Firefox Zero-Day Exploit Reveals Tor Users' Identity

The vulnerability is being used to reveal the identity of Tor users'.

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This week's sponsor: O’REILLY DESIGN CONFERENCE

O’REILLY DESIGN CONFERENCE - get the skills and insights you need to design the products of the future. Save 20% with code ALIST

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Amazon Deletes 500,000 "Incentivized" Reviews

In a little over a month the company has made good and is doing more than prohibiting, it's deleting "incentivized" reviews.

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E.U. Proposals For Ecommerce Payments Will Require Extra Security Checks

The European Union's "Payment Services Directive 2" proposal includes making consumers go through additional security measures.

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Alexa Retires Top 1 Million Sites List

Alexa quietly retired the top 1 million sites list.

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Google Extends Rich Cards to Include Local Restaurants and Online Courses

Google adds two new verticals to the Rich Cards.

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Insisting on Core Development Principles

The web community talks a lot about best practices in design and development: methodologies that are key to reaching and retaining users, considerate design habits, and areas that we as a community should focus on.

But let’s be honest—there are a lot of areas to focus on. We need to put users first, content first, and mobile first. We need to design for accessibility, performance, and empathy. We need to tune and test our work across many devices and browsers. Our content needs to grab user attention, speak inclusively, and employ appropriate keywords for SEO optimization. We should write semantic markup and comment our code for the developers who come after us.

Along with the web landscape, the expectations for our work have matured significantly over the last couple of decades. It’s a lot to keep track of, whether you’ve been working on the web for 20 years or only 20 months.

If those expectations feel daunting to those of us who live and breathe web development every day, imagine how foreign all of these concepts are for the clients who hire us to build a site or an app. They rely on us to be the experts who prioritize these best practices. But time and again, we fail our clients.

I’ve been working closely with development vendor partners and other industry professionals for a number of years. As I speak with development shops and ask about their code standards, workflows, and methods for maintaining consistency and best practices across distributed development teams, I’m continually astonished to hear that often, most of the best practices I listed in the first paragraph are not part of any development project unless the client specifically asks for them.

Think about that.

Development shops are relying on the communications team at a finance agency to know that they should request their code be optimized for performance or accessibility. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that shouldn’t be the client’s job. We’re the experts; we understand web strategy and best practices—and it’s time we act like it. It’s time for us to stop talking about each of these principles in a blue-sky way and start implementing them as our core practices. Every time. By default.

Whether you work in an internal dev shop or for outside clients, you likely have clients whose focus is on achieving business goals. Clients come to you, the technical expert, to help them achieve their business goals in the best possible way. They may know a bit of web jargon that they can use to get the conversation started, but often they will focus on the superficial elements of the project. Just about every client will worry more about their hero images and color palette than about any other piece of their project. That’s not going to change. That’s okay. It’s okay because they are not the web experts. That’s not their job. That’s your job.

If I want to build a house, I’m going to hire experts to design and build that house. I will have to rely on architects, builders, and contractors to know what material to use for the foundation, where to construct load-bearing walls, and where to put the plumbing and electricity. I don’t know the building codes and requirements to ensure that my house will withstand a storm. I don’t even know what questions I would need to ask to find out. I need to rely on experts to design and build a structure that won’t fall down—and then I’ll spend my time picking out paint colors and finding a rug to tie the room together.

This analogy applies perfectly to web professionals. When our clients hire us, they count on us to architect something stable that meets industry standards and best practices. Our business clients won’t know what questions to ask or how to look into the code to confirm that it adheres to best practices. It’s up to us as web professionals to uphold design and development principles that will have a strong impact on the final product, yet are invisible to our clients. It’s those elements that our clients expect us to prioritize, and they don’t even know it. Just as we rely on architects and builders to construct houses on a solid foundation with a firm structure, so should we design our sites on a solid foundation of code.

If our work doesn’t follow these principles by default, we fail our clients

So what do we prioritize, and how do we get there? If everything is critical, then nothing is. While our clients concentrate on colors and images (and, if we’re lucky, content), we need to concentrate on building a solid foundation that will deliver that content to end users beautifully, reliably, and efficiently. How should we go about developing that solid foundation? Our best bet is to prioritize a foundation of code that will help our message reach the broadest audience, across the majority of use cases. To get to the crux of a user-first development philosophy, we need to find the principles that have the most impact, but aren’t yet implicit in our process.

At a minimum, all code written for general audiences should be:

• responsive
• accessible
• performant

More specifically, it’s not enough to pay lip service to those catch phrases to present yourself as a “serious” dev shop and stop there. Our responsive designs shouldn’t simply adjust the flow and size of elements depending on device width—they also need to consider loading different image sizes and background variants based on device needs. Accessible coding standards should be based on the more recent WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) standards, with the understanding that coding for universal access benefits all users, not just a small percentage (coupled with the understanding that companies whose sites don’t meet those standards are being sued for noncompliance). Performance optimization should think about how image sizes, scripts, and caching can improve page-load speed and decrease the total file size downloaded in every interaction.

Do each of these take time? Sure they do. Development teams may even need additional training, and large teams will need to be prescriptive about how that can be integrated into established workflows. But the more these principles are built into the core functions of all of our products, the less time they will take, and the better all of our services will be.

How do we get there?

In the long run, we need to adjust our workflows so that both front-end and backend developers build these best practices into their default coding processes and methodologies. They should be part of our company cultures, our interview screenings, our value statements, our QA testing scripts, and our code validations. Just like no one would think of building a website layout using tables and 1px spacer images anymore (shout out to all the old-school webmasters out there), we should reach a point where it’s laughable to think of designing a fixed-width website, or creating an image upload prompt without an alt text field.

If you’re a freelance developer or a small agency, this change in philosophy or focus should be easier to achieve than if you are part of a larger agency. As with any time you and your team expand and mature your skillsets, you will want to evaluate how many extra hours you need to build into the initial learning curves of new practices. But again, each of these principles becomes faster and easier to achieve once they’re built into the workflow.

There is a wealth of books, blogs, checklists, and how-tos you can turn to for reference on designing responsively, making sites accessible, and tuning for performance. Existing responsive frameworks can act as a starting point for responsive development. After developing the overarching layout and flow, the main speed bumps for responsive content arise in the treatment of tables, images, and multimedia elements. You will need to plan to review and think through how your layouts will be presented at different breakpoints. A tool like embedresponsively.com can speed the process for external content embeds.

Many accessibility gaps can be filled by using semantic markup instead of making every element a div or a span. None of the accessible code requirements should be time hogs once a developer becomes familiar with them. The a11y Project’s Web Accessibility Checklist provides an easy way for front-end developers to review their overall code style and learn how to adjust it to be more accessible by default. In fact, writing truly semantic markup should speed CSS design time when it’s easier to target the elements you’re truly focused on.

The more you focus on meeting each of these principles in the early stages of new projects, the faster they will become your default way of developing, and the time spent on them will become a default part of the process.

Maintaining focus

It’s one thing to tell your team that you want all the code they develop to be responsive, accessible, and performant. It’s another thing entirely to make sure it gets there. Whether you’re a solo developer or manage a team of developers, you will need systems in place to maintain focus. Make sure your developers have the knowledge required to implement the code and techniques that address these needs, and supplement with training when they don’t.

Write value statements. Post lists. Ask at every stage what can be added to the process to make sure these core principles are considered. When you hire new talent, you can add questions into the interview process to make sure your new team members are already up to speed and have the same values and commitment to quality from day one.

Include checkpoints within each stage of the design and development process to ensure your work continues to build toward a fully responsive, accessible, and performant end product. For example, you can adjust the design process to start with mobile wireframes to change team mindsets away from designing for desktop and then trying to backfill mobile and tablet layouts. Another checkpoint should be added when determining color palettes to test foreground and background color sets for accessible color contrast. Add in a step to run image files through a compressor before uploading any graphic assets. Ask designers to use webfonts responsibly, not reflexively. Set a performance budget, and build in steps for performance checks along the way. Soon, your team will simply “know” which features or practices tend to be performance hogs and which are lean. You will need to make sure testing and code reviews look for these things, too.

Nothing worth doing happens by accident. Every time we overlook our responsibilities as designers and developers because it’s faster to cut corners, our products suffer and our industry as a whole suffers. As web professionals, how we work and what we prioritize when no one’s looking make a difference in thousands of little ways to thousands of people we will never meet. Remember that. Our clients and our users are counting on us.

 

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Facebook Winds Down Ad Serving on Atlas

Facebook's Atlas ad serving is to be wound down over the coming months.

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Australian AdSense Login Problem

AdSense log in problem for Australian publishers.

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The Coming Revolution in Email Design

Facebook to Fix Metrics Bugs in Insights

Facebook has said the Page Insights metrics had a bug in the system since May 2016.

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Microsoft Takes Platinum Membership at The Linux Foundation

Microsoft is joining The Linux Foundation with Platinum membership.

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Google Cloud Joins .NET Foundation

Google is joining the Technical Steering Group of the .NET Foundation.

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Google to Ban AdSense Publishers With Fake News Sites

The new policy will go into effect "imminently."

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Twitter Now Lets You "Mute" Keywords and Phrases

Twitter is rolling out a new addition which means you can now mute keywords and phrases, or conversations.

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WhatsApp Adds Video Calling

WhatsApp adds video calling and is rolling it out world-wide.

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New Form of AdSense Abuse and Spam Attack

WebmasterWorld Members discuss a new observation of sites appearing to use AdSense code resulting in skewing page view statistics.

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This week's sponsor: ADOBE XD

ADOBE XD BETA, the only all-in-one solution for designing, prototyping, and sharing experiences for websites and mobile apps.

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Best Practices for Indexable Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Comprehensive guide detailing both best practice and a series of do's and don'ts.

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Facebook Messenger 1.3 Now Allows Sponsored Messages

Sponsored messages coming to Facebook Messenger.

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Google Safe Browsing "Repeat Offenders" Locked Out For 30-Days

Repeat offenders of Google's safe browsing will be locked out from review for 30-days.

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Browser Plug-In Found Selling User Browsing Histories

The plug in has now been removed from the browsers.

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Google Announces Mobile-First Indexing Experiments

"To make our results more useful, we've begun experiments to make our index mobile-first."

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2016

WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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MySQL Exploit Gives Root Access to Server: Update Your Systems

Site administrators should apply patches immediately.

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Facebook Q3, 2016 Reports Revenue $7.01 Billion

Facebook says its monthly active users reaches 1.79 billion, which is a 16pct increase, year on year.

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Reviews of The Latest Google AdSense User Interface

WebmasterWorld Members review and discuss the most recent update to the Google AdSense user interface.

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Awaken the Champion A/B Tester Within

Let Emotion Be Your Guide

We were sitting in a market research room in the midst of a long day of customer interviews. Across from us, a young mother was telling us about her experience bringing her daughter into the ER during a severe asthma attack. We had been interviewing people about their healthcare journeys for a large hospital group, but we’d been running into a few problems.

First, the end-goal of the interviews was to develop a strategy for the hospital group’s website. But what we’d discovered, within the first morning of interviews aimed at creating a customer journey map, was that hospital websites were part of no one’s journey. This wasn’t wildly surprising to us—in fact it was part of the reason we’d recommended doing customer journey mapping in the first place. The hospital had a lot of disease content on their site, and we wanted to see whether people ever thought to access that content in the course of researching a condition. The answer had been a resounding no. Some people said things like, “Hmm, I’d never think to go to a hospital website. That’s an interesting idea.” Others didn’t even know that hospitals had websites. And even though we’d anticipated this response, the overwhelming consistency on this point was starting to freak out our client a little—in particular it started to freak out the person whose job it was to redesign the site.

The second issue was that our interviews were falling a little flat. People were answering our questions but there was no passion behind their responses, which made it difficult to determine where their interactions with the hospital fell short of expectations. Some of this was to be expected. Not every customer journey is a thrill ride, after all. Some people’s stories were about mundane conditions. I had this weird thing on my hand, and my wife was bugging me to get it checked out, so I did. The doctor gave me cream, and it went away, was one story. Another was from someone with strep throat. We didn’t expect much excitement from a story about strep throat, and we didn’t get it. But mixed in with the mundane experiences were people who had chronic conditions, or were caregivers for children, spouses, or parents with debilitating diseases, or people who had been diagnosed with cancer. And these people had been fairly flat as well.

We were struggling with two problems that we needed to solve simultaneously. First: what to do with the three remaining days of interviews we had lined up, when we’d already discovered on the morning of day one that no one went to hospital websites. And second: how to get information that our client could really use. We thought that if we could just dig a little deeper underneath people’s individual stories, we could produce something truly meaningful for not only our client, but the people sitting with us in the interview rooms.

We’d been following the standard protocol for journey mapping: prompting users to tell us about a specific healthcare experience they’d had recently, and then asking them at each step what they did, how they were feeling and what they were thinking. But the young mother telling us about her daughter’s chronic asthma made us change our approach.

“How were you feeling when you got to the ER?” we asked.

“I was terrified,” she said. “I thought my daughter was going to die.” And then, she began to cry. As user experience professionals we’re constantly reminding ourselves that we are not our users; but we are both parents and in that moment, we knew exactly what the woman in front of us meant. The entire chemistry of the room shifted. The interview subject in front of us was no longer an interview subject. She was a mother telling us about the worst day of her entire life. We all grabbed for the tissue box, and the three of us dabbed at our eyes together.

And from that point on, she didn’t just tell us her story as though we were three people sitting in front of a two-way mirror.  She told us her story the way she might tell her best friend.

We realized, in that interview, that this was not just another project. We’ve both had long careers in user research and user experience, but we’d never worked on a project that involved the worst day of people’s lives. There might be emotion involved in using a frustrating tool at work or shopping for the perfect gift, but nothing compares to the day you find yourself rushing to the emergency room with your child.

So we decided to throw out the focus on the hospital website, concentrate on where emotion was taking us, and trust that we would be able to reconcile our findings with our client’s needs. We, as human beings, wanted to hear other human beings tell us about the difficulties of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease. We wanted to know what it felt like to receive a cancer diagnosis after a long journey to many doctors across a spectrum of specialties. We wanted to understand what we could do, in any small way, to help make these Worst Days minutely less horrible, less terrifying, and less out-of-control. We knew that the client was behind the two-way mirror, concerned about the website navigation, but we also knew that we were going to get to someplace much more important and meaningful by following wherever these stories took us.

We also realized that not all customer journeys are equal. We still wanted to understand what people’s journeys with strep throat and weird hand rashes looked like, because those were important too. Those journeys told us about the routine issues that we all experience whenever we come into contact with the medical establishment—the frustration of waiting endlessly at urgent care, the annoyance of finding someone who can see you at a time when you can take off from work, the importance of a doctor who listens. But we also wanted to get to the impassioned stories where the stakes and emotions were much higher, so we adjusted our questioning style accordingly. We stuck to our standard protocol for the routine medical stories. And for the high-stakes journeys, the ones that could leave us near tears or taking deep breaths at the end of the interview, we proceeded more slowly. We gave our interview subjects room to pause, sigh, and cry. We let there be silence in the room. We tried to make it not feel weird for people to share their most painful moments with two strangers.

When we completed our interviews at the end of the week, we had an incredibly rich number of stories to draw from—so many, in fact, that we were able to craft a digital strategy that went far beyond what the hospital website would do. (Website? We kept saying to ourselves. Who cares about the website?) We realized that in many ways, we were limiting ourselves by thinking about a website strategy, or even a digital strategy. By connecting with the emotional content of the conversations, we started to think about a customer strategy—one that would be medium-agnostic.

In Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter encourages us to “think of our designs not as a façade for interaction, but as people with whom our audience can have an inspired conversation.” As we moved into making strategic recommendations, we thought a lot about how the hospital (like most hospitals) interacted with their patients as a bureaucratic, depersonalized entity. It was as though patients were spilling over with a hundred different needs, and the hospital group was simply silent. We also thought about what a helpful human would do at various stages of the journey, and found that there were multiple points where pushing information out to customers could make a world of difference.

We heard from people diagnosed with cancer who said, “After I heard the word ‘cancer’ I didn’t hear anything else, so then I went home and Googled it and completely panicked.” So we recommended that the day after someone gets a devastating diagnosis like that, there is a follow-up email with more information, reliable information resources, and videos of other people who experienced the same thing and what it was like for them.

We heard from people who spent the entire day waiting for their loved ones to get out of surgery, not knowing how much longer it would take, and worried that if they stepped out for a coffee, they would miss the crucial announcement over the loudspeaker. As a result, we proposed that relatives receive text message updates such as, “Your daughter is just starting her surgery. We expect that it will take about an hour and a half. We will text you again when she is moved to the recovery room.”

The stories were so strong that we believed they would help our client refocus their attention away from the website and toward the million other touchpoints and opportunities we saw to help make the worst day of people’s lives a little less horrible.

And for the most part, that is what happened. We picked a few journeys that we thought provided a window on the range of stories we’d been hearing. As we talked through some of the more heart-rending journeys there were audible gasps in the room: the story of a doctor who had refused to see a patient after she’d brought in her own research on her daughter’s condition; a woman with a worsening disease who had visited multiple doctors to try to get a diagnosis; a man who was caring for his mother-in-law, who was so debilitated by Alzheimer’s that she routinely tried to climb out the second floor bedroom window.

In Design for Real Life, Sarah Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer note that “the more users have opened up to you in the research phase” the more realistic your personas can be. More realistic personas, in turn, make it easier to imagine crisis points. And this was exactly what began to unfold as we shared our user journeys. As we told these stories, we felt a shift in the room. The clients started to share their own unforgettable healthcare experiences. One woman pulled out her phone and showed us pictures of her tiny premature infant, wearing her husband’s wedding ring around her wrist as she lay there in an incubator, surrounded by tubes and wires. When we took a break we overheard a number of people on the client side talking over the details of these stories and coming up with ideas for how they could help that went so beyond the hospital website it was hard to believe that had been our starting point. One person pointed out that a number of journeys started in Urgent Care and suggested that perhaps the company should look at expanding into urgent care facilities.

In the end, the research changed the company’s approach to the site.

“We talked about the stories throughout the course of the project,” one of our client contacts told me. “There was so much raw humanity to them.” A year after the project wrapped up (even though due to organizational changes at the hospital group our strategy recommendations have yet to be implemented), our client quickly rattled off the names of a few of our customer types. It is worth noting, too, that while our recommendations went much farther than the original scope of the project, the client appreciated being able to make informed strategic decisions about the path forward. Their immediate need was a revamped website, but once they understood that this need paled in comparison to all of the other places they could have an impact on their customers’ lives, they began talking excitedly about how to make this vision a reality down the road.

For us, this project changed the way we conceptualize projects, and illustrated that the framework of a website strategy or even “digital” strategy isn’t always meaningful. Because as the digital world increasingly melds with the IRL world, as customers spend their days shifting between websites, apps, texting, and face-to-face interactions, it becomes increasingly important for designers and researchers to drop the distinctions we’ve drawn around where an interaction happens, or where emotion spikes.

Before jumping in however, it is important to prep the team about how, and most importantly, why your interview questions probe into how customers are feeling. When you get into the interview room, coaxing out these emotional stories requires establishing emotional rapport quickly, and making it a safe place for participants to express themselves.

Being able to establish this rapport has changed our approach to other projects as well—we’ve seen that emotion can play into customer journeys in the unlikeliest of places. On a recent project for a client who sells enterprise software, we interviewed a customer who had recently gone through a system upgrade experience which affected tens of thousands of users. It did not go well and he was shaken by the experience. “The pressure on our team was incredible. I am never doing that ever again,” he said. Even for this highly technical product, fear, frustration, anger, and trust were significant elements of the customer journey. This is a journey where a customer has ten thousand people angry at him if the product he bought does not perform well, and he could even be out of a job if it gets bad enough. So while the enterprise software industry doesn’t exactly scream “worst day of my life” in the same way that hospitals do, emotion can run high there as well.

We sometimes forget that customers are human beings and human beings are driven by emotion, especially during critical life events. Prior to walking into the interview room we’d thought we might unearth some hidden problems around parking at the ER, navigating the hospital, and, of course, issues with the website content. But those issues were so eclipsed by all of the emotions surrounding a hospital visit that they came to seem irrelevant. Not being able to find parking at the ER is annoying, but more important was not knowing what you were supposed to do next because you’d just been told you have cancer, or because you feared for your child’s life. By digging deeper into this core insight, we were able to provide recommendations that went beyond websites, and instead took the entire human experience into account.

For researchers and designers tasked with improving experiences, it is essential to have an understanding of the customer journey in its full, messy, emotional agglomeration. Regardless of the touchpoint your customer is interacting with, the emotional ride is often what ties it all together, particularly in high-stakes subject matter. Are your client’s customers likely to be frustrated, or are they likely to be having the worst day of their lives? In the latter types of situations, recognize that you will get much more impactful insights when you address the emotions head-on.

And when appropriate, don’t be afraid to cry.

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Microsoft Flow - Create automated workflows between your favorite apps

Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based service that makes it simple to automate common tasks and business processes across your applications and services

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