Organizing and simplifying, one illumination at a time
My March 25 post on The Interconnected is about a disturbing trend I recently noticed in website navigation. Everything’s gone black and white.
Well, dark grey and white.
And that’s fine if you don’t need anyone to figure out what’s clickable on your website, but, well, we invented the hyperlink for a reason, and the reason wasn’t “to make you stab wildly at a page until you figure out what’s interactive”.
Go check it out.
Having changed jobs a few months ago, my February 28th post on The Interconnected is about the difference having time to do my work at work makes both in my personal life and my productivity at work.
My January 24 post on The Interconnected is the next in a series of posts about design heuristics. It concentrates on making complex topics manageable through knowing your audience. I hope you find it useful.
The Colin McEnroe Show, a radio program on WNPR (Connecticut’s NPR affiliate) invited me to join their other guests to talk about accessibility issues on January 19, 2017. The episode is An Assessment of Accessibility and it runs about 49 minutes.
Major props to the show for simulcasting American Sign Language signers from Source Interpreting to translate today’s show! When radio was first invented, the opportunity for the Deaf and hearing-impaired communities to access the content were obviously limited, but in our current age of Internet Video Everything, there’s no longer a reason to assume that people who can’t hear your broadcast can’t enjoy it in a different medium. It’s a great example of where today’s technology can provide access to stuff that was impossible to access in the past.
This is the first time I’ve done a radio appearance and these kinds of things are generally done unscripted, but as far as I can tell I didn’t say anything too stupid and I had a great time.
If you have an opportunity to work with host Colin McEnroe, producer Jonathan McNicol, and the staff of the show, I recommend it!
Alex Duloz, who was one of the brains behind The Pastry Box, asked me to participate in his 2017 project The Human In The Machine. He’s doing a look at productivity and how we handle it, with a post every day about productivity from a different author.
For my post, Preconditions, I thought about my daily routine and what things I do to set myself up for a productive day. Some of them are physical and environmental, like the way my desk is set up or how warmly-dressed I am. Others are about the work itself: is it ready to be worked? How do I know? The list goes on from there.
I don’t have any expectation that anyone else will use my process. More, it was nice to quantify the process I’m using and see it out on paper (well, electrons) so I could confirm it. And a little bit, writing it down helped me look at it and decide whether everything really was of value.