Tag Archives: usability

Medium’s Complex Simplicity is Awful

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping out with our corporate blog, a Medium publication. Medium is utterly awful for the purpose of corporate blogging.

Disclaimer: Some of the things described here are so molar-crushingly bad that I suspect they are in fact not true. Perhaps it’s the lack of any detailed documentation for Medium, the mad navigation system, or clever-silly interaction design that hides things from you. So if anyone knows differently, please let me know.

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“Irregular Verbs” in Software Design

(This post implements my new year’s resolution of sub-titling my sections so as to make me look like I know what I’m talking about.)

At MailOnline, we have no development process. Well, that’s not entirely true, we use Programmer Anarchy. The developers decide for themselves which “table” they want to work on, and can then leave to join another table at any time. A table is roughly aligned to one or more projects.

But the main thing as far as I’m concerned is that anyone can – and does – have an opinion about the UX of the product. This is because, well,  it’s Anarchy. A large part of my role is therefore to persuade people that I’m worth the time (and my salary) as a UX designer. This makes for a refreshing change to the command and control culture of previous environments I’ve been in.

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