Inventing

LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

The NDS is a coherent set of standards and principles that combine neurodiversity and user experience design for Learning Management Systems.

I speak and write about design, front-end code, leadership, and (occasionally) math.

The UX profession has an aura of empathy and care for the people who use tech products. Businesses capitalise on this aura without having to entertain it.

Are you presenting your content the way users read it? An eye-tracking study found that most users don’t read entire headlines. Instead, they scan the left side and only read the first few words. They do this because they’re searching for keywords to see if the content is worth clicking. Users Need Keywords Fast If the first […]

Issue opened.

Haven’t used timeshifting in Audacity in a while and wow this is so finicky.

The time shift tool is missing! Yes, that is intentional. Audio clips can now be dragged using the Selection tool (or any other tool) in the “Clip Handle”

For readers, they look just like normal blog posts, there’s RSS and there’s a normal web view. The weirdo chat bubble interface is only for the person writing them.

It’s supposedly a way to overcome writer’s block. I haven’t tried the app (and not gonna), but I do believe that this does work.

Great reminder of how it felt to have only a surface understanding of an app:

they don’t internalize a computer/app as a generalized system with common UI conventions and frameworks and reusable elements that always behave predictably in different contexts, etc, etc. They interact with these things through a set of memorized steps that gets them to the thing they want to do.

I think even many programmers can relate to using one specific app this way: git! Yeah, yeah, it’s possible to understand git properly (one of the good things of a previous day job I had was that I learned that, and have started heading down that road at least somewhat, because it made git fun instead of a source of dread) but we’ve all heard the memes of how people just memorize a set of steps with git. I was even using shell scripts and many of those scripts I still use. Just basically “make a save point here please” like a video game.

Now can I finally get a li’l less grief for using an editor from the 1970s? 🤷🏻‍♀️