The working world also largely disincentivizes broadcasting weakness, which is a huge loss given failure represents an opportunity
Lovely post from Eric. Spot on in defining a problem area, and specific in recommending solutions.
Modeling your notion of what success is from what others publicly share doesn’t grant you the vital context of why they made the decisions they did, and what constrains they had to work with.
I can see this practice being useful, even for only myself in a non-work context like blogging, but the work context is probably even more transformative.
At the end of the day, we all still have to produce value for the place that employs us, with value being highly dependent on the organization’s priorities.
Eric with a shakedown of comic sans jokes:
Even though I put a lot of effort into selecting typefaces, I’m not precious about it. If someone changes the typeface, its font size, line height, letter spacing, and color to meet their needs, I’m delighted! It means that they’re interested enough in the content to expend effort to make it legible.
Why do you care so much about setting and overriding (see: dictating) someone else’s preferences?
The thing is, you can’t know what works for someone’s access needs, but you can provide mechanisms for them to help themselves, and that’s totally fine.
It’s one thing to take a critical eye to things like personas, but it’s another to question the larger structures that facilitate and reinforce their use.
How have our histories and practices affected the way culture is manufactured? What decisions are being made for others without their input, or even awareness of their existence? What power structures inform our notions of frameworks, categorization, and cognition?
Representation is important, but it is also an output of a larger system.
If you make websites, a thing you should know is that complete redesigns are oftentimes political, and not stemming from user demand. It’s a move to claim ownership over those who came before you.
From now on, whenever I see a redesign announced to the world, I am going to ask myself: “hmmm...I wonder who is claiming control over what over in that business?”
Eric Bailey, speaking on some research work he was doing designing a dashboard:
That dashboard would have been a month or so of work for me, but it would have been the participant's everyday experience for the foreseeable future. That's a huge responsibility.
As a designer, this is a good reminder of your impact on humans, irregardless of scale.