Shambling Towards Perfection

Well, my  2020 goals  didn't all get done, but then when I came up with them I wasn't anticipating a global health emergency to derail... Everything... So with the start of the New Year I figured I should revisit last year's goals and set new goals for this year. Image by Ockert Le Roux from Pixabay 2020 goals Finish rewriting apps at work. Try doing actual usability testing on at least 2 apps in order to determine if it's worth our while for future development. Complete UX/design training curriculum at work. Read at least one professional development type book per month. Finish 2 major e-textiles/wearable electronics projects by the end of the year. Finish up the nativity figurines I made in pottery class before Christmas. Finish 3 mixed media 3D printed/acrylic paintings by the end of the year. Things I'm already doing but want to keep doing include: Kick ass at work. (No false modesty here) Practice Spanish at least 6 days a week. Mentor CS students and women tr...

I started this book waaaay back in the good ol' days, BC. Before Coronavirus. And then the pandemic struck and blew up my placid dev existence. On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 4pm NMSU finally decided to allow us those of us who wanted or needed to, to work from home. I took the weekend plus 2 days to get my home office set up; I had a feeling this was going to go on longer than any of us thought at the time. That decision has paid off in spades as I was able to get a pretty sweet dedicated workspace set up, with a corner desk, my 2 personal monitors, my work monitor, my work tower, a printer/storage cabinet, and a new laser printer. Oh, and a nice office chair and one of those carpet protectors. Current me is very grateful to past me for having that forethought...  Anyway, I officially started working from home March 18. By that time NMSU was no longer "allowing" us to work from home by choice, but instead sending everyone possible home. In less than a week we had to move n...

I had originally planned to read a book about form usability this month, but one of my goals for the year was to try out usability testing. Last month's book, Steve Krug's  Don't Make Me Think , convinced me to try, and we needed to go live this month with some Very Important, Highly Visible features on our internal portal that everyone in the entire department needs to use. Don't Make Me Think 's promises of immediate, valuable feedback on usability problems from doing usability testing convinced me that NOW was the time, hence the switch to Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy , which focuses on doing informal, cheap, and easy usability testing, and suggests what to try first when trying to fix the issues that are inevitably discovered during testing. It was an easy, fast read, so I was able to finish the book in time to use its advice to guide our very first usability tests AND fix most of the issues we discovered during testing before goin...

One of my goals for this year is to read a book per month that's related to my work. I've already finished the book for January, mainly because I had started it last year, but hey, it counts! Anyhow, the book is Don't Make Me Think  by Steve Krug . While it is a little dated with respect to mobile UX at this point (this 3rd edition was published in 2014), it was a very useful read with lots of specific, actionable advice. So much so that I had to give up on trying to bookmark every useful thing and just created a long list of ideas and items to discuss with my fellow devs instead. I highly recommend this book if you, like me, are a dev who is responsible for user interfaces without having (almost) any formal training on UI or UX. In other words, most devs from a traditional CS background... Argh. But anyhow, it really is a great resource for simple, specific ways to improve your user interfaces. We're definitely going to redesign our navigation based on the great...

It's a new year and I have all kinds of stuff I want to get done. In the hopes of achieving some of it, I'm making a list of specific, quantifiable goals: Finish rewriting apps at work. Try doing actual usability testing on at least 2 apps in order to determine if it's worth our while for future development. Complete UX/design training curriculum at work. Read at least one professional development type book per month. Finish 2 major e-textiles/wearable electronics projects by the end of the year. Finish up the nativity figurines I made in pottery class before Christmas. Finish 3 mixed media 3D printed/acrylic paintings by the end of the year. Things I'm already doing but want to keep doing include: Kick ass at work. (No false modesty here) Practice Spanish at least 6 days a week. Mentor CS students and women trying to break into tech/software development. Ideally I'd like to get more than this done, but life is busy and I'm trying to keep it ...