired people because it is hard to see where buttons begin and end. Many people think it’s gorgeous – but what about the people who can’t see?Continue reading “Accessibility and Neumorphism”

The article I read this week covers accessibility on the web – it can be found here . This is something that people have written about many times and this article doesn’t cover anything new or interesting. It’s a good recap of things everyone else has already said but it doesn’t say anything different. That’sContinue reading “Good Advice, Bad Site”

From an article titled, “Designers should avoid pure black typography — but which dark gray should we use?” I expected that the article would talk a lot about grays, but that was not my experience. The first three paragraphs spoke about a company and how excited the author was to design for this company. IContinue reading “Information vs Advertisement”

You wouldn’t necessarily choose to say that UX Design and boardgames have much in common. Maybe you might stereotype boardgame players and UX designers in very similar ways… but not much beyond that. One thing connected these two things is Hick’s Law. As described in this article, Hick’s Law states that the more decisions thereContinue reading “UX Design and Boardgames”

This article gives 5 tips – some of them I agree with and some I heavily disagree with. I agree with four tips: using action verbs, using precise diction, using the action imperative form, and using sentence-style capitalization. All of the tips and reasonings make a lot of sense. I wholeheartedly agree with them. EspeciallyContinue reading “Designing Good Buttons”

There are so many articles on whitespace. It’s a very common term and I’d be hardpressed to find a person that doesn’t have an idea of what it is. The concept of “use whitespace” isn’t revolutionary. There are so many articles detailing what whitespace is but not really explaining how to use it beyond “yes,Continue reading “White Space”

When Virgin Airlines made their assistive site in 2015, it gathered a lot of flack. It was ugly – but worse, it was useless. Karl Groves, a self-proclaimed accessibility expert, discussed his thoughts on the topic. First, Karl Groves goes into the topic “What is accessibility?”. To him, accessibility means that people with disabilities canContinue reading “Virgin Airline’s Biggest Mistake”

There is no understating the importance of error messages – they will, one day, be encountered. It is impossible to create an entirely perfect product and it is important to have a good backup if something happens. This story gives six tips (with examples on designing perfect error messages). https://bit.ly/2vi5cZo One thing that I noticedContinue reading “Writing and Desinging User-Friendly Error Messages”

I always thought VR was extremely interesting. There are many programs that are touted as “empathy builders” – things where able-bodied and able-minded people are able to experience what it might not be like to have it. Yet, there is a severe lack of content for those who are unable or struggle to use VR.Continue reading “Accessibility and VR”