Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Cathy Dutton
Design for Safety, An Excerpt
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Eva PenzeyMoog’s Design for Safety, from A Book Apart. Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.
Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt
In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. Article Continues Below But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise.
Voice Content and Usability
We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations.
Designing for the Unexpected
I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented? Article Continues Below Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design#section2 When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in.
Immersive Content Strategy
Beyond the severe toll of the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps no other disruption has transformed user experiences quite like how the tethers to our formerly web-biased era of content have frayed. We’re transitioning to a new world of remote work and digital content. We’re also experimenting with unprecedented content channels that, not too long ago, elicited chuckles at the watercooler, like voice interfaces, digital signage, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
Achieving Vertical Alignment (Thanks, Subgrid!)
Our tools for vertical alignment have gotten a lot better as of late. My early days as a website designer involved laying out 960px wide homepage designs and aligning things horizontally across a page using a 12-column grid. Media queries came along which required a serious mental shift. It solved some big problems, of course, but introduced new ones, like dealing with alignment when elements wrap or are otherwise moved around in the layout.
Color Craft & Counterpoint: A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency
So, what is it like to be color blind and also work in the web design and development industry? I’ll answer that question throughout this article, but it’s something that’s always factored into my thoughts, given my passion for design and now my career. I wonder if having “normal” vision would have made me a better artist growing up. Would it make me better at my job now? Would I have pursued a more design-oriented career, as opposed to one that’s more dev-focused?
Usability Testing for Voice Content
It’s an important time to be in voice design. Many of us are turning to voice assistants in these times, whether for comfort, recreation, or staying informed. As the interest in interfaces driven by voice continues to reach new heights around the world, so too will users’ expectations and the best practices that guide their design.
Starting small with building a design community
https://defradigital.blog.gov.uk/2019/06/21/starting-small-with-building-a-design-community/ Cathy Dutton reflects on setting up a User Centred Design Community of Practice (COP) for a small team at Defra’s Warrington digital hub. How do you build a community with small numbers of people in different roles with various work patterns? At our Warrington digital hub there are currently 3 Interaction Designers, 4 User Researchers and one Content Designer.
Designing for Cognitive Differences
Inclusive design is designing to be inclusive of as many users as possible, considering all aspects of diversity in users. With increased understanding, compassionate discussions around how to design for disabilities are becoming increasingly common in the web industry. But even with this growth, there are misconceptions: accessibility is still frequently thought of as “design for blind people” when it’s so much more than that.
The Problem with Patterns
It started off as an honest problem with a brilliant solution. As the ways we use the web continue to grow and evolve, we, as its well-intentioned makers and stewards, needed something better than making simple collections of pages over and over again. Design patterns, component libraries, or even style guides have become the norm for organizations big and small. Having reusable chunks of UI aids consistency and usability for users, and it lends familiarity and efficiency to designers.
My Accessibility Journey: What I’ve Learned So Far
Last year I gave a talk about CSS and accessibility at the stahlstadt.js meetup in Linz, Austria. Afterward, an attendee asked why I was interested in accessibility: Did I or someone in my life have a disability? Article Continues Below I’m used to answering this question—to which the answer is no—because I get it all the time. A lot of people seem to assume that a personal connection is the only reason someone would care about accessibility. This is a problem.
Never Show A Design You Haven’t Tested On Users
It isn’t hard to find a UX designer to nag you about testing your designs with actual users. The problem is, we’re not very good at explaining why you should do user testing (or how to find the time). We say it like it’s some accepted, self-explanatory truth that deep down, any decent human knows is the right thing to do. Like “be a good person” or “be kind to animals.” Of course, if it was that self-evident, there would be a lot more user testing in this world.
JavaScript Pairs Game
You can apply CSS to your Pen from any stylesheet on the web. Just put a URL to it here and we'll apply it, in the order you have them, before the CSS in the Pen itself. If the stylesheet you link to has the file extension of a preprocessor, we'll attempt to process it before applying. You can also link to another Pen here, and we'll pull the CSS from that Pen and include it.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Cathy
Contact Cathy, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack