sideproject

Can you tell me what is not loading? the homepage?

I once sat on a zoom call with a vision impaired user to do some accessibility testing on our site.

First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.

Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.

I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.

Well, maybe not throw away everything, but I understand the principle. There are also other areas where this could help - and one of them is "naming". Sometimes when you start a project, you don't really know what the best names are for things. Project name, repo name, service name etc. So you choose something that you think it's ok and you go ahead. As the project progresses, you realise you've named things wrong, but renaming is so annoying and tedious. Often we ignore the bad names because it doesn't seem significant. But names are how people burden their cognitive load (an example, we named our repo after planets rather than describing what the repo does - "acme-customer-module-frontend" but we named it "pluto" - now everyone has to remember what pluto is and make sure pluto is not neptune).