Articles in "ux"

It’s not secret that I love a bit of beautiful UI. The web is full of creativity, experiences that we start to miss out from when using AI to look up everything. Finding information for a Metal festival and reading it in a sans-serif black/white screen is not engaging, you lose every bit of feeling, the urge to go jump in the mosh pit. I felt I had to at least try to take a look at ChatGPT apps. Is this the way forward? Some thoughts...

Read more about AI or not, I’d hate to live in a world with boring UI. Building a ChatGPT App

About half a year ago I wrote about the idea to have multi-handle range sliders as a native HTML element. I asked for feedback, and the community delivered. The proposal has moved forward since then, but it needs more voices to get browser vendors on board. Here's what happened, what changed, and what you can do. This article shows some of the survey results, and is a big call for help.

Read more about The community has spoken, now we need browsers vendors to help: a <rangegroup> update

I talk about progressive enhancement a lot. Like, a lot. So when it came time to redesign my own site, I figured it was time to actually practice what I preach. What started as a typography fix turned into a full redesign powered by view transitions, corner-shape, @property, scroll-state queries, anchor positioning, and more. All progressively enhanced. All without a single polyfill.

Read more about Putting my money where my mouth is: a redesign built on progressive enhancement

Scroll-driven animations have been one of my favorite features to land in CSS. Being able to play animation progress to scroll positions opens up so many possibilities. But I always felt that something was missing: sometimes you don't want to scrub through an animation. Sometimes you just want the scroll position to determine when an animation plays, not how it plays, which for me was a far more common pattern in the past. Well, with scroll-triggered animation, this final piece of the puzzle is there. What's more, when you combine the two, it's a match so perfect, even Cupid would be impressed by the timing.

Read more about CSS Animation Triggers: Playing animations on scroll without scrubbing. It's a match!

Oh, how I have been waiting to write this title! If you've read a few things by me, you know I'm always a bit hyped when CSS gives us the keys to the state-machine kingdom. For years, we've relied on intersection observers or scroll events in JavaScript to answer simple questions about an element's position and state. We already have a lot of these things happening in browsers, such as scroll-driven animations. But more state information is on the rise with an update on scroll-state queries.

Read more about Is it scrolled? Is it not? Let's find out with CSS @container scroll-state() queries

A few weeks ago, I didn't think I'd start the year with another demo on customizable select. To be honest, I was hoping to let it go for a little while. But there is an update on the rise that needs to be talked about: The multiple select. This little attribute could change a lot of things in making multiple selections; it could turn a series of checkboxes into one element, and it could improve accessibility. This is still in development, but we can take a peek in Chrome Canary.

Read more about An update on customizable selects: the multiple select

We need to talk about multi-handle range sliders… Really, we do. They’re one of those UI elements we see on a variety of web shops indicating price ranges; we see them for selecting time-slots; we see them for filtering between a variety of lenght units. Creating these experiences is more often inaccessible than just working, and even when I found the so-called perfect library, I’d still run into limitations for styling and expanding upon it. I thought that I should do something about this. I might be way over my head, and that is why I need your help...

Read more about A native way of having more than one thumb on a range slider in HTML

A little while ago, in Chrome 133, a feature called popover=”hint” landed in the browser. This feature paved the way to something bigger, more specifically, popovers being triggered on hover/focus. This comes with a new attribute “interestfor” and some CSS properties to change the delay speed when showing popovers using that method. There still isn’t much definitive on how this should behave on devices without hover capabilities, and that’s what this article is all about. I want to make sure the content of these popovers is accessible on touch devices.

Read more about HTML popovers shown on interest should be accessible on mobile devices

In this part of my customizable select series, I want to highlight option groups! Option groups are part of our select interactions to provide clarity, and now, they can be styled. This will certainly not be the last demo I did on the select, and more updates are coming to this element. With a wink to the past, we will be creating a restaurant dish picker, a true “Select Menu”.

Read more about The customizable select - Part five: Optgroup, creating a true select menu

In this (long) part of the customizable select series, it’s all about gamification. In this article, I’d like to highlight one of my demos, where I aimed to recreate a piece of UI found in the Monster Hunter games. To re-create this behavior, I had to think in terms of keyboard navigation first. This demo requires quite a lot of CSS, as well as some scripting, and in the end, I do want to highlight some accessibility concerns. This is an experiment on how far we can take it when styling select elements.

Read more about The customizable select - Part four: Scroll snapping, state queries, monster hunter, and gamification

In this third episode of my exploration of the customizable select, I thought it was time to show how we can have a little bit of fun with an old friend: sticky positioning. In this article, we’ll be following up on earlier techniques while exploring how we can use the :checked pseudo-class to create a fun open and close effect. We’ll be messing with top-layer functionality, interpolate-size and other trickery to create an emoji picker.

Read more about The customizable select - Part three: Sticky Options

The customizable select has entered Chrome 134, allowing us to style this form element to our hearts' content. I decided to write a series about this feature because there are so many cool things we can do with CSS these days to create some really unique and fun experiences. In this first article of the series, I want to talk a bit about the history, while also giving an in-depth guide on how you can start creating your first customizable select as a progressive enhancement, today.

Read more about The customizable select - Part one: history, trickery, and styling the select with CSS

It’s Valentine's Day! As usual, I want to write about something I love, and this time it’s still highly experimental but something I am extremely excited about. Something new is on the horizon named CSS scroll-markers and it allows you to create a fully functional slider without the need of any JavaScript. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look, shall we? Here is my first impression of creating a carousel with only CSS and some accessibility concerns as well.

Read more about Love at first slide! Creating a carousel purely out of CSS

While experimenting with CSS, you sometimes discover a technique you want to do more of. This is one of those discoveries for me... I love how we can now animate clip paths on scroll with CSS. From animating an image into a star to creating Polaroid-like images on scroll. In this article, I’d like to demo some techniques we can use to create these interesting effects using clip paths, @property, and even container units to create visually pleasing scroll-driven animations.

Read more about Animating clip paths on scroll with @property in CSS

There are a lot of CSS units available at the moment and we mostly still rely on pixels and (r)ems for our sizing and fonts. I say it’s time to do a little freshening up. In this mini-series I will be going around all the current length units in CSS with practical examples.

Read more about Going beyond pixels and (r)ems in CSS (iO tech_hub)

Have you run into a situation where you need the padding of one element to align with the padding of another element? It’s a common debacle, especially when a page layout is set with global padding? In this article I demonstrate that issue with a full-width slider component that breaks out of the main page container using a couple of techniques to keep it visually aligned with other elements on the page.

Read more about CSS Scroll Snapping Aligned With Global Page Layout: A Full-Width Slider Case Study (Smashing Magazine)

A full evergreen browser support for CSS subgrid is just around the corner. Time to have a look on how we can create some interesting implementations in our design systems. This article will be focussing on grid-template-rows with subgrid.

Read more about Grid ideas: Creating a CSS subgrid utility class for rows

Scroll Driven Animations are set to be released in Chrome 115, giving us the chance to animate elements based on a scroll instead of time, increasing our toolset to create some fun interactions. I’m sure many great tricks and articles will be found, as this feature opens a lot of possibilities.

Read more about Scroll driven animations in CSS are a joy to play around with!

If you love CSS, you've probably heard of custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) before. Still, a lot of people seem to use them as constants for their CSS. In this article, I will try to give you some more insights on how you can use these custom properties to create some smart systems or even use them as booleans in CSS and create easy progressive enhancements.

Read more about Going beyond constants with custom properties (iO tech_hub)

Thanks to the Open UI working community group, there's a new element on the horizon, the selectlist, that will make styling this type of form control a whole lot better. Let's use this element to creating a pattern that you would never have thought possible with CSS alone - a radial selection menu.

Read more about Advanced Form Control Styling With Selectmenu And Anchoring API (Smashing Magazine)