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Author Archives: Irit Arkin
UX Review: Emergency Measures
If you’re working on a product and have no particular understanding of UX, you can still do a basic UX review to stop the most obvious disasters. This will not be as good as getting a UX expert or experienced … Continue reading
Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 6: The Secret Usefulness of Bad QAs
We’ve all worked with testers who were bad at their job; it was frustrating and felt like a giant waste of time and effort. But hold on to those bad testers: they’re more useful than you think.
Recommended Reading: how the Other Side Feels
Programming: we didn’t start out crazy, we’re being driven crazy.
Posted in Reading
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Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 5: It’s not a Feature, it’s a Bug: Fixing Bugs Your Users Enjoy
Some bugs, even quite severe ones, can seem to your users like very nice features. Bugs that are likely to reach this status are those that make work smoother at the expense of security (for example, not enforcing part of … Continue reading
Recommended Reading: Pay Attention Before it Gets Complicated
Designing something? “Simplicity doesn’t happen accidentally. It needs to be actively cultivated. Complexity is what happens when you aren’t paying attention”.
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QA: Need Help Finding UX Faults? Ask the Technical Writers
Technical writers have a very clear goal: explain the interface. That means they notice, instantly, when it’s inexplicable. If your interface is a confusing mess with overly-complicated procedures, buttons that make no sense, important options hidden in sub-menus and related … Continue reading
Make Yourself a Better Writer: Treat Every Document Like a Writing Sample
The only way to improve, the internet keeps telling us, is to push yourself past your comfort zone so that you’re always learning new things. Writing day in and day out, however, can mean you start to churn out documents on … Continue reading
Posted in Articles, Technical Writing
Tagged Quick writing tips, Writing for writers
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Quick Writing Tip: Don’t Add Images Until the Text is Done
Here’s a quick writing tip for user manuals: don’t add your images to the manual until you’re done writing your text. This has two advantages. The first is that when you add images one at a time over the long … Continue reading
Glossing Over the UX: Why Do so Many UX Bugs Get Past the QA?
Some bugs are a work of art. Consider a login page I encountered a few weeks ago. Two fields, one Submit button – so far so obvious. But above the button was the text “Do not press Enter to log … Continue reading
Recommended Reading: Colours and Buttons
The User Experience Stack Exchange has a nice discussion about confirmation buttons and colours, with lots of good points about clear communication in UI.
Posted in Reading
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