Super8: Eight intriguing articles from June.

When it comes to digital, it’s not unusual to wear multiple hats, work within multi-disciplinary teams and manage a multitude of clients, audiences, and outputs.

This month I’ve collected eight eclectic articles on duality in and outside the workplace.

Whether that’s taking design cues from doctors, running silent meetings, or balancing aesthetics with accessibility—I hope you can embrace each side of these stories.

Welcome to Super8 in June!

1. How can thinking like a doctor help you as a designer?

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Sarah Healy.
• Contributor: Mel Bruning.

This piece offers a new perspective: doctors and designers may have more in common than at first glance.

When dealing with patients, doctors use a simple process to help empathise with problems before offering solutions.

As a designer fulfilling a brief, try diagnosing your client’s problem first, and provide your pitch later.

To get clarity on the problem, we must listen. Similar to a good doctor, a good designer first seeks to understand the true nature of a clients problem and only then offers a solution.

It can help put your client at ease, build authority, and lay the foundation for future work that’s built on trust and collaboration.

2. Five ways you might mess up when running SEO split tests.

• Read full article here.
• Written by Sam Nemzer.
• Contributor: Mike McCusker.

You may be familiar with A/B testing in the context of conversion rate optimisation (CRO)—this piece from Moz looks at how applying these concepts to SEO is a logical next step if you want to be confident that what you’re spending your time on will lead to more traffic.

While the change might be subtle, split testing gives you the chance to test which version of a page will perform better when it comes to organic search.

3.The case for more silence in meetings.

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Steven G. Rogelberg.
• Contributor: Aziza Mohamed.

A silent meeting might sound like a misnomer, but it offers a unique opportunity to try flipping a process on its head.

Although they often have many different purposes and goals, meetings are typically conducted in the same way, time and time again.

Even the most well-planned meeting can be subject to someone dominating the conversation, multi-tasking with tech, and side conversations.

Attendees often hold back in meetings, waiting to hear what others say and what their boss might say out of fear of being perceived as difficult, out of touch, or off the mark.  Silence can be a solution to this problem, allowing space for unique knowledge and novel ideas to emerge.

This piece looks at using silence as a tool to flatten the room, draw out additional ideas, and ideate as a team.

4.Using DevTools to improve the UX design to development process.

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Lisa Tweedie.
• Contributor: Isabel Silvis.

There doesn’t need to be a great divide between design and development, this piece from CSS Tricks looks at how designers can use code in their everyday work.

Being experimental is a huge part of the design process—and code is just another means to test, interact, and play with the possibilities.

One of the concerns a UX designer might have is knowing how a design holds up once it’s in the browser. Are the colours accurate? Are fonts legible throughout? How do the elements respond on various devices? These are some of the styling and interaction issues designers are thinking about when we hand our work off for development.

Try these tips to help build context when it comes to working alongside developers, handing over projects, and catering for the processes of each discipline.

5. It’s time to switch to a privacy browser.

• Read full article here.
• Written by Casey Chin.
• Contributor: James Otter.

There’s a new battleground in the browser wars: user privacy.

With FireFox making enhanced tracking protection a default feature, and Apple offering privacy-focussed featured within Safari, people are more aware than ever before of their digital footprint on the web.

Even if you don’t lead a double life online, this list from WIRED shares some browser options that help keep your activity under wraps.

With a range of alternatives available, find a browser that suits your needs and prioritises your privacy.

6. Making design accessible everywhere: getting started.

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Harish Shivaraman.
• Contributor: Bridget Noonan.

Good design is accessible design: it looks awesome, while being easy to use for diverse needs.

Everyone knows that it’s essential to get user’s feedback to understand their pain points when designing, but we often neglect people with varying abilities across vision, hearing, speaking or cognition.

People with disabilities can find it very hard to access content on the web. It’s essential for us to include them while designing since that’s where the untapped market lies.

Covering global accessibility standards, this piece shares plenty of visuals and examples to help you get started when it comes to crafting more inclusive designs.

7. How NASA uses social media to bring space to everyone.

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Belinda Lanks.
• Contributor: Sarah El-Atm. 

This article from Belinda Lanks covers the tactics of NASA’s social media lead, Stephanie Smith.

As part of her role, her team advances the agency’s mission of sharing its scientific investigations, engineering marvels, and space activities with their audience back on Earth.

Social media is a two-way conversation, and Stephanie shares her strategy for keeping NASA fans engaged and trolls at bay.

This piece explores matching tone and timing, speaking like a human, and recognising a story’s epic potential.

8. Google doubles down on its project to teach kids how to spot fake news.

• Read the full article here.
• Written by Katharine Schwab.
• Contributor: Geordie Launder.

While each of us use the internet every single day to validate information, share ideas, or engage with content, it can also be a destructive and disturbing place—especially for children.

That’s why Google has launched a new set of lessons that aims to teach kids ages 7 to 11 about how to stay safe and secure online.

It’s designed to teach children how to spot if a website is fake, to understand the way that images and videos can be edited to leave out important context, and to be able to analyze how captions and text can change the meaning of different types of media.

The lessons, titled Be Internet Awesome, explores topics like cyberbullying and privacy, while extending a focus to recognising misinformation to help kids better navigate the world online.