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Posted on 28th April 2010
I’m not a genius.
I’m not a genius. That might sound shocking if your perception of design involves people solving problems by having brilliant, inspired, creative ideas. But it’s absolutely true: I’m not any smarter than the next guy, and I don’t have better ideas than anyone else. But I am a designer, and if you task a non-designer
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Posted on 28th October 2009
User-centered design for technical communicators
There's a lot of overlap in skills and process between user-centered design and technical communication. This presentation explores that overlap by answering three questions: What exactly is user-centered design, how can technical communicators borrow from UCD to make their deliverables better, and where in the UCD process can technical communicators contribute to increase their value?
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Posted on 25th October 2009
#ProTips: Twitter’s collected wisdom on usability testing
I asked my Twitter friends what one tidbit of wisdom they'd share with someone new to usability testing. Their responses provide great insights on planning and facilitating usability tests.
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Posted on 6th October 2009
Building emapthy with user stories
As a user experience designer in the agile world, my job is as much about influencing my team's DNA to include best practices for UX design as it is about actually designing. I stumbled on one powerful method for doing that--tying user research and user stories together using personas.
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Posted on 6th August 2009
Lessons from leading scrum: It’s not a race.
Sprint after sprint, I watched my team commit to a reasonable amount of work and then utterly fail to deliver it. Turns out, a team's not much of a team without a shared goal.
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Posted on 31st July 2009
Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation is out now
Anne Gentle's new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation is all about how social media can transform technical documentation into a two-way street of collaboration between companies and their customers.
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Posted on 29th July 2009
User-centered design: A road map to usability
Nobody ever set out to build a Web site that’s difficult to use. Even so, many sites prove to be frustrating for the very people they’re built to serve. When we design without a clear and proven understanding of the site’s audience–or with our own preferences and biases unchecked–we put the overall usability and effectiveness of the site at jeopardy.
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Posted on 1st April 2008
Introducing Lucy Cora Sansbury
My daughter, Lucy, was born on Thursday, 3/27, at 3:10 pm. Early the next morning, at her routine pediatric checkup, we learned that she was born with a congenital heart defect called transposition of the great arteries. She underwent open heart surgery yesterday, 3/31. I’ve written much more about Lucy and the rough road she’s
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Posted on 24th March 2008
Visual Structure workshop sound bites
These nuggets stuck with me after seeing Jean-luc Doumont's excellent Visual Structure workshop at STC Atlanta's Currents 2008 conference.
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Posted on 5th November 2006
Digital Pinhole Photography
The other night, the lovely Mrs. Sansbury and I modified the lens cover of our Canon Digital Rebel XT to convert the camera into a pinhole camera. The process was pretty simple–I just drilled a hole in the exact center of the lens cover. I used a small bit, but in retrospect, I could have
