I am very excited to announce that I’m writing a book on responsive web design. It’s going to be published by O’Reilly in mid-2013.

Responsive design is still relatively new, and it’s something we all need to be talking about. There are a few books out so far, including Ethan Marcotte’s seminal Responsive Web Design, but all those books are targeted towards developers and designers who are already very familiar with HTML and CSS.

But the process of making or maintaining a website involves many other roles: UX designers, content strategists, web managers, etc. Unfortunately there are not a lot of resources yet for all these other people who are involved in creating responsive sites, and who need information that is a bit less… daunting. Read more ›

One of the difficult things about designing websites is that we often don’t know how users are using our websites.

Our analytics can tell us what path someone took through the site, but not why they made choices about which links to click or what actions to take. Usability testing can give us more of the “why,” but we often don’t have resources to do much testing, or even any at all.

Analytics can also tell us what the user’s device is like — the size of the screen, the operating system — but we have no idea what’s happening beyond the screen, while users are experiencing the website. Is that 1280 pixel monitor sitting in an office cubicle in a noisy room, or on someone’s desk at home? Is the user pulling out her mobile phone as she’s walking down the street, late for a meeting? Or is she sitting on her sofa at home, comfortable, not in a hurry, and wanting to experience the entire web on that tiny screen? Read more ›

This is a summary of my session on HTML5 accessibility at Accessibility Camp Toronto (I didn’t use slides for my talk, so you’re getting this instead).

Accessibility is not a niche area of web design: everybody who works on the web needs to be interested in accessibility. You should try to make your websites as accessible as possible. For some of you it’s a legal obligation, but for everyone else it’s just the right thing to do.

What Is Accessibility

Accessibility for the web means making sure that our web pages and applications are available to everyone, including people with disabilities. Many but not all users with disabilities use assistive devices or software to browse the web. This includes on mobile devices as well as regular desktop computers.

Read more ›

There’s still time to register for User Focus, the annual conference of the DC chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). User Focus is scheduled for this Friday, October 19, in Chevy Chase, Maryland (suburb of Washington, DC).

This will be my first time as a presenter at User Focus, and I’ll be doing a session on responsive design & UX:

Optimizing User Experience Across Devices With Responsive Web Design
With the extremely fast rise in the use of mobile devices in recent years, companies are starting to realize that ignoring mobile web users is no longer an option. Many have chosen to provide a stripped-down version of their desktop site to mobile users, on the assumption that mobile users only want or need to use a small subset of the features available to desktop users. But as more and more people are turning to mobile as their primary or only means of accessing the internet, it’s becoming clear that mobile users’ needs aren’t so straightforward. At the same time, attempts to create a simplified version of a website for mobile users often make it clear that the full website is too complicated, cluttered, and difficult to navigate. But there is a solution. By designing from a mobile-first perspective, and using responsive web design to create a site that responds to the device on which it’s being viewed, you can provide all users with a quality experience across screen sizes and devices, without having to create and maintain separate websites.

There are tons of other great sessions scheduled for User Focus, including three others on responsive design. (And very cleverly all four are in the same room one after another, so you don’t even have to get out of your chair if you want an afternoon full of responsive design.)

If you want to attend, you should go register for User Focus right this minute so you don’t miss out on what is undoubtedly going to be the most awesome conference of the year.