We say we’re crafting personas to fit the needs of “real” people—yet we easily revert to abstractions when raw emotions enter the picture. Common human experiences aren’t “edge” cases; we don’t get to dismiss what seems uncomfortable or different to us. In this excerpt from Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher take on the elephant in the room—the tendency to look the other way.
Topic: Web Strategy
Dealing with Difficult Workshop Attendees
What do you do when your carefully planned workshop starts going off the rails? Senongo Akpem shares a few strategies for handling stressful workshop situations.
Selecting Effective Workshop Tasks
You’ve identified your goals, set an an agenda, and invited attendees, now the fun begins. Senongo Akpem shows how to pick the best workshop tasks to achieve your goals.
Planning and Organizing Workshops
Good workshops start long before you get everyone in the room. By setting goals, creating an agenda, and communicating early and often with your attendees, Senongo Akpem shows how you can set your workshop up for success.
Writing CSS on Growing Teams
A clear process—based on communication, code reviews, and documentation—will help your team write strong, modular CSS together.
Mentoring Junior Designers
Mentorship isn’t magic; training doesn’t just happen. You need a clear process in place to train junior team members and give them the skills they need to grow. Senongo Akpem shares his process for asking questions and tailoring projects to match a team member’s abilities.
Multimodal Perception: When Multitasking Works
Don’t believe everything you hear these days about multitasking—it’s not necessarily bad. In fact, humans have a knack for perception that engages multiple senses. Graham Herrli unpacks the theories around multimodal communication and suggests that we can sometimes make things easier to understand by making them more complex to perceive.
Building to Learn
Whether you’re just getting started on the web, or trying to pick up a new framework, Susan Robertson has a radical idea: build something that interests you. Sure, there are courses and tutorials out there to walk you through it, but a project you’re actually excited about will help you solidify those skills and make them easier to recall when you need them most.
Developing Empathy
Everyone talks a lot about empathy, but distilling that theory-driven talk into practices for our day-to-day work can seem daunting. Susan Robertson shows how she’s been able to practice empathy for users as a developer.
Designing for Non-Native Speakers
Half of all web pages are in English, but only about 28 percent of people using the internet speak English as a first language. Fortunately, designing for non-native English speakers doesn’t have to come with a huge price tag. Senongo Akpem shares three straightforward strategies for making your sites and apps more usable for non-native speakers.
