Quiet in a time of change

You may have noticed that the site has become… well… UX-related book reviews mostly.

That’s not an accident — I’m reading more than I have in decades, and I do my best to review good books because reviews are a driver for sales, and good authors deserve to be rewarded for being good authors.

But it’s also an acknowledgement that I’m not talking about much else in UX right now. Even on The Interconnected, which is my usual ranting locus, the site was virtually silent last year.

Last year, I think we can all agree, was rough.

This year so far is better but that doesn’t mean much. When I walk the half marathon in Virginia Beach, mile 11 over the damned bridge is hell, but it being stupid hard doesn’t suddenly move the finish line closer.

Still, I think there’s a finish line around the corner, so I shall trudge on until I can fall onto the beach and soak my feet in the ocean.

Things that are looking up:

  • I have a new job at Vertex, Inc. where we design software that calculates sales tax and VAT. I am pro-fair-taxes and also pro-make-taxes-easy, and in a lot of places (for better or worse) sales taxes fund lots of important local initiatives, so at least at the moment it feels like a good fit. I’m two months in and I haven’t seriously pissed anyone off yet, but the day is still young.
  • I’m seeing more and more people in our industry concerned about accessibility and making things more equitable for all, regardless of disability. I refuse to say that the pandemic has any silver linings with 500,000 dead in my country alone. I will say that hard-earned lessons are still lessons, and hopefully we’ll come out of this with more accessible jobs, more accessible websites, and more people giving a damn about their own impacts on their neighbors’ ability to survive in an increasingly technical world.
  • While we’re on the subject of survival, there’ll be a review coming up sometime soon on Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood. I’m about halfway through now and already recommending it to coworkers. Many of the goals in the book align with accessibility goals and good information architecture goals, so I think it could become an asset in convincing our higher-ups (especially in enterprise product design) that good web design = good business, both on the surface and within the code.

I’m also working (slowly) on my own accessibility website, trying to bring together information from the WCAG and the Deque online training classes I’m taking, articles that I rely on, other books, etc.. The ultimate goal is somewhere that people can navigate through a list of components and find something that says “Oh, buttons? Here are all the WCAG guidelines, info on how to hit them, and info on how to test them, all in one place.”

That’s taking longer than I thought it would because

  1. pandemic;
  2. constant exhaustion;
  3. I am the world’s worst estimator.

May you also be within sight of the next milestone, and may your strength hold out until you get there.

[insert tumbleweeds here]

A snowy mountain in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile with tumbleweeds on the desert-like plains in the foreground
Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

Yeah…. when I’m working on my fiction career over on kirabug.com and my UX nonfiction career over on The Interconnected, things get a little quiet over here.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, it’s not like I’ve been up to nothing, it’s just that it hasn’t been in the blog portion of the site… so if you didn’t see them already you might want to check out the An Event Apart DC notes I posted or maybe see what I’m doing on my wiki/brain dump thingie

And in a few minutes I’m going to be moving some UX-related book reviews over here because I don’t trust Goodreads to hold onto them forever :)

Catching up….

Ever have one of those days where you realize just how horribly behind you’ve become in keeping specific parts of your portfolio up to date?

Yeah, that’s today.

So here’s a list of the last… um… five article I’ve written for The Interconnected:

Of those, the top one was probably the most important, because it discusses ongoing differences between the way that most conferences handle codes of conduct and how we probably should be handling them.

But if you’re looking for general ranting about UX, the lamp post is pretty fun.

Also, a reminder: we’re always looking for authors so if you have something to say and want to post it to Medium and our little website, we’ll gladly take your submission.

In other news, I just got back from An Event Apart DC and had a fantastic time, so there will be a notes dump sometime soon. As in, I’m starting to write it now.

And October 8-10 I’ll be speaking at edUi Conference in Charlottesville, VA. Come on out and check it out!

 

So that was a thing

Hello! We’re on a new server now!

We’re also on a new host!

And since we got hacked on the old host, we’re on a fresh WordPress install!

Every day is a new adventure.

Things I have done in the last three weeks

Hectic, harrowing, and headachey are the ways to describe the last three weeks, but so much of it is design-oriented I felt like it was time for a blog post.

  • I attended Future Insights Live in Las Vegas and live-tweeted the conference sessions I attended. (In short: this is a great conference you should attend, despite it being in Las Vegas. Yes, I said “despite”. I’m a shy introvert who’s allergic to cigarette smoke and that place was a new circle of hell for me.) 
  • I built a new website called BorrowABlog.com. What’s that about? Well occasionally folks say they wish they had a blog to post to, but they only really have one or two things they occasionally want to write about. If that describes you, register, blog when you want, and link to your blog post from wherever.
  • I built a website for close friends who lost their son to brain cancer, and are now raising money for cancer research. (I’d love to link to it, but the parents in question haven’t given it the thumbs-up yet.)
  • I accepted a new position at work, moving from Interaction Designer back to Information Architect — with a lot of interaction design still in my future. I’m really excited to join my new team and stretch a bit more into the “UX generalist” role. It’s a little scary, too (what new job isn’t?) because I’ll be moving to a different division of the company and serving a different business group for the first time in thirteen years.
  • I wrote two articles — like actual articles, not just tech writing — for aforementioned primary employer, which at some point will be published up on the main site. As an Engish major with heavy IT leanings (or a Software Engineer Poet, depending on the day) I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to communicate in words as well as designs.

In other words, life is full of change, but those changes are good.