Cookies, lock-ins, and HTML to avoid

Morning! Welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Roundup.

This week, my eldest dog Holly helped me out with a little video for our newspaper. She really is that smart, though she got a lot of treats that morning.

The first copies were sent out this week, and you can get your copy here. It’s worth it, honest.

Cheers.

Tom HaczewskiDirector, The User Story

News

Cookie notices done well as well as possible

I hate cookie notices. I wrote many years ago, in fact, about how stupid the law was when the EU decided to implement the directive and all that followed, and it has, as predicted, ruined the internet.

Not only has it disrupted people’s experiences across most of the websites and apps they use every day - not just on the internet, but on pretty much every mobile phone app, games console, and even smart TVs too - but it’s not actually helped to solve the problem that it set out to solve.

People are no more informed about the information that’s being shared with websites than they used to be, and end up hitting ‘allow all’ in the vast majority of cases.

A number of deceptive patterns have also shown up to grab people’s data anyway, so if anything, things are now worse than they were before the directive.

Anyway, depending on how closely you want to follow the rules, there are some nice ideas and best-practices here.

How lock-in hurts design

The inimitable Cory Doctorow explores the newer convention of corporations attempting to control users through various lock-ins, from installed apps (nothing but web browsers in a proprietary advertising-friendly wrapper) to removing the right-to-customise-or-repair, which is fundamentally harming our innovation and diminishing good listening-and-learning practices.

He also argues that the use of session recording - HotJar, PostHog and many others like it - are worlds apart from co-innovation and are more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

It’s an interesting view if a little cynical, and I agree to a certain extent. After all, we have worked with a great many businesses whose entire objective is to extract value from customers to move it to shareholders. But the optimistic part of me still believes that there are organisations that do this to genuinely improve experiences for users, in order to solve their problems, and that profits as a result are a pleasant side effect (and those businesses that do accomplish this are the ones that will garner the most trust, and the most longevity - one hopes).

Give it a read here, and I’d love to know what you think.

Not all HTML is good for you

Great link here that serves as a nice reminder that not all HTML is actually useful, and there’s a lot of bloat and genuinely harmful markup that you can use on a site in the name of trying to use the correct syntax.

One hill I will choose to die on is the use of the placeholder within fields. It usually fails visual accessibility guidelines, gives users the wrong impression that a field is already filled, and isn’t useful as soon as a user starts typing. It’s also terrible for nonsighted users. Anyone that has studies usability will tell you that placeholders need to die in a fire. And yet, they persist - along with utterly terrible field labels inside fields.

That’s not the only one, though - HTMHell lists some of the worst, most dangerous markup and patterns you could use. Avoid like the plague.

Get informed today!

What we’re up to.

🖥️ Usability testing for agencies webinar6 Feb, 4pmUsability testing is awesome for everyone, but especially agencies. If you’ve never done it before, come and see why selling this service to your clients could be the best thing you ever did.Sign up here

🖥️ Usability testing for agencies webinar13 Feb, 4pmLots of people do workshops in lots of different ways. But really, when you boil them all down, you basically only need these four different workshops to do anything you need to do at work. Sign up here

Thanks for reading.

You look nice today.

As you’re here to the end, here’s my thought for the week to leave you on:

See you next time, friends!

Brought to you by Tom Haczewski, director of The User Story. We’re a product strategy, research and UX agency based in Norwich, working with SaaS teams and startups.