Organizing and simplifying, one illumination at a time
In the March edition of The Pastry Box I got all mushy and sentimental about my best friends at work. Specifically, the ones so close that we call them our “work wives” or “office spouses”. I also looked at how those trying to measure engagement in their employees would benefit from looking at these strong relationships.
Read Embracing Your Work Wife (no, not like that) on The Pastry Box.
It’s been a bit crazy around here.
On February 3rd, my scheduled article for The Pastry Box, Recovery, went up. That was, as usual, exciting for me. This month’s post was about being kind to yourself, because you can. People seem to like it a lot.
So my phone was already buzzing with twitter notifications as different folks found and commented on that post, which made me pretty happy.
Then about mid-morning, A List Apart posted Reframing Accessibility for the Web, a piece I wrote about ableism, accessibility, and testing strategies that move accessibility into technology. That’s when my phone started vibrating off my desk.
The article, which has been read and tweeted about more times than I can count, has been very well-received. The most an author can accomplish is to get people thinking — anything beyond that is a bonus. Based on the comments and feedback I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten people thinking, and that makes me very satisfied indeed.
It’s also gotten me remembering the requests I’d received for a printable version of An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues back in July.
So here it is, better late than never, an Alphabet of Accessibility Issues PDF that you can download and print onto whatever size paper you happen to have available. Hang it around the office, in the lobby, or wherever you work on your design and development stuff. Update: thanks to the fine folks at Emerge Interactive the PDF is now tagged for better accessibility!
As for me, I’m thinking of something more oriented toward design heuristics for my next piece. It’ll be fun.
Continuing the trend of back to basics posts, I wrote on The Pastry Box about handling negative feedback. Really this one could be entitled “It’s not about you, even when it’s about you”.
Enjoy!
Ugh. I spent seven years providing technical support to a major website. For seven years people called me up and said, “this isn’t working” (or more frequently “your website sucks”) and it was not only my job to care, it was my job to fix it if I could.
I would have lasted 10 minutes if my stock answer was “It works for me.”
Of course it works for me. If it didn’t work when we tested it, it wouldn’t have been elevated to production. That doesn’t mean it’s flawless. It means it passed our tests.
Anyway, I ranted about exactly this problem in A Small Rant Courtesy of Your Users over on The Pastry Box this month.
…I really should get around to writing more posts here instead of “just” publishing there.
Those kind folks at The Pastry Box let me write for them again. This time I covered a subject that’s absolutely plaguing me right now: decision fatigue. Honestly, it’s one of the top things I think lead to designer burnout, but lacking hard data about that, I just talk about how it feels.
Please read Decisions, Decisions and check out the rest of The Pastry Box while you’re there.