Learning Log, May 2021
SEA — Seasons
I always want to live more in tune with the seasons, so I'm pulling together a little site about seasonal living in the Seattle area. It'll help track the soltices throughout the year, and each season will have lists of: things to do, recurring events to attend, and seasonal produce to cook with.
This month I worked on some icons for sabbats and esbats throughout the year:
Imbolc / ostara / beltane / litha / lammas / mabon / samhain / yule.
User research decision trees
I've been picking up Cracking the PM Career by Jackie Bavaro and Gayle Laakmann McDowell in between other books. I've wanted a book about the art of PMing, without all the bro-y bluster, and this book is pretty much the universe's response.
I came across in a recent passage the idea of creating a user research decision tree. Basically, you take each and every question and pre-plan for: if the answer to this question was x, what would we do?
On my team at work we tend to go into user research with a set of hypotheses: we identify what we hope to learn and how we will apply the findings. That's more of an overarching theme to the research, though. What's different about this decision tree is it forces you to look at each question in turn to define the resulting action. Seems neat—I imagine that mindfulness would help ensure that every question is truly needed and best phrased to suit its purpose.
にほんご (Japanese)
Still slowly chipping away at vocabulary; reached the end of my free levels in WaniKani (level 3), so I sprung for a year’s subscription. Would like to get more consistent with practice again in June.
On the Internet
Reading
Web design and development
- WebAIM Million – 2021 Update. I want to highlight this observation: “Web site categories that were subject to increased civil rights complaints and lawsuits in 2020 were among the most improved.”
- Creating Colorful, Smart Shadows
- 16px or Larger Text Prevents iOS Form Zoom—TIL!
- What Google’s New Page Experience Update Means for Images on Your Website
Other interesting articles
- Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home: whenever my S.O. and I get sucked into our homegrown memes again—lots of pandemic togetherness—we say, “we need to see other people. Not date them, just see them.”
- Caught up on James Clear newsletter issues and particularly liked the quotes in this issue