I always attempt to die on the links should be links hill. So far the only times I didn’t get my way was when the thing was in fact semantically a button, it just happened to use navigation to achieve its aim. Usually in these cases the markup is too complex to shove into a link anyway.
Happy to report that our production site has more links that look like buttons than it does buttons that act like links. It’s almost a meme on my team that Swiz will get you if you use onClick for navigation.
The other hill I enjoy defending is that we should use more browser built-in components instead of trying to design our own.
> browser built-in components instead of trying to design our own.
Ugh. Let me know if you have any tips. All the art-school “UX designers” have to have custom date pickers and stupid knockoffs of iOS switches and custom drop-downs when there are actual, better, and automatically-accessible, versions of all those. How do you fight against this vanity design without making an enemy of the whole design team?
Any artist or designer has to learn their medium before they are allowed to produce designs for it. If you want to learn to sculpt, you have to learn what you can and cannot do with clay; if you want to learn to design clothes, you have to learn about fabrics, sewing and tailoring (Jean Paul Gautier and Versace worked as tailors in the industry while they were doing their early work).
Yet there seems to be a free pass where a "web designer" is allowed to dictate how a site should work and look without knowing the basics of HTML, CSS and JS.
Luckily that one doesn’t even come up. “Kids these days” don’t know about it :D
I jest, but I am at least 5 years older than everyone else on the team. And have the unfun background of getting into professional webdev before jQuery.
Happy to report that our production site has more links that look like buttons than it does buttons that act like links. It’s almost a meme on my team that Swiz will get you if you use onClick for navigation.
The other hill I enjoy defending is that we should use more browser built-in components instead of trying to design our own.