If you trick your customers into giving up their personal information, you risk losing them altogether — I’m seeing what seems to be a new deceptive design pattern deployed more often lately, which it focuses on offering potential new customers discounts when they arrive at a site. The Pattern Here’s how it works: Step 1 (Bait) — Present a popup which looks like it’s saying something like…

A case study of how Twitter’s proposed API changes will further undermine accessibility for its users — Some time ago, Portland-based developer Hannah Kolbeck noticed a gap in the accessibility of images posted to Twitter. Specifically, when users posted images without alt-text in them, people using screen readers to review tweets couldn’t review the content of those images. As a result, she created a remarkably helpful bot…

Contrary to what many believe, we don’t have enough immigrants coming into the country — Listening to the popular media lately, you might conclude that we have an enormous and unprecedented migration crisis at our borders. It’s true, we have regular waves of migrants approaching our border, which include migrant caravans and asylum seekers. But these dynamics have evolved over the decades since the United…

A coming change to LinkedIn exemplifies how social platforms often ignore the need for privacy as a default — Last week I received a one-off email from LinkedIn, the subject line of which read: “Updates that help you discover more newsletters.” That sounds helpful, doesn’t it? It’s not unusual for a platform like LinkedIn to send you an email announcing new features, of course, but I don’t think that’s…

How Crosby’s life-saving liver transplant kept him with us for another 3 decades — When David Crosby died earlier this week, I remembered the time I briefly met him in a previous life and career, along with my colleagues from the South Carolina Organ Procurement Agency (aka SCOPA, now We Are Sharing Hope SC). Crosby was on tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash in…

Social media platforms are leaning into deceptive design patterns to capture your attention but they’re just contributing to our growing “notification anxiety” — They’re on the rise. They strike at you from a new angle every day now. Enticing you. Striving to pull you onto platforms you’re now trying to avoid. You’ve turned off so many notifications, but they just keep coming. Let’s call them “desperation notifications.”

An overview of the new social media platform and Twitter competitor Post — I joined the new social media platform Post last night after signing up early for the beta and I have some thoughts. First off, it’s really good. Especially from both a UI and UX perspective. Post proves a refreshingly clean substitute for Twitter. So far, it features 1000% fewer trolls…

The chaotic rollout of Twitter’s new verification program proves a stunning example of bad UX design — After pausing the release to avoid disrupting the U.S. …

Within Two Days of Taking Over Twitter, Elon Musk Tweeted Political Disinformation or “Pink Slime” — “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes” — often attributed to Mark Twain This Sunday morning, within two days of taking over Twitter, Elon Musk himself posted the sort of disinformation people feared had become characteristic of the platform — for tens…