Web browsers can generate unique sessions organized for each user on a website. Often these are handled on the backend using languages like PHP or Ruby, but we can also utilize cookie sessions on the frontend with Javascript. There are many tutorials out there explaining how to generate pure JS cookies. But a newer library […]

Mobile app interfaces have been utilizing on/off sliding switches for a while. These are most commonly found on the settings page where users can update preferences for their account. But web designers have taken notice and have built many open platforms to generate your own on/off switch sliders. In this tutorial I want to look […]

Signup forms are all too common when building new web applications or social networks. Traction from user signups can really boost your own self-confidence about a project when it comes to launching a new website. But what can you do to help improve the signup experience and hopefully gain more interested users? In this tutorial […]

Everyone loves a cool little loading animation, right? But if that divot lasts more than a second or two, it only brings attention to the fact that the website is loading slowly. And that’s a website killer. Users expect websites to load quickly and efficiently. It’s your job to ensure that the design is not […]

Take advantage of the new element and new features of in your next responsive website.

By the numbers, JavaScript is a performance liability. If the trend persists, the median page will be shipping at least 400 KB of it before too long, and that’s merely what’s transferred. Like other text-based resources, JavaScript is almost always served compressed—but that might be the only thing we’re getting consistently right in its delivery.

Unfortunately, while reducing resource transfer time is a big part of that whole performance thing, compression has no effect on how long browsers take to process a script once it arrives in its entirety. If a server sends 400 KB of compressed JavaScript, the actual amount browsers have to process after decompression is north of a megabyte. How well devices cope with these heavy workloads depends, well, on the device. Much has been written about how adept various devices are at processing lots of JavaScript, but the truth is, the amount of time it takes to process even a trivial amount of it varies greatly between devices.

Take, for example, this throwaway project of mine, which serves around 23 KB of uncompressed JavaScript. On a mid-2017 MacBook Pro, Chrome chews through this comparably tiny payload in about 25 ms. On a Nokia 2 Android phone, however, that figure balloons to around 190 ms. That’s not an insignificant amount of time, but in either case, the page gets interactive reasonably fast.

Now for the big question: how do you think that little Nokia 2 does on an average page? It chokes. Even on a fast connection, browsing the web on it is an exercise in patience as JavaScript-laden web pages brick it for considerable stretches of time.

While devices and the networks they navigate the web on are largely improving, we’re eating those gains as trends suggest. We need to use JavaScript responsibly. That begins with understanding what we’re building as well as how we’re building it.

The mindset of “sites” versus “apps”

Nomenclature can be strange in that we sometimes loosely identify things with terms that are inaccurate, yet their meanings are implicitly understood by everyone. Sometimes we overload the term “bee” to also mean “wasp”, even though the differences between bees and wasps are substantial. Those differences can motivate you to deal with each one differently. For instance, we’ll want to destroy a wasp nest, but because bees are highly beneficial and vulnerable insects, we may opt to relocate them.

We can be just as fast and loose in interchanging the terms “website” and “web app”. The differences between them are less clear than those between yellowjackets and honeybees, but conflating them can bring about painful outcomes. The pain comes in the affordances we allow ourselves when something is merely a “website” versus a fully-featured “web app.” If you’re making an informational website for a business, you’re less likely to lean on a powerful framework to manage changes in the DOM or implement client-side routing—at least, I hope. Using tools so ill-suited for the task would not only be a detriment to the people who use that site but arguably less productive.

When we build a web app, though, look out. We’re installing packages which usher in hundreds—if not thousands—of dependencies, some of which we’re not sure are even safe. We’re also writing complicated configurations for module bundlers. In this frenzied, yet ubiquitous, sort of dev environment, it takes knowledge and vigilance to ensure what gets built is fast and accessible. If you doubt this, run npm ls --prod in your project’s root directory and see if you recognize everything in that list. Even if you do, that doesn’t account for third party scripts—of which I’m sure your site has at least a few.

What we tend to forget is that the environment websites and web apps occupy is one and the same. Both are subject to the same environmental pressures that the large gradient of networks and devices impose. Those constraints don’t suddenly vanish when we decide to call what we build “apps”, nor do our users’ phones gain magical new powers when we do so.

It’s our responsibility to evaluate who uses what we make, and accept that the conditions under which they access the internet can be different than what we’ve assumed. We need to know the purpose we’re trying to serve, and only then can we build something that admirably serves that purpose—even if it isn’t exciting to build.

That means reassessing our reliance on JavaScript and how the use of it—particularly to the exclusion of HTML and CSS—can tempt us to adopt unsustainable patterns which harm performance and accessibility.

Don’t let frameworks force you into unsustainable patterns

I’ve been witness to some strange discoveries in codebases when working with teams that depend on frameworks to help them be highly productive. One characteristic common among many of them is that poor accessibility and performance patterns often result. Take the React component below, for example:

import React, { Component } from "react";
import { validateEmail } from "helpers/validation";

class SignupForm extends Component {
  constructor (props) {
    super(props);

    this.handleSubmit = this.handleSubmit.bind(this);
    this.updateEmail = this.updateEmail.bind(this);
    this.state.email = "";
  }

  updateEmail (event) {
    this.setState({
      email: event.target.value
    });
  }

  handleSubmit () {
    // If the email checks out, submit
    if (validateEmail(this.state.email)) {
      // ...
    }
  }

  render () {
    return (
      

        Enter your email:
        
        Sign Up
      
    );
  }
}

There are some notable accessibility issues here:

1. A form that doesn’t use a <form> element is not a form. Indeed, you could paper over this by specifying role="form" in the parent <div>, but if you’re building a form—and this sure looks like one—use a <form> element with the proper action and method attributes. The action attribute is crucial, as it ensures the form will still do something in the absence of JavaScript—provided the component is server-rendered, of course.
2. A <span> is not a substitute for a <label> element, which provides accessibility benefits <span>s don’t.
3. If we intend to do something on the client side prior to submitting a form, then we should move the action bound to the <button> element's onClick handler to the <form> element’s onSubmit handler.
4. Incidentally, why use JavaScript to validate an email address when HTML5 offers form validation controls in almost every browser back to IE 10? There’s an opportunity here to rely on the browser and use an appropriate input type, as well as the required attribute—but be aware that getting this to work right with screen readers takes a little know-how.
5. While not an accessibility issue, this component doesn't rely on any state or lifecycle methods, which means it can be refactored into a stateless functional component, which uses considerably less JavaScript than a full-fledged React component.

Knowing these things, we can refactor this component:

import React from "react";

const SignupForm = props => {
  const handleSubmit = event => {
    // Needed in case we're sending data to the server XHR-style
    // (but will still work if server-rendered with JS disabled).
    event.preventDefault();

    // Carry on...
  };
  
  return (
    <form method="POST" action="/signup" onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
      <label for="email" class="email-label">Enter your email:</label>
      <input type="email" id="email" required />
      <button>Sign Up</button>
    </form>
  );
};

Not only is this component now more accessible, but it also uses less JavaScript. In a world that’s drowning in JavaScript, deleting lines of it should feel downright therapeutic. The browser gives us so much for free, and we should try to take advantage of that as often as possible.

This is not to say that inaccessible patterns occur only when frameworks are used, but rather that a sole preference for JavaScript will eventually surface gaps in our understanding of HTML and CSS. These knowledge gaps will often result in mistakes we may not even be aware of. Frameworks can be useful tools that increase our productivity, but continuing education in core web technologies is essential to creating usable experiences, no matter what tools we choose to use.

Rely on the web platform and you’ll go far, fast

While we’re on the subject of frameworks, it must be said that the web platform is a formidable framework of its own. As the previous section showed, we’re better off when we can rely on established markup patterns and browser features. The alternative is to reinvent them, and invite all the pain such endeavors all but guarantee us, or worse: merely assume that the author of every JavaScript package we install has solved the problem comprehensively and thoughtfully.

SINGLE PAGE APPLICATIONS

One of the tradeoffs developers are quick to make is to adopt the single page application (SPA) model, even if it’s not a fit for the project. Yes, you do gain better perceived performance with the client-side routing of an SPA, but what do you lose? The browser’s own navigation functionality—albeit synchronous—provides a slew of benefits. For one, history is managed according to a complex specification. Users without JavaScript—be it by their own choice or not—won’t lose access altogether. For SPAs to remain available when JavaScript is not, server-side rendering suddenly becomes a thing you have to consider.

Accessibility is also harmed if a client-side router fails to let people know what content on the page has changed. This can leave those reliant on assistive technology to suss out what changes have occurred on the page, which can be an arduous task.

Then there’s our old nemesis: overhead. Some client-side routers are very small, but when you start with React, a compatible router, and possibly even a state management library, you’re accepting that there’s a certain amount of code you can never optimize away—approximately 135 KB in this case. Carefully consider what you’re building and whether a client side router is worth the tradeoffs you’ll inevitably make. Typically, you’re better off without one.

If you’re concerned about the perceived navigation performance, you could lean on rel=prefetch to speculatively fetch documents on the same origin. This has a dramatic effect on improving perceived loading performance of pages, as the document is immediately available in the cache. Because prefetches are done at a low priority, they’re also less likely to contend with critical resources for bandwidth.

The primary drawback with link prefetching is that you need to be aware that it can be potentially wasteful. Quicklink, a tiny link prefetching script from Google, mitigates this somewhat by checking if the current client is on a slow connection—or has data saver mode enabled—and avoids prefetching links on cross-origins by default.

Service workers are also hugely beneficial to perceived performance for returning users, whether we use client side routing or not—provided you know the ropes. When we precache routes with a service worker, we get many of the same benefits as link prefetching, but with a much greater degree of control over requests and responses. Whether you think of your site as an “app” or not, adding a service worker to it is perhaps one of the most responsible uses of JavaScript that exists today.

JAVASCRIPT ISN’T THE SOLUTION TO YOUR LAYOUT WOES

If we’re installing a package to solve a layout problem, proceed with caution and ask “what am I trying to accomplish?” CSS is designed to do this job, and requires no abstractions to use effectively. Most layout issues JavaScript packages attempt to solve, like box placement, alignment, and sizing, managing text overflow, and even entire layout systems, are solvable with CSS today. Modern layout engines like Flexbox and Grid are supported well enough that we shouldn’t need to start a project with any layout framework. CSS is the framework. When we have feature queries, progressively enhancing layouts to adopt new layout engines is suddenly not so hard.

/* Your mobile-first, non-CSS grid styles goes here */

/* The @supports rule below is ignored by browsers that don't
   support CSS grid, _or_ don't support @supports. */
@supports (display: grid) {
  /* Larger screen layout */
  @media (min-width: 40em) {
    /* Your progressively enhanced grid layout styles go here */
  }
}

Using JavaScript solutions for layout and presentations problems is not new. It was something we did when we lied to ourselves in 2009 that every website had to look in IE6 exactly as it did in the more capable browsers of that time. If we’re still developing websites to look the same in every browser in 2019, we should reassess our development goals. There will always be some browser we’ll have to support that can’t do everything those modern, evergreen browsers can. Total visual parity on all platforms is not only a pursuit made in vain, it’s the principal foe of progressive enhancement.

I’m not here to kill JavaScript

Make no mistake, I have no ill will toward JavaScript. It’s given me a career and—if I’m being honest with myself—a source of enjoyment for over a decade. Like any long-term relationship, I learn more about it the more time I spend with it. It’s a mature, feature-rich language that only gets more capable and elegant with every passing year.

Yet, there are times when I feel like JavaScript and I are at odds. I am critical of JavaScript. Or maybe more accurately, I’m critical of how we’ve developed a tendency to view it as a first resort to building for the web. As I pick apart yet another bundle not unlike a tangled ball of Christmas tree lights, it’s become clear that the web is drunk on JavaScript. We reach for it for almost everything, even when the occasion doesn’t call for it. Sometimes I wonder how vicious the hangover will be.

In a series of articles to follow, I’ll be giving more practical advice to follow to stem the encroaching tide of excessive JavaScript and how we can wrangle it so that what we build for the web is usable—or at least more so—for everyone everywhere. Some of the advice will be preventative. Some will be mitigating “hair of the dog” measures. In either case, the outcomes will hopefully be the same. I believe that we all love the web and want to do right by it, but I want us to think about how to make it more resilient and inclusive for all.

Accessibility can be tricky. There are plenty of conditions to take into consideration, and many technical limitations and weird exceptions that make it quite hard to master for most designers and developers.

I never considered myself an accessibility expert, but I took great pride in making my projects Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant…ish. They would pass most automated tests, show perfectly in the accessibility tree, and work quite well with keyboard navigation. I would even try (and fail) to use a screen reader every now and then.

But life would give me a lesson I would probably never learn otherwise: last October, my abled life took a drastic change—I started to feel extremely dizzy, with a constant sensation of falling or spinning to the right. I was suffering from a bad case of vertigo caused by labyrinthitis that made it impossible to get anything done.

Vertigo can have a wide range of causes, the most common being a viral infection or tiny calcium crystal free floating in the inner ear, which is pretty much our body’s accelerometer. Any disruption in there sends the brain confusing signals about the body’s position, which causes really heavy nausea, dizziness, and headaches. If you’ve ever felt seasick, it’s quite a similar vibe. If not, think about that feeling when you just get off a rollercoaster…it’s like that, only all day long.

For most people, vertigo is something they’ll suffer just once in a lifetime, and it normally goes away in a week or two. Incidence is really high, with some estimates claiming that up to 40% of the population suffers vertigo at least once in their lifetime. Some people live all their lives with it (or with similar symptoms caused by a range of diseases and syndromes grouped under the umbrella term of vestibular disorders), with 4% of US adults reporting chronic problems with balance, and an additional 1.1% reporting chronic dizziness, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

In my case, it was a little over a month. Here’s what I learned while going through it.

Slants can trigger vestibular symptoms

It all started as I was out for my daily jog. I felt slightly dizzy, then suddenly my vision got totally distorted. Everything appeared further away, like looking at a fun house’s distortion mirror. I stumbled back home and rested; at that moment I believed I might have over-exercised, and that hydration, food, and rest were all I needed. Time would prove me wrong.

What I later learned was that experiencing vertigo is a constant war between one of your inner ears telling the brain “everything is fine, we’re level and still” and the other ear shouting “oh my God, we’re falling, we’re falling!!!” Visual stimuli can act as an intermediary, supporting one ear’s message or the other’s. Vertigo can also work in the opposite way, with the dizziness interfering with your vision.

I quickly found that when symptoms peaked, staring at a distant object would ease the falling sensation somewhat.

In the same fashion, some visual stimuli would worsen it.

Vertical slants were a big offender in that sense. For instance, looking at a subtle vertical slant (the kind that you’d have to look at twice to make sure it’s not perfectly vertical) on a webpage would instantly trigger symptoms for me. Whether it was a page-long slant used to create some interest beside text or a tiny decoration to mark active tabs, looking at anything with slight slants would instantly send me into the rollercoaster.

Horizontal slants (whatever the degree) and harder vertical slants wouldn’t cause these issues.

My best guess is that slight vertical slants can look like forced perspective and therefore reinforce the falling-from-height sensation, so I would recommend avoiding vertical slants if you can, or make them super obvious. A slight slant looks like perspective, a harder one looks like a triangle.

Target size matters (even on mouse-assisted devices)

After a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, some tests to discard neurological conditions, and other treatments that proved ineffective, I was prescribed Cinnarizine.

Cinnarizine is a calcium channel blocker—to put it simply, it prevents the malfunctioning inner ear “accelerometer” from sending incorrect info to the brain. 
And it worked wonders. After ten days of being barely able to get out of bed, I was finally getting something closer to my normal life. I would still feel dizzy all the time, with some peaks throughout the day, but for the most part, it was much easier.

At this point, I was finally able to use the computer (but still unable to produce any code at all). To make the best of it, I set on a mission to self-experiment on accessibility for vestibular disorders. In testing, I found that one of the first things that struck me was that I would always miss targets (links and buttons).

I’m from the generation that grew up with desktop computers, so using a mouse is second nature. The pointer is pretty much an extension of my mind, as it is for many who use it regularly. But while Cinnarizine helped with the dizziness, it has a common side effect of negatively impacting coordination and fine motor skills (it is recommended not to drive or operate machinery while under treatment). It was not a surprise when I realized it would be much harder to get the pointer to do what I intended.

The common behavior would be: moving the pointer past the link I intended to click, clicking before reaching it at all, or having to try multiple times to click on smaller targets.

Success Criterion 2.5.5 Target Size (Level AAA) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s WCAG recommends bigger target sizes so users can activate them easily. The obvious reason for this is that it’s harder to pinpoint targets on smaller screens with coarser inputs (i.e., touchscreens of mobile devices). A fairly common practice for developers is to set bigger target sizes for smaller viewport widths (assuming that control challenges are only touch-related), while neglecting the issue on big screens expected to be used with mouse input. I know I’m guilty of that myself.

Instead of targeting this behavior for just smaller screen sizes, there are plenty of reasons to create larger target sizes on all devices: it will benefit users with limited vision (when text is scaled up accordingly and colors are of sufficient contrast), users with mobility impairments such as hand tremors, and of course, users with difficulty with fine motor skills.

Font size and spacing

Even while “enjoying” the ease of symptoms provided by the treatment, reading anything still proved to be a challenge for the following three weeks.

I was completely unable to use mobile devices while suffering vertigo due to the smaller font sizes and spacing, so I was forced to use my desktop computer for everything.

I can say I was experiencing something similar to users with mild forms of dyslexia or attention disorders: whenever I got to a website that didn’t follow good font styling, I would find myself reading the same line over and over again.

This proves once again that accessibility is intersectional: when we improve things for a particular purpose it usually benefits users with other challenges as well. I used to believe recommendations on font styles were mostly intended for the nearsighted and those who have dyslexia. Turns out they are also critical for those with vertigo, and even for those with some cognitive differences. At the end of the day, everybody benefits from better readability.

Some actions you can take to improve readability are:

• Keep line height to at least 1.5 times the font size (i.e., line-height: 1.5).
• Set the spacing between paragraphs to at least 2.0 times the font size. We can do this by adjusting the margins using relative units such as em.
• Letter spacing should be at least 0.12 times the font size. We can adjust this by using the letter-spacing CSS property, perhaps setting it in a relative unit.
• Make sure to have good contrast between text and its background.
• Keep font-weight at a reasonable level for the given font-family. Some fonts have thin strokes that make them harder to read. When using thinner fonts, try to improve contrast and font size accordingly, even more than what WCAG would suggest.
• Choose fonts that are easy to read. There has been a large and still inconclusive debate on which font styles are better for users, but one thing I can say for sure is that popular fonts (as in fonts that the user might be already familiar with) are generally the least challenging for users with reading issues.

WCAG recommendations on text are fairly clear and fortunately are the most commonly implemented of recommendations, but even they can still fall short sometimes. So, better to follow specific guides on accessible text and your best judgement. Passing automated tests does not guarantee actual accessibility.

Another issue on which my experience with vertigo proved to be similar to that of people with dyslexia and attention disorders was how hard it was for me to keep my attention in just one place. In that sense…

Animations are bad (and parallax is pure evil)

Val Head has already covered visually-triggered vestibular disorders in an outstanding article, so I would recommend giving it a good read if you haven’t already.

To summarize, animations can trigger nausea, dizziness, and headaches in some users, so we should use them purposely and responsibly.

While most animations did not trigger my symptoms, parallax scrolling did. I’d never been a fan of parallax to begin with, as I found it confusing. And when you’re experiencing vertigo, the issues introduced by parallax scrolling compound.

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Though normal animations did not trigger a reaction as severe, they still posed a big problem. The extreme, conscious, focused effort it took to read would make it such that anything moving on the screen would instantly break my focus, and force me to start the paragraph all over. And I mean anything.

I would constantly find myself reading a website only to have the typical collapsing navigation bar on scroll distract me just enough that I’d totally lose count of where I was at. Autoplaying carousels were so annoying I would delete them using dev tools as soon as they showed up. Background videos would make me get out of the website desperately.

Over time I started using mouse selection as a pointer; a visual indication of what I’d already read so I could get back to it whenever something distracted me. Then I tried custom stylesheets to disable transforms and animations whenever possible, but that also meant many websites having critical elements not appear at all, as they were implemented to start off-screen or otherwise invisible, and show up on scroll.

Of course, deleting stuff via dev tools or using custom stylesheets is not something we can expect 99.99% of our users to even know about.

So if anything, consider reducing animations to a minimum. Provide users with controls to turn off non-essential animations (WCAG 2.2.3 Animation from Interactions) and to pause, stop, or hide them (WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide). Implement animations and transitions in such a way that if the user disables them, critical elements still display.

And be extra careful with parallax: my recommendation is to, at the very least, try limiting its use to the header (“hero”) only, and be mindful of getting a smooth, realistic parallax experience. My vertigo self would have said, “just don’t freaking use parallax. Never. EVER.” But I guess that might be a hard idea to sell to stakeholders and designers.

Also consider learning how to use the prefers-reduced-motion feature query. This is a newer addition to the specs (it’s part of the Media Queries Level 5 module , which is at an early Editor’s Draft stage) that allows authors to apply selective styling depending on whether the user has requested the system to minimize the use of animations. OS and browser support for it is still quite limited, but the day will come when we will set any moving thing inside a query for when the user has no-preference, blocking animations from those who choose reduce.

After about a week of wrestling websites to provide a static experience, I remembered something that would prove to be my biggest ally while the vertigo lasted:

Reader mode

Some browsers include a “reader mode” that strips the content from any styling choices, isolates it from any distraction, and provides a perfect WCAG compliant layout for the text to maximize readability.

It is extremely helpful to provide a clear and consistent reading experience throughout multiple websites, especially for users with any kind of reading impairment.

I have to confess: before experiencing my vestibular disorder, I had never used Reader Mode (the formal name varies in browsers) or even checked if my projects were compatible with it. I didn’t even think it was such a useful feature, as a quick search for “reader mode” actually returned quite a few threads by users asking how to disable it or how to take the button for it out of Firefox’s address bar. (It seems some people are unwittingly activating it…perhaps the icon is not clear enough.)

Displaying the button to access Reader Mode is toggled by browser heuristics, which are based on the use (or not) of semantic tags in a page’s HTML. Unfortunately this meant not all websites provided such a “luxury.”

I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this in 2019…but please, please use semantic tags. Correct conversational semantics allow your website to be displayed in Reader Mode, and provide a better experience for users of screen readers. Again, accessibility is intersectional.

Reader Mode proved to be extremely useful while my vertigo lasted. But there was something even better:

Dark color schemes

By the fourth week, I started feeling mostly fine. I opened Visual Studio Code to try to get back to work. In doing so, it served me well to find one more revelation: a light-text-on-dark-background scheme was SO much easier for me to read. (Though I still was not able to return to work at this time.)

I was quite surprised, as I had always preferred light mode with dark-text-on-light-background for reading, and dark mode, with light-text-on-dark for coding. I didn’t know at the time that I was suffering from photophobia (which is a sensitivity to light), which was one of the reasons I found it hard to read on my desktop and to use my mobile device at all.

As far as I know, photophobia is not a common symptom of vestibular disorders, but there are many conditions that will trigger it, so it’s worth looking into for our projects’ accessibility.

CSS is also planning a media query to switch color schemes. Known as prefers-color-scheme, it allows applying styles based on the user’s stated preference for dark or light theming. It’s also part of the Media Queries Level 5 spec, and at the time of writing this article it’s only available in Safari Technology Preview, with Mozilla planning to ship it in the upcoming Firefox 67. Luckily there’s a PostCSS plugin that allows us to use it in most modern browsers by turning prefers-color-schemequeries into color-index queries, which have much better support.

If PostCSS is not your cup of tea, or for whatever reason you cannot use that approach to automate switching color schemes to a user’s preference, try at least to provide a theming option in your app’s configuration. Theming has become extremely simple since the release of CSS Custom Properties, so implementing this sort of switch is relatively easy and will greatly benefit anyone experiencing photophobia.

Moving on

After a month and some days, the vertigo disappeared completely, and I was able to return to work without needing any meds or further treatment. It should stay that way, as for most people it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

I went back to my abled life, but the experience changed my mindset for good.

As I said before, I always cared for making my projects compatible for people using keyboard navigation and screen readers. But I learned the hard way that there are plenty of “invisible conditions” that are just as important to take into consideration: vestibular disorders, cognitive differences, dyslexia, and color blindness, just to name a few. I was totally neglecting those most of the time, barely addressing the issues in order to pass automated tests, which means I was unintentionally annoying some users by making websites inaccessible to them.

After my experience with vertigo, I’ve turned to an accessibility-first approach to design and development. Now I ask myself, “am I leaving anyone behind with this decision?,” before dropping a single line of code. Accessibility should never be an afterthought.

Making sure my projects work from the start for those with difficulties also improves the experience for everyone else. Think about how improving text styles for users with dyslexia, vertigo, or visual problems improves readability for all users, or how being able to control animations or choose a color scheme can be critical for users with attention disorders and photophobia, respectively, while also a nice feature for everybody.

It also turned my workflow into a much smoother development experience, as addressing accessibility issues from the beginning can mean a slower start, but it’s also much easier and faster than trying to fix broken accessibility afterwards.

I hope that by sharing my personal experience with vertigo, I’ve illustrated how we can all design and develop a better web for everybody. Remember, we’re all just temporarily abled.

Late one night a few years ago, a panicked professor emailed me: “My transgender student’s legal name is showing on our online discussion board. How can I keep him from being outed to his classmates?” Short story: we couldn’t. The professor created an offline workaround with the student. Years later this problem persists not just in campus systems, but in many systems we use every day.

To anyone who’d call that an unusual situation, it’s not. We are all already designing for trans users—1 in 250 people in the US identifies as transgender or gender non-binary (based on current estimates), and the number is rising.

We are web professionals; we can do better than an offline workaround. The choices we make impact the online and offline experiences of real people who are trans, non-binary, or gender-variant—choices that can affirm or exclude, uplift or annoy, help or harm.

The rest of this article assumes you agree with the concept that trans people are human beings who deserve dignity, respect, and care. If you are seeking a primer on trans-related vocabulary and concepts, please read up and come back later.

I’m going to cover issues touching on content, images, forms, databases, IA, privacy, and AI—just enough to get you thinking about the decisions you make every day and some specific ideas to get you started.

“Tried making a Bitmoji again, but I always get disillusioned immediately by their binary gender model from literally step 1 and end up not using it. I don’t feel represented.”

Editorial note: All personal statements quoted in this article have been graciously shared with the express consent of the original authors.

How we can get things right

Gender is expansively misconstrued as some interchangeable term for anatomical features. Unlike the constellation of human biological forms (our sex), gender is culturally constructed and varies depending on where you are in the world. It has its own diversity.

Asking for gender when it is not needed; limiting the gender options users can select; assuming things about users based on gender; or simply excluding folks from our designs are all ways we reify the man-woman gender binary in design decisions.

Names are fundamentally important

If we do nothing else, we must get names right. Names are the difference between past and present, invalidation and affirmation, and sometimes safety and danger.

Yet, many of the systems we use and create don’t offer name flexibility.

Many programmers and designers have a few misconceptions about names, such as assuming people have one moniker that they go by all the time, despite how common it is for names to change over a lifetime. People might update them after a change in marital status, family situation, or gender, or perhaps someone is known by a nickname, westernized name, or variation on a first name.

In most locales, legally changing names is extremely difficult, extremely expensive, requires medical documentation, or is completely out of the question.

Changes to name and gender marker are even more complicated; they tend to be two separate, long-drawn-out processes. To make matters worse, laws vary from state to state within the U.S. and most only recognize two genders—man and woman—rather than allowing non-binary options.Not all trans people change their names, but for those who do, it’s a serious and significant decision that shouldn’t be sabotaged. We can design systems that protect the lives and privacy of our users, respect the fluid nature of personal identity, and act as an electronic curb cut that helps everyone in the process.

Deadnaming

One need only search Twitter for “deadname app” to get an idea of how apps can leave users in the lurch. Some of the most alarming examples involve apps and sites that facilitate real-life interactions (which already involve a measure of risk for everyone).

“Lyft made it completely impossible for me to change my name on its app even when it was legally changed. I reached out to their support multiple times and attempted to delete the account and start over with no result. I was completely dependent on this service for groceries, appointments, and work, and was emotionally exhausted every single time I needed a ride. I ended up redownloading Uber - even though there was a strike against the service - which I felt awful doing. But Uber allowed me to change my name without any hoops to jump through, so for the sake of my mental health, I had to.”

Trans people are more likely to experience financial hardship, so using payment apps to ask for donations is often necessary. Some of these services may reveal private information as a matter of course, leaving them exposed and potentially at risk.

There are also ramifications when linked services rely on our data sources for name information, instigating an unpredictable cascade effect with little or no recourse to prevent the sharing of sensitive details.

These are examples of deadnaming. Deadnaming is what happens when someone’s previous or birth name is used, rather than the name the person uses now. Deadnaming is invalidating at the least, even as a faux pas, but can be psychologically devastating at the other extreme, even putting lives at risk.The experiences of trans, non-binary, or gender-variant folk can vary widely, and they live in disparate conditions throughout the world. Many are thriving and creating new and joyful ways to resist and undo gender norms, despite the common negative narrative around trans lives. Others can face hardship; trans people are more likely to be unstably housed, underemployed, underpaid, and targets of violence in and out of their homes, workplaces, and intimate relationships. The ramifications are amplified for people of color and those with disabilities, as well as those in precarious living/working situations and environments where exposure can put them in harm’s way.

Design for name changes

Here’s what we can do:

Design for renaming. Emma Humphries’ talk on renaming covers this nicely. Airbnb has developed policies and procedures for users who’ve transitioned, allowing users to keep their review histories intact with amended names and/or pronouns.

Get rid of “real name” requirements. Allow people to use names they go by rather than their legal first names.

Clarify when you actually need a legal name, and only use that in conjunction with a display name field.

Have a name change process that allows users to change their names without legal documentation. (It’s likely that you have procedures for marriage-related name changes already.)

Ensure users can still change their display names when connecting with other data sources to populate users’ names.

Don’t place onerous restrictions on changes. Once someone creates a username, web address, or profile URL, allow them to change it.

Draft a code of conduct if you’re part of an online community, and make sure to include policies around deadnaming. Twitter banned deadnaming last year.

Allow people to be forgotten. When people delete their accounts for whatever reason, help them make sure that their data is not lingering in your systems or in other places online.

Update the systems users don’t see, too

Identity management systems can be a mess, and name changes can reveal the failures among those systems, including hidden systems that users don’t see.

One Twitter user’s health insurance company kept their ID number between jobs but changed their gender. Another user updated their display name but got an email confirmation addressed to their legal name.

Hidden information can also undermine job opportunities:

“At a university as a student, I transitioned and changed my name and gender to be a woman. TWELVE YEARS later after being hired to work in the Libraries, the Libraries HR coordinator emailed me that I was listed as male still in the database. He changed it on my asking, but I have to wonder how long… was it a factor in my being turned down for jobs I applied to… who had seen that..?”

Emma Humphries details the hidden systems that can carry out-of-date information about users. Her tips for database design include:

• Don’t use emails as unique IDs.
• Use an invariant user ID internally, and link the user’s current email and display name to it.

Images

Visuals should allow room for representation and imagination rather than a narrow subset of the usual suspects: figures who appear to be straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and white/Caucasian.

What we can do is feature a variety of gender presentations, as well as not assume someone’s gender identity if they buy certain items.

Some companies, like Wildfang and Thinx, offer a broad array of images representing different races, body sizes, and gender expressions on their websites and in their ads.

Many are also choosing not to hire models, allowing room for imagination and versatility:

“I got a catalog for a ‘classic menswear company’ that features zero photos of any person of any gender. Now if only I could afford an $800 blazer...”

Here's what we can do:

Actively recruit diverse groups of models for photos. And pay them!

If you can’t shoot your own photos, Broadly has recently launched a trans-inclusive stock photo collection free for wide use. Avataaars allows users to create an avatar without selecting a gender.

Information architecture

How we organize information is a political act and a non-neutral decision (librarians have said this for a while). This applies to gender-based classifications.

Many companies that sell consumer goods incorporate gender into their product design and marketing, no matter what. The product itself might be inherently gender-neutral (such as clothing, toys, bikes, or even wine), but these design and marketing decisions can directly impact the information architecture of websites.

Here's what we can do:

Evaluate why any menus, categories, or tags are based on gender, and how it can be done differently:

“Nike has a ‘gender neutral’ clothing category, yet it’s listed under ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the website architecture. ????”

Forms

Forms, surveys, and other types of data gathering are surefire ways to include or exclude people. If you ask for information you don’t need or limit the options that people can select, you risk losing them as users.

Here's what we can do:

Critically evaluate why you are asking for personal information, including gender. Will that information be used to help someone, or sell things to your advertisers?

"Why does the @CocaCola site make me select a gender just to make a purchase? Guess my family isn't getting personalized Coke bottles for Christmas."

If you are asking users for their gender, you’d better have a good reason and options that include everyone. A gender field should have more than two options, or should ask for pronouns instead. When including more than binary options, actually record the selections in your databases instead of reclassifying answers as male/female/null, otherwise you risk losing trust when disingenuous design decisions become public.

Honorifics are infrequently used these days, but it takes little work to add gender-inclusive titles to a list. For English-language sites, “Mx.” can go alongside “Mr.” and “Ms.” without fuss. United Airlines debuted this option earlier this year.

Content

Here's what we can do:

Avoid inappropriately gendered language. Your style guide should include singular “they” instead of “he/she” or “s/he,” and exclude frequently used words and phrases that exclude trans folks. Resources such as this transgender style guide are a quick way to check your language and benchmark your own content guidelines.

Check assumptions about gender and biology. Not everyone who can have a period, can get pregnant, or can breastfeed identifies as women or mothers—just as not everyone who identifies as women or mothers can have periods, can get pregnant, or can breastfeed. Thinx, a company that sells period underwear, has an inclusive tagline: “For people with periods.”

Avoid reinforcing the binary. Groups of people aren’t “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.” They are folks, people, colleagues, “y’all,” or even “all y’all.”

Pronouns aren’t “preferred”—they’re just pronouns. Calling pronouns preferred suggests that they’re optional and are replacing a “true” pronoun.

Avoid reinforcing stereotypes about trans people. Not all trans people are interested in medically transitioning, or in “passing.” They also aren’t fragile or in need of a savior. Gender is separate from sexual orientation. You can’t “tell” someone is trans.

Privacy, surveillance, and nefarious AI

We’ve heard the story of algorithms identifying a pregnant teen before her parents knew. What if an algorithm predicts or reveals information about your gender identity?

Inferences. Users’ genders are assumed based on their purchase/browsing history.

Recommendations. A user bought something before they transitioned and it shows up in “recommended because you bought X.”

Predictions. Users’ genders are not only inferred but used to predict something else based on characteristics of that gender. Even if you don’t tell big websites what your gender is, they assume one for you based on your interests. That kind of reductive essentialism can harm people of all genders. One of this article’s peer readers summed this up:

“Gender markers are a poor proxy for tastes. I like dresses, cute flats, and Raspberry Pis.”

Flashbacks. “On this day” algorithms remind users of the past, sometimes for better (“I’ve come so far”) or for worse (“don’t remind me”).

AI-based discrimination

AI and surveillance software can also reinforce norms about what men’s and women’s bodies should look like, resulting in harrowing airline travel experiences and creating AI-based discrimination for trans people.

So, too, can trans folks’ public data be used for projects that they don’t consent to. Just because we can use AI for something—like determining gender based on a face scan—doesn’t mean we should.

Here's what we can do:

Read up and proactively mitigate bias. AI and algorithms can reflect developers’ biases and perpetuate stereotypes about how people’s bodies should look. Use AI to challenge the gender binary rather than reinforce it. Design for privacy first. Hire more types of people who represent different lived experiences.

Toward a gender-inclusive web

The ideas I’ve offered here are only starting points. How you choose to create space for trans folks is going to be up to you. I don’t have all the solutions here, and there is no singular trans experience. Also, language, definitions, and concepts change rapidly.

We shouldn’t use any of these facts as excuses to keep us from trying.

When we start to think about design impact on trans folks, the ideas we bring into question can benefit everyone. Our designs should go beyond including—they should affirm and validate. Ideally, they will also reflect organizational cultures that support diversity and inclusion.

Here's what we can do:

Keep learning. Learn how to be a good ally. Pay trans user research participants to help validate your design assumptions. Hire trans people on your team and don't hang them out to dry or make them do all the hard work around inclusion and equity. Make it everyone’s job to build a more just web and world for everybody.

Editorial note: All personal statements quoted in this article have been graciously shared with the express consent of the original authors.

This article is stronger and wiser thanks to Mica McPheeters at A List Apart and the following peer readers. Thank you.

Jake Atchison
Katherine Deibel, Ph.D.
Justina F. Hall
Austyn Higgs
Emma Humphries
Tara Robertson
Levi R. Walter

Suddenly, I realized that the people next to me might be severely impacted by my work. I was having a quick lunch in the airport. A group of flight attendants sat down at the table next to me and started to prepare for their flight. For a while now, our design team had been working on futuristic concepts for the operations control center of these flight attendants’ airline, pushing ourselves to come up with innovative solutions enabled by the newest technologies. As the control center deals with all activities around flying planes, our concepts touched upon everything and everyone within the airline. How was I to know what the impact of my work would be on the lives of these flight attendants? And what about the lives of all the other people working at the airline? Ideally, we would have talked to all the types of employees in the company and tested our concepts with them. But, of course, there was no budget (or time) allocated to do so, not to mention we faced the hurdle of convincing (internal) stakeholders of the need. Not for the first time, I felt frustrated: practical, real-world constraints prevented me from assessing the impact and quality of my work. They prevented me from properly conducting ethical design.

What is ethical design?

Right, good question. A very comprehensive definition of ethical design can be found at Encyclopedia.com:

Design ethics concerns moral behavior and responsible choices in the practice of design. It guides how designers work with clients, colleagues, and the end users of products, how they conduct the design process, how they determine the features of products, and how they assess the ethical significance or moral worth of the products that result from the activity of designing.

In other words, ethical design is about the “goodness”—in terms of benefit to individuals, society, and the world—of how we collaborate, how we practice our work, and what we create. There’s never a black-and-white answer for whether design is good or bad, yet there are a number of areas for designers to focus on when considering ethics.

Usability

Nowadays usability has conquered a spot as a basic requirement for each interface; unusable products are considered design failures. And rightly so; we have a moral obligation as designers to create products that are intuitive, safe, and free from possibly life-threatening errors. We were all reminded of usability’s importance by last year’s accidental nuclear strike warning in Hawaii. What if, instead of a false-positive, the operator had broadcasted a false-negative?

Accessibility

Like usability, inclusive design has become a standard item in the requirement list of many designers and companies. (I will never forget that time someone tried to use our website with a screen reader—and got absolutely stuck at the cookie message.) Accessible design benefits all, as it attempts to cover as many needs and capabilities as possible. Yet for each design project, there are still a lot of tricky questions to answer. Who gets to benefit from our solutions? Who is (un)intentionally left out? Who falls outside the “target customer segment”?

Privacy

Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal. As we’re progressing into the Data Age, the topic of privacy has become almost synonymous with design ethics. There’s a reason why more and more people use DuckDuckGo as an alternative search engine to Google. Corporations have access to an abundance of personal information about consumers, and as designers we have the privilege—and responsibility—of using this information to shape products and services. We have to consider how much information is strictly necessary and how much people are willing to give up in exchange for services. And how can we make people aware of the potential risks without overloading them?

User involvement

Overlapping largely with privacy, this focus area is about how we deal with our users and what we do with the data that we collect from them. IDEO has recently published The Little Book of Design Research Ethics, which provides a comprehensive overview of the core principles and guidelines we should follow when conducting design research.

Persuasion

Ethics related to persuasion is about to what extent we may influence the behavior and thoughts of our users. It doesn’t take much to bring acceptable, “white hat” persuasion into gray or even dark territories. Conversion optimization, for example, can easily turn into “How do we squeeze out more revenue from our customers by turning their unconsciousness against them?” Prime examples include Netflix, which convinces us to watch, watch, and watch even more, and Booking.com, which barrages our senses with urgency and social pressure.

Focus

The current digital landscape is addictive, distracting, and competing for attention. Designing for focus is about responsibly handling people’s most valuable resource: time. Our challenge is to limit everything that disrupts our users’ attention, lower the addictiveness of products, and create calmness. The Center for Humane Technology has started a useful list of resources for this purpose.

Sustainability

What’s the impact of our work on the world’s environment, resources, and climate? Instead of continuously adding new features in the unrelenting scrum treadmill, how could we design for fewer? We’re in the position to create responsible digital solutions that enable sustainable consumer behavior and prevent overconsumption. For example, apps such as Optimiam and Too Good To Go allow people to order leftover food that would normally be thrashed. Or consider Mutum and Peerby, whose peer-to-peer platforms promote the sharing and reuse of owned products.

Society

The Ledger of Harms of the Center for Human Technology is a work-in-progress collection of the negative impacts that digital technology has on society, including topics such as relationships, mental health, and democracy. Designers who are mindful of society consider the impact of their work on the global economy, communities, politics, and health.

[caption id="attachment_7171650" align="alignnone" width="1200"] The focus areas of design ethics. That’s a lot to consider![/caption]

Ethics as an inconvenience

Ideally, in every design project, we should assess the potential impact in all of the above-mentioned areas and take steps to prevent harm. Yet there are many legitimate, understandable reasons why we often neglect to do so. It’s easy to have moral principles, yet in the real world, with the constraints that our daily life imposes upon us, it’s seldom easy to act according to those principles. We might simply say it’s inconvenient at the moment. That there’s a lack of time or budget to consider all the ethical implications of our work. That there are many more pressing concerns that have priority right now. We might genuinely believe it’s just a small issue, something to consider later, perhaps. Mostly, we are simply unaware of the possible consequences of our work. And then there’s the sheer complexity of it all: it’s simply too much to simultaneously focus on. When short on time, or in the heat of approaching deadlines and impatient stakeholders, how do you incorporate all of design ethics’ focus areas? Where do you even start?

Ethics as a structural practice

For these reasons, I believe we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level. We need to find ways to make ethics not an afterthought, not something to be considered separately, but rather something that’s so ingrained in our process that not doing it means not doing design at all. The only way to overcome the “inconvenience” of acting ethically is to practice daily ethical design: ethics structurally integrated in our daily work, processes, and tools as designers. No longer will we have to rely on the exceptions among us; those extremely principled who are brave enough to stand up against the system no matter what kind of pressure is put upon them. Because the system will be on our side. By applying ethics daily and structurally in our design process, we’ll be able to identify and neutralize in a very early stage the potential for mistakes and misuse. We’ll increase the quality of our design and our practices simply because we’ll think things through more thoroughly, in a more conscious and structured manner. But perhaps most important is that we’ll establish a new standard for design. A standard that we can sell to our clients as the way design should be done, with ethical design processes and deliverables already included. A standard that can be taught to design students so that the newest generation of designers doesn’t know any better than to apply ethics, always.

How to practice daily ethical design?

At this point we’ve arrived at the question of how we can structurally integrate ethics into our design process. How do we make sure that our daily design decisions will result in a product that’s usable and accessible; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; and benefits both society and nature? I want to share with you some best practices that I’ve identified so far, and how I’ve tried to apply them during a recent project at Mirabeau. The goal of the project was to build a web application that provides a shaver manufacturer’s factory workers insight into the real-time availability of production materials.

Connect to your organization’s mission and values

By connecting our designs to the mission and values of the companies we work for, we can structurally use our design skills in a strategic manner, for moral purposes. We can challenge the company to truly live up to its promises and support it in carrying out its mission. This does, however, require you to be aware of the company’s values, and to compare these to your personal values. As I had worked with our example client before, I knew it was a company that takes care of its employees and has a strong focus on creating a better world. During the kick-off phase, we used a strategy pyramid to structure the client’s mission and values, and to agree upon success factors for the project. We translated the company’s customer-facing brand guidelines to employee-focused design principles that maintained the essence of the organization.

Keep track of your assumptions

Throughout our entire design process, we make assumptions for each decision that we take. By structurally keeping track of these assumptions, you’ll never forget about the limitations of your design and where the potential risks lie in terms of (harmful) impact on users, the project, the company, and society. In our example project, we listed our assumptions about user goals, content, and functionalities for each page of the application. If we were not fully sure about the value for end users, or the accuracy of a user goal, we marked it as a value assumption. When we were unsure if data could be made available, we marked this as a data (feasibility) assumption. If we were not sure whether a feature would add to the manufacturer’s business, we marked it as a scope assumption. Every week, we tested our assumptions with end users and business stakeholders through user tests and sprint demos. Each design iteration led to new questions and assumptions to be tested the next week.

Aim to be proven wrong

While our assumptions are the known unknowns, there are always unknown unknowns that we aren’t aware of but could be a huge risk for the quality and impact of our work. The only way we can identify these is by applying the scientific principle of falsifiability: seeking actively to be proven wrong. Only outsiders can point out to us what we miss as an individual or as a team. In our weekly user tests, we included factory workers and stakeholders with different disciplines, from different departments, and working in different contexts, to identify the edge cases that could break our concept. On one occasion, this made us reconsider the entirety of our concept. Still, we could have done better: although scalability to other factories was an important success factor, we were unable to gather input from those other factories during the project. We felt our only option was to mention this as a risk (“limit to scalability”).

Use the power of checklists

Let’s face it: we forget things. (Without scrolling up the page, can you name all the focus areas of design ethics?) This is where checklists help us out: they provide knowledge in the world, so that we don’t have to process it in our easily overwhelmed memory. Simple yet powerful, a checklist is an essential tool to practice daily ethical design. In our example project, we used checklists to maintain an overview of questions and assumptions to user test, checking whether we included our design principles properly, and assessing whether we complied to the client’s values, design principles, and the agreed-upon success factors. In hindsight, we could also have taken a moment during the concept phase to go through the list of focus areas for design ethics, as well as have taken a more structural approach to check accessibility guidelines.

The main challenge for daily ethical design

Most ethics focus areas are quite tangible, where design decisions have immediate, often visible effects. While certainly challenging in their own right, they’re relatively easy to integrate in our daily practice, especially for experienced designers. Society and the environment, however, are more intangible topics; the effects of our work in these areas are distant and uncertain. I’m sure that when Airbnb was first conceived, the founders did not consider the magnitude of its disruptive impact on the housing market. The same goes for Instagram, as its role in creating demand for fast fashion must have been hard to foresee. Hard, but not impossible. So how do we overcome this challenge and make the impact that we have on society and the environment more immediate, more daily?

Conduct Dark Reality sessions

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates used a series of questions to gradually uncover the invalidity of people’s beliefs. In a very similar way, we can uncover the assumptions and potential disastrous consequences of our concepts in a ‘Dark Reality’ session, a form of speculative design that focuses on stress-testing a concept with challenging questions. We have to ask ourselves—or even better, somebody outside our team has to ask us— questions such as, “What is the lifespan of your product? What if the user base will be in the millions? What are the long-term effects on economy, society, and the environment? Who benefits from your design? Who loses? Who is excluded? And perhaps most importantly, how could your design be misused? (For more of these questions, Alan Cooper provided a great list in his keynote at Interaction 18.) The back-and-forth Q&A of the Dark Reality session will help us consider and identify our concept’s weaknesses and potential consequences. As it is a team effort, it will spark discussion and uncover differences in team members’ ethical values. Moreover, the session will result in a list of questions and assumptions that can be tested with potential users and subject matter experts. In the project for the airline control center, it resulted in more consideration for the human role in automatization and how digital interfaces can continue to support human capabilities (instead of replacing them), and reflection on the role of airports in future society. The dark reality session is best conducted during the convergent parts of the double diamond, as these are the design phases in which we narrow down to realistic ideas. It’s vital to have a questioner from outside the team with strong interviewing skills and who doesn’t easily accept an answer as sufficient. There are helpful tools available to help structure the session, such as the Tarot Cards of Tech and these ethical tools.

Take a step back to go forward

As designers, we’re optimists by nature. We see the world as a set of problems that we can solve systematically and creatively if only we try hard enough. We intend well. However, merely having the intention to do good is not going to be enough. Our mindset comes with the pitfall of (dis)missing potential disastrous consequences, especially under pressure of daily constraints. That’s why we need to regularly, systematically take a step back and consider the future impact of our work. My hope is that the practical, structural mindset to ethics introduced in this article will help us agree on a higher standard for design.

In Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, the Storming stage happens as a group begins to figure out how to work together. Previously, each person had been doing their own thing as individuals, so necessarily a few things need to be ironed out: how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities. Of course there may be some friction here!

But even if your team doesn’t noticeably demonstrate this kind of internal Storming as they begin to gel, there might be some outside factors at play in your work environment that create friction. During times of team scaling and organizational change—the water we in the web industry are often swimming in—managers are responsible for things like strategy-setting, aligning their team’s work to company objectives, and unblocking the team as they ship their work.

In addition to these business-context responsibilities, managers need to be able to help their teammates navigate this storm by helping them grow in their roles and support the team’s overall progress. If you and your teammates don’t adapt and evolve in your roles, it’s unlikely that your team will move out of the Storming stage and into the Norming stage of team dynamics.

To spur this course-correction and growth in your teammates, you’ll end up wearing four different hats:

• Mentoring: lending advice and helping to problem solve based on your own experience.
• Coaching: asking open questions to help your teammate reflect and introspect, rather than sharing your own opinions or quickly problem solving.
• Sponsoring: finding opportunities for your teammate to level up, take on new leadership roles, and get promoted.
• Delivering feedback: observing behavior that is or isn’t aligned to what the team needs to be doing and sharing those observations, along with praise or suggestions.

Let’s dive in to how to choose, and when to use, each of these skills as you grow your teammates, and then talk about what it looks like when teammates support the overarching direction of the team.

Mentoring

When I talk to managers, I find that the vast majority have their mentor hats on ninety percent of the time when they’re working with their teammates. It’s natural!

In mentoring mode, we’re doling out advice, sharing our perspective, and helping someone else problem solve based on that information. Our personal experiences are often what we can talk most confidently about! For this reason, mentorship mode can feel really good and effective for the mentor. Having that mentor hat on can help the other person overcome a roadblock or know which next steps to take, while avoiding drastic errors that they wouldn’t have seen coming otherwise.

As a mentor, it’s your responsibility to give advice that’s current and sensitive to the changing dialog happening in our industry. Advice that might work for one person (“Be louder in meetings!” or “Ask your boss for a raise!”) may undermine someone else, because members of underrepresented groups are unconsciously assessed and treated differently. For example, research has shown that “when women are collaborative and communal, they are not perceived as competent—but when they emphasize their competence, they’re seen as cold and unlikable, in a classic ‘double bind’”.

If you are not a member of a marginalized group, and you have a mentee who is, please be a responsible mentor! Try to be aware of the way members of underrepresented groups are perceived, and the unconscious bias that might be at play in your mentee’s work environment. When you have your mentor hat on, do lots of gut checking to make sure that your advice is going to be helpful in practice for your mentee.

Mentoring is ideal when the mentee is new to their role or to the organization; they need to learn the ropes from someone who has firsthand experience. It’s also ideal when your teammate is working on a problem and has tried out a few different approaches, but still feels stumped; this is why practices like pair coding can help folks learn new things.

As mentors, we want our mentees to reach beyond us, because our mentees’ success is ultimately our success. Mentorship relationships evolve over time, because each party is growing. Imaginative, innovative ideas often come from people who have never seen a particular challenge before, so if your mentee comes up with a creative solution on their own that you wouldn’t have thought of, be excited for them—don’t just focus on the ways that you’ve done it or seen it done before.

Managers often default to mentoring mode because it feels like the fastest way to solve a problem, but it falls short in helping your teammate connect their own dots. For that, we’ll look to coaching.

Coaching

In mentoring mode, you’re focused on both the problem and the solution. You’ll share what you as the mentor would do or have done in this situation. This means you’re more focused on yourself, and less on the person who is sitting in front of you.

In coaching mode—an extremely powerful but often underutilized mode—you’re doing two primary things:

1. Asking open questions to help the other person explore more of the shape of the topic, rather than staying at the surface level.
2. Reflecting, which is like holding up a mirror for the other person and describing what you see or hear, or asking them to reflect for themselves.

These two tools will help you become your teammate’s fiercest champion.

Open Questions

“Closed” questions can only be answered with yes or no. Open questions often start with who, what, when, where, why, and how. But the best open questions are about the problem, not the solution. Questions that start with why tend to make the other person feel judged, and questions that start with how tend to go into problem solving mode—both of which we want to avoid while in coaching mode.

However, what questions can be authentically curious! When someone comes to you with a challenge, try asking questions like:

• What’s most important to you about it?
• What’s holding you back?
• What does success look like?

Let’s say my teammate comes to me and says they’re ready for a promotion. Open questions could help this teammate explore what this promotion means and demonstrate to me what introspection they’ve already done around it. Rather than telling them what I think is necessary for them to be promoted, I could instead open up this conversation by asking them:

• What would you be able to do in the new level that you can’t do in your current one?
• What skills are required in the new level? What are some ways that you’ve honed those skills?
• Who are the people already at that level that you want to emulate? What about them do you want to emulate?

Their answers would give me a place to start coaching. These questions might push my teammate to think more deeply about what this promotion means, rather than allowing them to stay surface level and believe that a promotion is about checking off a lot of boxes on a list. Their answers might also open my eyes to things that I hadn’t seen before, like a piece of work that my teammate had accomplished that made a huge impact. But most important, going into coaching mode would start a two-way conversation with this teammate, which would help make an otherwise tricky conversation feel more like a shared exploration.

Open questions, asked from a place of genuine curiosity, help people feel seen and heard. However, if the way you ask your questions comes across as judgy or like you’ve already made some assumptions, then your questions aren’t truly open (and your teammate can smell this on you!). Practice your intonation to make sure your open questions are actually curious and open.

By the way, forming lots of open questions (instead of problem solving questions, or giving advice) is tremendously hard for most people. Don’t worry if you don’t get the hang of it at first; it takes a lot of practice and intention over time to default to coaching mode rather than mentoring mode. I promise, it’s worth it.

Reflections

Just like open questions, reflections help the other person feel seen and heard, and to explore the topic more deeply.

It’s almost comical how rarely we get the sense that the person we’re talking to is actively listening to us, or focusing entirely on helping us connect our own dots. Help your teammates reflect by repeating back to them what you hear them say, as in:

• “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re frustrated with how this project is going. Is that right?”
• “What I know to be true about you is how deeply you care about your teammates’ feelings.”

In each of these examples, you are holding up a metaphorical mirror to your teammate, and helping them look into it. You can coach them to reflect, too:

• “How does this new architecture project map to your goals?”
• “Let’s reflect on where you were this time last year and how far you’ve come.”

Occasionally, you might get a reflection wrong; this gives the other person an opportunity to realize something new about their topic, like the words they’re choosing aren’t quite right, or there’s another underlying issue that should be explored. So don’t be worried about giving a bad reflection; reflecting back what you’re hearing will still help your teammate.

The act of reflecting can help the other person do a gut check to make sure they’re approaching their topic holistically. Sometimes the act of reflection forces (encourages?) the other person to do some really hard work: introspection. Introspection creates an opportunity for them to realize new aspects of the problem, options they can choose from, or deeper meanings that hadn’t occurred to them before—which often ends up being a nice shortcut to the right solution. Or, even better, the right problem statement.

When you have your coaching hat on, you don’t need to have all the answers, or even fully understand the problem that your teammate is wrestling with; you’re just there as a mirror and as a question-asker, to help prompt the other person to think deeply and come to some new, interesting conclusions. Frankly, it may not feel all that effective when you’re in coaching mode, but I promise, coaching can generate way more growth for that other person than just giving them advice or sharing your perspective.

Choose coaching when you’re looking to help someone (especially an emerging leader) hone their strategic thinking skills, grow their leadership aptitude, and craft their own path forward. Coaching mode is all about helping your teammate develop their own brain wrinkles, rather than telling them how you would do something. The introspection and creativity it inspires create deeper and longer-lasting growth.

Sponsoring

While you wear the mentoring and coaching hats around your teammates, the sponsor hat is more often worn when they’re not around, like when you’re in a 1:1 with your manager, a sprint planning meeting, or another environment where someone’s work might be recognized. You might hear about an upcoming project to acquire a new audience and recommend that a budding user researcher take it on, or you’ll suggest to an All Hands meeting organizer that a junior designer should give a talk about a new pattern they’ve introduced to the style guide.

Sponsorship is all about feeling on the hook for getting someone to the next level. As someone’s sponsor, you’ll put their name in the ring for opportunities that will get them the experience and visibility necessary to grow in their role and at the organization. You will put your personal reputation on the line on behalf of the person you’re sponsoring, to help get them visible and developmental assignments. It’s a powerful tool, and the one most effective at helping someone get to the next level (way more so than mentoring or coaching!).

The Center for Talent Innovation routinely measures the career benefits of sponsorship (PDF). Their studies have found that when someone has a sponsor, they are way more likely to have access to career-launching work. They’re also more likely to take actions that lead to even more growth and opportunities, like asking their manager for a stretch assignment or a raise.

When you’re in sponsorship mode, think about the different opportunities you have to offer up someone’s name. This might look like:

• giving visible/public recognition (company “shout outs,” having them present a project demo, thanking them in a launch email, giving someone’s manager feedback about their good work);
• assigning stretch tasks and projects that are just beyond their current skill set, to help them grow and have supporting evidence for a future promotion; or
• opening the door for them to write blog posts, give company or conference talks, or contribute open-source work.

Remember that members of underrepresented groups are typically over-mentored, but under-sponsored. These individuals get lots of advice (often unsolicited), coffee outings, and offers to teach them new skills. But it’s much rarer for them to see support that looks like sponsorship.

This isn’t because sponsors intentionally ignore marginalized folks, but because of in-group bias. Because of how our brains (and social networks) work, the people we’re closest to tend to look mostly like us—and we draw from that same pool when we nominate people for projects, for promotions, and for hires. Until I started learning about bias in the workplace, most of the people I sponsored were white, cisgender women, like myself. Since then, I’ve actively worked to sponsor people of color and nonbinary people. It takes effort and intention to combat our default behaviors—but I know you can do it!

Take a look at the daily communications you participate in: your work chat logs, the conversations you have with others, the process for figuring out who should fix a bug or work on a new project, and the processes for making your teams’ work visible (like an architecture review, code review, launch calendar, etc.). You’ll be surprised how many moments there are to sponsor someone throughout an average day. Please put in the time and intention to ensure that you’re sponsoring members of underrepresented groups, too.

You and the rest of the dev team lobbied enthusiastically for a total re-architecture of the company’s aging website. Your pleas were heard by management—even up to the C-suite—who gave the green light. Elated, you and the team started working with the design, copy, and IA teams. Before long, you were banging out new code.

It started out innocently enough with an npm install here and an npm install there. Before you knew it, though, you were installing production dependencies like an undergrad doing keg stands without a care for the morning after.

Then you launched.

Unlike the aftermath of most copious boozings, the agony didn’t start the morning after. Oh, no. It came months later in the ghastly form of low-grade nausea and headache of product owners and middle management wondering why conversions and revenue were both down since the launch. It then hit a fever pitch when the CTO came back from a weekend at the cabin and wondered why the site loaded so slowly on their phone—if it indeed ever loaded at all.

Everyone was happy. Now no one is happy. Welcome to your first JavaScript hangover.

It’s not your fault

When you’re grappling with a vicious hangover, “I told you so” would be a well-deserved, if fight-provoking, rebuke—assuming you could even fight in so sorry a state.

When it comes to JavaScript hangovers, there’s plenty of blame to dole out. Pointing fingers is a waste of time, though. The landscape of the web today demands that we iterate faster than our competitors. This kind of pressure means we’re likely to take advantage of any means available to be as productive as possible. That means we’re more likely—but not necessarily doomed—to build apps with more overhead, and possibly use patterns that can hurt performance and accessibility.

Web development isn't easy. It’s a long slog we rarely get right on the first try. The best part of working on the web, however, is that we don’t have to get it perfect at the start. We can make improvements after the fact, and that’s just what the second installment of this series is here for. Perfection is a long ways off. For now, let’s take the edge off of that JavaScript hangover by improving your site’s, er, scriptuation in the short term.

Round up the usual suspects

It might seem rote, but it’s worth going through the list of basic optimizations. It’s not uncommon for large development teams—particularly those that work across many repositories or don’t use optimized boilerplate—to overlook them.

Shake those trees

First, make sure your toolchain is configured to perform tree shaking. If tree shaking is new to you, I wrote a guide on it last year you can consult. The short of it is that tree shaking is a process in which unused exports in your codebase don’t get packaged up in your production bundles.

Tree shaking is available out of the box with modern bundlers such as webpack, Rollup, or Parcel. Grunt or gulp—which are not bundlers, but rather task runners—won’t do this for you. A task runner doesn’t build a dependency graph like a bundler does. Rather, they perform discrete tasks on the files you feed to them with any number of plugins. Task runners can be extended with plugins to use bundlers to process JavaScript. If extending task runners in this way is problematic for you, you’ll likely need to manually audit and remove unused code.

For tree shaking to be effective, the following must be true:

1. Your app logic and the packages you install in your project must be authored as ES6 modules. Tree shaking CommonJS modules isn’t practically possible.
2. Your bundler must not transform ES6 modules into another module format at build time. If this happens in a toolchain that uses Babel, @babel/preset-env configuration must specify modules: false to prevent ES6 code from being converted to CommonJS.

On the off chance tree shaking isn’t occurring during your build, getting it to work may help. Of course, its effectiveness varies on a case-by-case basis. It also depends on whether the modules you import introduce side effects, which may influence a bundler’s ability to shake unused exports.

Split that code

Chances are good that you’re employing some form of code splitting, but it’s worth re-evaluating how you’re doing it. No matter how you’re splitting code, there are two questions that are always worth asking yourself:

1. Are you deduplicating common code between entry points?
2. Are you lazy loading all the functionality you reasonably can with dynamic import()?

These are important because reducing redundant code is essential to performance. Lazy loading functionality also improves performance by lowering the initial JavaScript footprint on a given page. On the redundancy front, using an analysis tool such as Bundle Buddy can help you find out if you have a problem.

Where lazy loading is concerned, it can be a bit difficult to know where to start looking for opportunities. When I look for opportunities in existing projects, I’ll search for user interaction points throughout the codebase, such as click and keyboard events, and similar candidates. Any code that requires a user interaction to run is a potentially good candidate for dynamic import().

Of course, loading scripts on demand brings the possibility that interactivity could be noticeably delayed, as the script necessary for the interaction must be downloaded first. If data usage is not a concern, consider using the rel=prefetch resource hint to load such scripts at a low priority that won’t contend for bandwidth against critical resources. Support for rel=prefetch is good, but nothing will break if it’s unsupported, as such browsers will ignore markup they doesn’t understand.

Externalize third-party hosted code

Ideally, you should self-host as many of your site’s dependencies as possible. If for some reason you must load dependencies from a third party, mark them as externals in your bundler’s configuration. Failing to do so could mean your website’s visitors will download both locally hosted code and the same code from a third party.

Let’s look at a hypothetical situation where this could hurt you: say that your site loads Lodash from a public CDN. You've also installed Lodash in your project for local development. However, if you fail to mark Lodash as external, your production code will end up loading a third party copy of it in addition to the bundled, locally hosted copy.

This may seem like common knowledge if you know your way around bundlers, but I’ve seen it get overlooked. It’s worth your time to check twice.

If you aren’t convinced to self-host your third-party dependencies, then consider adding dns-prefetch, preconnect, or possibly even preload hints for them. Doing so can lower your site’s Time to Interactive and—if JavaScript is critical to rendering content—your site’s Speed Index.

Smaller alternatives for less overhead

Userland JavaScript is like an obscenely massive candy store, and we as developers are awed by the sheer amount of open source offerings. Frameworks and libraries allow us to extend our applications to quickly do all sorts of stuff that would otherwise take loads of time and effort.

While I personally prefer to aggressively minimize the use of client-side frameworks and libraries in my projects, their value is compelling. Yet, we do have a responsibility to be a bit hawkish when it comes to what we install. When we’ve already built and shipped something that depends on a slew of installed code to run, we’ve accepted a baseline cost that only the maintainers of that code can practically address. Right?

Maybe, but then again, maybe not. It depends on the dependencies used. For instance, React is extremely popular, but Preact is an ultra-small alternative that largely shares the same API and retains compatibility with many React add-ons. Luxon and date-fns are much more compact alternatives to moment.js, which is not exactly tiny.

Libraries such as Lodash offer many useful methods. Yet, some of them are easily replaceable with native ES6. Lodash’s compact method, for example, is replaceable with the filter array method. Many more can be replaced without much effort, and without the need for pulling in a large utility library.

Whatever your preferred tools are, the idea is the same: do some research to see if there are smaller alternatives, or if native language features can do the trick. You may be surprised at how little effort it may take you to seriously reduce your app’s overhead.

Differentially serve your scripts

There’s a good chance you’re using Babel in your toolchain to transform your ES6 source into code that can run on older browsers. Does this mean we’re doomed to serve giant bundles even to browsers that don’t need them, until the older browsers disappear altogether? Of course not! Differential serving helps us get around this by generating two different builds of your ES6 source:

• Bundle one, which contains all the transforms and polyfills required for your site to work on older browsers. You’re probably already serving this bundle right now.
• Bundle two, which contains little to none of the transforms and polyfills because it targets modern browsers. This is the bundle you’re probably not serving—at least not yet.

Achieving this is a bit involved. I’ve written a guide on one way you can do it, so there’s no need for a deep dive here. The long and short of it is that you can modify your build configuration to generate an additional but smaller version of your site’s JavaScript code, and serve it only to modern browsers. The best part is that these are savings you can achieve without sacrificing any features or functionality you already offer. Depending on your application code, the savings could be quite significant.

The simplest pattern for serving these bundles to their respective platforms is brief. It also works a treat in modern browsers:

<!-- Modern browsers load this file: -->
<script type="module" src="/js/app.mjs"></script>
<!-- Legacy browsers load this file: -->
<script defer nomodule src="/js/app.js"></script>

Unfortunately, there’s a caveat with this pattern: legacy browsers like IE 11—and even relatively modern ones such as Edge versions 15 through 18—will download both bundles. If this is an acceptable trade-off for you, then worry no further.

On the other hand, you'll need a workaround if you’re concerned about the performance implications of older browsers downloading both sets of bundles. Here’s one potential solution that uses script injection (instead of the script tags above) to avoid double downloads on affected browsers:

var scriptEl = document.createElement("script");

if ("noModule" in scriptEl) {
  // Set up modern script
  scriptEl.src = "/js/app.mjs";
  scriptEl.type = "module";
} else {
  // Set up legacy script
  scriptEl.src = "/js/app.js";
  scriptEl.defer = true; // type="module" defers by default, so set it here.
}

// Inject!
document.body.appendChild(scriptEl);

This script infers that if a browser supports the nomodule attribute in the script element, it understands type="module". This ensures that legacy browsers only get legacy scripts and modern browsers only get modern ones. Be warned, though, that dynamically injected scripts load asynchronously by default, so set the async attribute to false if dependency order is crucial.

Transpile less

I’m not here to trash Babel. It’s indispensable, but lordy, it adds a lot of extra stuff without your ever knowing. It pays to peek under the hood to see what it’s up to. Some minor changes in your coding habits can have a positive impact on what Babel spits out.

To wit: default parameters are a very handy ES6 feature you probably already use:

function logger(message, level = "log") {
  console[level](message);
}

The thing to pay attention to here is the level parameter, which has a default of “log.” This means if we want to invoke console.log with this wrapper function, we don’t need to specify level. Great, right? Except when Babel transforms this function, the output looks like this:

function logger(message) {
  var level = arguments.length > 1 && arguments[1] !== undefined ? arguments[1] : "log";

  console[level](message);
}

This is an example of how, despite our best intentions, developer conveniences can backfire. What was a handful of bytes in our source has now been transformed into much larger in our production code. Uglification can’t do much about it either, as arguments can’t be reduced. Oh, and if you think rest parameters might be a worthy antidote, Babel’s transforms for them are even bulkier:

// Source
function logger(...args) {
  const [level, message] = args;

  console[level](message);
}

// Babel output
function logger() {
  for (var _len = arguments.length, args = new Array(_len), _key = 0; _key < _len; _key++) {
    args[_key] = arguments[_key];
  }

  const level = args[0],
        message = args[1];
  console[level](message);
}

Worse yet, Babel transforms this code even for projects with a @babel/preset-env configuration targeting modern browsers, meaning the modern bundles in your differentially served JavaScript will be affected too! You could use loose transforms to soften the blow—and that’s a fine idea, as they’re often quite a bit smaller than their more spec-compliant counterparts—but enabling loose transforms can cause issues if you remove Babel from your build pipeline later on.

Regardless of whether you decide to enable loose transforms, here’s one way to cut the cruft of transpiled default parameters:

// Babel won't touch this
function logger(message, level) {
  console[level || "log"](message);
}

Of course, default parameters aren’t the only feature to be wary of. For example, spread syntax gets transformed, as do arrow functions and a whole host of other stuff.

If you don’t want to avoid these features altogether, you have a couple ways of reducing their impact:

1. If you’re authoring a library, consider using @babel/runtime in concert with @babel/plugin-transform-runtime to deduplicate the helper functions Babel puts into your code.
2. For polyfilled features in apps, you can include them selectively with @babel/polyfill via @babel/preset-env’s useBuiltIns: "usage" option.

This is solely my opinion, but I believe the best choice is to avoid transpilation altogether in bundles generated for modern browsers. That’s not always possible, especially if you use JSX, which must be transformed for all browsers, or if you’re using bleeding edge language features that aren’t widely supported. In the latter case, it might be worth asking if those features are really necessary to deliver a good user experience (they rarely are). If you arrive at the conclusion that Babel must be a part of your toolchain, then it’s worth peeking under the hood from time to time to catch suboptimal stuff Babel might be doing that you can improve on.

Improvement is not a race

As you massage your temples wondering when this horrid JavaScript hangover is going to lift, understand that it’s precisely when we rush to get something out there as fast as we possibly can that the user experience can suffer. As the web development community obsesses on iterating faster in the name of competition, it’s worth your time to slow down a little bit. You’ll find that by doing so, you may not be iterating as fast as your competitors, but your product will be faster than theirs.

As you take these suggestions and apply them to your codebase, know that progress doesn’t spontaneously happen overnight. Web development is a job. The truly impactful work is done when we’re thoughtful and dedicated to the craft for the long haul. Focus on steady improvements. Measure, test, repeat, and your site’s user experience will improve, and you’ll get faster bit by bit over time.

Special thanks to Jason Miller for tech editing this piece. Jason is the creator and one of the many maintainers of Preact, a vastly smaller alternative to React with the same API. If you use Preact, please consider supporting Preact through Open Collective.

Today, MDN announced their first-ever needs assessment survey for web developers and designers. The survey takes about 20 minutes and asks a variety of questions aimed at understanding the joys, frustrations, needs and wants of everyday web-makers. Mozilla have committed to making the results of the survey public later this year, and the survey itself […]

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