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Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.

To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.

Read more [thestyleofelements.org]

In an older, but still relevant, post on Medium John Saito demonstrates the effect of different capitalizations.

Can you spot the differences with the messages above? The left side has a few more capital letters than the right side. Big O, little o. Who cares, right?

Well, if you write for an app or website, you should care. A little thing like capitalization can actually be a big deal. Capitalization affects readability, comprehension, and usability. It even impacts how people view your brand.

We’ll get to the juicy stuff in a bit, but first, let’s start with a little more background about capitalization.

https://medium.com/@jsaito/making-a-case-for-letter-case-19d09f653c98

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Adam Silver lists a bunch of problems you need to solve if you opt to build a single page application.

Ironically, SPAs are harder to design and harder to build. And yet, they typically produce slow, disagreeable experiences for users. ... Javascript is never going to beat the browser at what it does best—browsing. We can still give users rich and enhanced experiences without cramming an entire site into one document.

We should let the browser manage the browsing experience, and spend our time solving real user problems.

https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/

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Wes Bos shares a quick tip to make phone numbers on websites tappable.

I’m talking about when phone numbers on a website aren’t tapable. Often the HTML is so that mobile operating systems cannot select the phone number alone and you are forced to remember/recite or write down the actual number.

So, when you put a phone number on a website, don’t just use any old element, use a link with the tel protocol.

http://wesbos.com/lets-talk-about-phone-numbers-on-mobile-sites/

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In the beginning of the year Wouter de Bres wrote this fantastic article on digital product design principles.

I wrote down twelve design principles for our team at Degreed to help us make design decisions. I tried to make them practical and clear and hopefully they are useful for anyone who is working on digital products.

https://medium.com/@WdeB/digital-product-design-principles-8bc9eb6c080c

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Broken images are ugly. But they don’t always have to be. We can use CSS to apply styles to the element to provide a better experience than the default.

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... information architecture is the creation of a structure for a website, application, or other project, that allows us to understand where we are as users, and where the information we want is in relation to our position. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata.

Information architecture is a task often shared by designers, developers, and content strategists. But regardless of who takes on the task, IA is a field of its own, with influences, tools, and resources that are worth investigation. In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture really is, and why it’s a valuable aspect of the user experience process.

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"Password must contain 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, and 1 number."

With a rule like that, the password Abcd1234 would pass your validation, but mu-icac-of-jaz-doad would not.

Ryan makes an excellent suggestion to replace password rules by an entropy estimator like Zxcvbn.

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