No lofty observations this week. For one reason and another it's been a bit Meh.
Work
Firebreak trundled along pointlessly. Each day was a processeion of scripted exercises:
- write down ideas
- vote on the ideas
- translate the selected ideas into questions
- vote on the questions
- come up with ideas to answer the questions
- vote on the answers
🙄
The cold that's been going around started getting to me on Wednesday and I absented myself from proceedings as the week wore on.
Not having gone through the whole process from beginning to end means I'll have to temper my criticism of Firebreak, I think. Hey ho.
One thing
The only thing I want to note: there was a point where I was crossing swords with the senior UX designer over whether we needed to figure out "the user flow". They said that we should map the journey from initial landing, through sign-up and account creation, in order to figure out what features we needed to document.
I was of the opinion that this was a) unnecessary — let's just assume they've signed up, or that they don't need to sign up b) boring — we're not building an actual app here, just spitballing ideas?
Anyway, I realised afterwards that I'd just been saying how clueless I was and how I was looking forward to seeing how real UX professionals would approach the problem (of creating wireframes) and then, when it was in front of me, I wanted to skip it. So that's another contadiction that Firebreak engenders — how to learn the doing-things-properly when you don't have the time.
And another thing
Also as well,on the doing-things-properly front, we reached a point in the designing where we were supposed to move from rough sketches to more formal wireframes.
This is where I found myself looking at a full-page mock-up and thinking "how the heck do we expect this to be accessible?". We did have a conversation about it, and I said my piece about how we should conceive the page primarily as an accessible document, with enhancements (like a map) being affordances for those who can use them.
So, yeah I suppose we talked about a11y, but I still feel like we were skipped that boring process in the name of time. Like, that would've been a valuable stage to simulate since that's what we're missing in normal development cycles.
OK, enough about work.
Play
Em. Not much to report. Had tea at the OG's last night, had a few drinks, played family fortunes.
Accidentally wiped out my MinUi install on the RG35XX+ by swapping the SD cards (why?!) and was unable to restore it. Also couldn't get Kokiri working (partitions don't expand on boot and it won't boot if I expand them manually). Ended up reverting to my RGB30, which is probably good, but it frustrates me to have spent so much effort and then not get the outcome I wanted.
Trying to get into drawing, with very little success (but some success).
Going forward
I have pottery class later today, we're off to Bute tomorrow for half term. I'll take my drawing stuff and try to do some comics while I'm away. Hopefully work will get back onto a more even keel next week and I'll stop feeling so listless.
END