At Pixel Pioneers Bristol on 10 June, web consultant Stuart Langridge will address the tech industry’s drive to build everything in client-side JavaScript with increasingly heavy frameworks, explain why this might not be a great idea, and suggest potential alternative approaches. Here’s a little teaser — How did JavaScript become so ubiquitous? This question gets asked a lot, but it’s actually three different but closely related questions:

Ahead of her talk at Pixel Pioneers Bristol, we catch up with Hannah Smith to explore what impact digital has on the planet, how Hannah got into sustainable web development and consulting, and some easy first steps for anyone to take meaningful action — Can you share a few eye-opening facts about sustainability in tech that might surprise people? The one many people will have heard of before is that if the internet was a country it would be the seventh biggest polluter in the world. I think it helps to put into perspective just how much pollution the internet creates.

Digital inclusion pioneer Robin Christopherson explains how technology can empower not just impaired users but everyone — “The advent of the smartphone really has put everybody in the market for inclusive design,” argues Robin Christopherson MBE, head of digital inclusion at AbilityNet. “Accessibility has always been seen as being for disabled customers, which has its limitations because it’s this extra niche thing that can easily be forgotten…

Designing for just one specific device or input type is no longer enough. These days, designers have a myriad of technologies at their disposal and can create UX/UI experiences across all kinds of devices: smart speakers, wearables, VR and AR headsets, etc. …

Ecommerce is a fast-growing, fast-evolving industry anyway, but the COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated this transformation — some say by as much as 10 years. According to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index, global online sales are expected to reach $4.2 trillion this year. The U.S. …

First impressions are crucial but attracting users to a product or service goes beyond the initial stage — or they might not come back. …

Shopify’s director of UX, Verne Ho, explains how conversational UIs and chatbots improve the user experience, discusses design challenges to look out for and suggests ways to get started — How can chatbots improve the user experience of a digital product? A handful of ways! For starters, by virtue of its medium, chatbots tend to gravitate towards shorter and more linear workflows. This often pushes product teams to discover new ways to create a simpler and more streamlined experience for its end users.

We catch up with designer Jon Tan to discuss durable, inclusive, and aesthetic design, running co-working studio Mild Bunch, and more — It’s good to have you back, Jon. You’ve been a bit quiet. What have you been up to? Thanks! The truth is, a few years go I got pretty sick, but the world keeps turning regardless, so I took a personal decision to try and focus on what was important: Being well, looking after my sons, and maintaining my design practice as far as possible. That meant some…

We chat to Lisi Linhart about all things web animation: tools, mistakes to avoid, turning hand-drawn sketches into delightful SVG animations, and more — How can animation and interactions on the web improve the user experience? In general our brains like to have concepts explained in a simple, logical way. On the web we essentially have documents that give us information to read, but with web animation, we can explain and show difficult concepts in a much simpler way by using motion. At the same time…