This is the seventh fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. We all use computers different ways. Does your software allow that? Here are some ways you can add accessibility with relatively little effort. Take your glasses off. Can you see any of the interaction...
This is the sixth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Have you shown this product to any actual humans who are like the users? Acceptance is the act of testing your vision against the user’s needs. It’s not about whether the software works, or...
This is the fifth fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Affordance is what the interface makes easy and obvious. Affordances tell us all sorts of things about the tiny interactions we have with the world, and with software. Most people talk about the affordances...
This is the third fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. What can you do that would make your product more extensible, more configurable, easier to put into the ecosystem you are trying to serve? I always explain APIs as a sort of Lego connector...
This week I was at Write/Speak/Code, a conference designed to teach technical women how to excel in other parts of their careers. It was amazing, soul-filling, and sometimes painfully honest. I was asked to mentor a group of nine women for Speak Day. We had a couple hours for them to write and deliver lightning...
This is the second fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Contrary to what you may have heard, the internet is not actually a series of tubes connected by guys in ski masks. There are bad actors out there, but your product probably won’t attract...
This is the first fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Are you ever planning on selling this to someone in another country? Or someone who doesn’t speak your company’s primary language? I’ll tell you right now: Yes, you are. There’s a big wide world out there,...
In October, I attended HydraConnect. To my relief, it was not a networking event for evil comic book characters, but rather an in-depth conference for people running the Hydra software, which is used in higher education (and other library-like places) to organize digital collections. When I walked in the first day, I didn’t even know that...
First, a disclaimer: Medium served me this article, but it’s a year old. Weird. Nonetheless, I have things to say about the content. The Virtues of Technical Writing, by a pseudonymous writer Introduction They are gleaned from a Bachelor of Science degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota’s Writing Studies Department,...
This is a series derived from my popular talk “The Seven Righteous Fights”. It’s not an exact transcript, but I think having a written form to refer people to greatly increases accessibility and gives me room to expand my thoughts in a way that is not compatible with speaking. There are seven fights that I...