Tag: The Pastry Box

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A deck of accessibility issues

Cross-posted from The Interconnected…

Back in February, I wrote about the events that brought about the Alphabet of Accessibility post on The Pastry Box, and I hinted I might have a deck of cards to accompany it soon.

I opened the mail today and discovered that my prototype deck arrived. The Alphabet of Accessibility Deck is a real thing you can purchase with actual money from over at The Gamecrafter.

A box for the accessibility deck, with the deck, with letter z on top

I’m a little overwhelmed. When I wrote the original alphabet back in 2014, I certainly didn’t expect it would ever become a talk, much less a talk, a deck of cards, and a half-formed workshop.

But here we are, dragging the world forward kicking and screaming into the Century of the Anchovy, as Terry Pratchett would put it. And you can buy the deck and share it with your teams or your organizations or whatever you’d like.

Many thanks to Dylan Wilbanks, Jeff Eaton, Sarah Hoffman, Elaine Nelson, and Greg Dunlap (as well as many others!) for encouragement, sanity checks, and pointing me to The Gamecrafter. And all of my friends and family, who will continue to remain nameless, for their love, support, and well-earned right to complain about the things we still don’t get right when we design.

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Now on The Pastry Box: Walk it Off

This was my last post on The Pastry Box, because on December 31st, they posted their last article and closed down. (The archives are still all there, and eventually I’ll move copies to here.)

The Pastry Box gave me the confidence to write and publish in front of the entire UX industry. Without their call for writers, I never would have had the nerve to write for A List Apart, and I never would have started taking my fiction seriously. I will miss Alex and Katy and their advice and encouragement immensely.

(And yes, I’m looking for a new publishing platform, something where I can share space with other authors.)

This last post was filler; I’d provided it because Decembers were always rough for the editors and having a last-minute post for cancellations seemed to help them quite a bit.

It’s also a bit of a personal post, describing how I picked up walking as a “hobby” and/or “lifesaving device” as well as how you too could pick up the habit.

I hope you enjoy Walk It Off.

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Now on The Pastry Box: Welcome to Enterprise

This month’s Pastry Box post, Welcome to Enterprise, is really a bit of a rant about user experience design vs. client experience design. Client experience design is when we design something that makes the paying client happy. User experience design is when we work with the client to make the end-user of the product happy. In doing so, we align the users’ needs with the clients needs (and/or make the client aware of irreconcilable differences) and make everyone satisfied.

It’s called Welcome to Enterprise because a) I work in Enterprise software and it’s what I know best, and b) pretty much everyone in Enterprise thinks that *they* are who I’m working for.

I’m not. It’s my job to advocate for the end user, and bring everyone else around to do the same. That’s what UX in Enterprise is about.