✏ Issue #508: Effective Offboarding, Exciting New Tools for Designers, Web Accessibility Myths, The Hidden Cost of Code Dependencies, and more…

We all know that an effective onboarding strategy is essential for attracting and retaining users, but how many of us build an excellent offboarding process into our sites and apps? In this great post, we learn that well-designed offboarding leaves users with a good impression of your business and maximizes the chances that they’ll return.

StoryChief is a comprehensive tool for planning and managing your content strategy. You can write, edit, and approve posts for social media, your blog, and even advertising. Publish across all of your channels at once, boost SEO, and keep your brand voice intact. Try StoryChief for free, paid plans start at €90 per month.

Exciting new resources are unleashed on the web each day. Every month we put together this collection of the best new tools, apps, and fonts that we’ve found in the previous four weeks. In October’s spooktacular edition, you’ll find a JavaScript library, gradient editor, analytics tools, and spooky new typefaces.

Most developers will rely on dependencies to a greater or lesser extent, whether we’re falling back on a specific CSS framework or relying on a JavaScript library. In this excellent post, Nate Jacobs reviews the pros and cons of working with dependencies and asks if it’s ever really OK to rely on 3rd party code.

UI-licious is a fantastic new tool for UX designers for testing user journeys instead of code. Tests are based on plain-English commands, and anything that runs in a browser can be tested, including all major JavaScript frameworks. You can try UI-licious for free and personal plans start at $12 per month.

Web accessibility is essential for any site. It benefits UX, improves SEO performance, and guarantees the most inclusive audience possible. But there are numerous myths surrounding accessibility, and in this excellent post, Alvaro Montoro busts some of the most prevalent, from the value of overlays, to the cost of accessibility.

Effective time management is one of the essential skills to master. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to be sucked into time-sinks and miss crucial deadlines. Sprinted is an awesome new AI-powered app that can analyze tasks in your to-do list, then find the best time for you to complete them. You can book a demo of Sprinted now.

It’s a common experience that the people most affected by design, i.e., users, are the least likely to be making design decisions. In this lengthy post (paywall), Gabriel Mugar argues that designers need to relinquish their roles as decision-makers and presents three assumptions about design that can be remedied with simple process changes.