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Now on The Pastry Box: A Small Rant Courtesy of Your Users

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.

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Now on The Pastry Box: Back to Basics: Peer reviews

My regular column is up on The Pastry Box.

One of the things I sometimes see lacking in UX columns or posts is where the newcomer is supposed to start. How do you learn to identify strategy, or survive a peer review, or use design heuristics? So I’m tackling one close to my heart this month — Back to Basics: Peer Reviews. Hopefully it will give you the confidence and thick skin needed to get through tough reviews. And if you’ve already got those things, hey, pass it on.

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Now on The Pastry Box: An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues

Wow. So I wrote An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues for The Pastry Box (who, by the way, have invited me to become one of the “regular bakers” and I could not be even more thrilled) and the reaction to it has just exploded.

This one’s simple: every one of us, in some way, is a person who needs accessible technology to surf the web. Maybe today we don’t, but probably in the future we will. When that time comes, we need the web to be flexible and accessible. We need to start building it now.