JournoGeekery

Non-reblog posts by Tiff Fehr, UX engineerette with the NYTimes. Basic disclaimer: what I do here has no official connection with corporate parentage. In fact, this may have escaped their notice.

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If a good employee asks to try remote work, or any choice about work habits they believe will help them perform well, why wouldn’t a manager let them do it on a trial basis? There’s very little risk. If it turns out to be disruptive to the team, or their performance is poor, that’s one thing as there would be an actual problem. But why not allow the employee to try? Allowing employees to try encourages them to look for better ways to work, an asset to any organization. Policies that are outright bans of anything rarely make sense as they prevents employees and managers from experimenting and evaluating actual results. Bans end thinking as people stop thinking for themselves and simply carry out a policy, the birth of bureaucracy.

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There’s no doubt about it: trying to apply responsive design to large-scale existing desktop-centric sites is really, really hard. The message I keep repeating in my workshops is that you can’t expect to just sprinkle on some magic media-query fairydust—it just doesn’t work that way. Instead, you’ve got to figure out a way to reframe all your challenges into a mobile-first way of thinking.

Instead of asking “How can I make these patterns (mega-menus, lightboxes, complex data tables) work when the screen size shrinks?”, you need to ask “What’s the problem they’re supposed to be solving, and how would I design a solution for the small screen to start with?” Once you’ve done that, then it becomes a matter of scaling up to the large screen …which is actually a much simpler problem space.

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(via Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project)

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Jonathan Corum | Gestalten TV

Jonathan Corum, the graphics editor for Science at the New York Times, designs print and interactive graphics with a decisive focus on clarity, simplicity, and elegance, translating detailed data into something widely understood.

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Mobile Menu AB Tested: Hamburger Not the Best Choice?, via @lukew.

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It’s Snack Time in the Cosmos - NYT Science Times

A gas cloud named G2 is about to collide with Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. A simulation shows how the cloud might be stretched and torn apart.

[timoni]

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, by Stewart Butterfield.

I post this because, frankly, it is an exceptional piece of writing about product making, covering the gamut from core functionality to marketing and positioning and the larger, philosophical motivations behind trying to make something excellent.

I have no counterpoints; I agree with this entire piece. I recommend you read it, too.

(via timoni)

[livelymorgue]

Aug. 27, 1983: An article enumerated the attractions of the Flemington Fair in Flemington, N.J. There was Robert Hasselbrook, who brought his 18-month-old steer and admitted that his prize half-ton animal “will be somebody’s dinner.” There was Linda Hartman with her cat, Buttons, who was struggling to sell Belgian waffle sundaes since it was “too hot for the waffles.” There was “Flem Man,” who wore a cape and drove a Ford in a demolition derby, to his wife’s chagrin: “He’s crazy,” she said. “He thinks getting killed is fun.” And a National Guard tank demonstrated its car-smashing capabilities. Photo: Frank C. Dougherty

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Every Men’s Figure Skating Jump, on One Page - NYT and the awesome Wilson Andrews.

[sunlightcities]

Easier Census data downloads are here! 

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I watched the men’s downhill races yesterday. Matthias Mayer won the race. But as I watched the individual runs it was not at all clear that he would be expected to do so. The reason for this was in how the local (United States) network showed the split times as each racer moved down the course. My question then is there an alternative way to present the race that would give the viewing audience a better perspective on how their favorite racer is doing as he progresses through the course?

[marypilon]

The Agony of Fourth place. Our latest Sochi interactive, which I think is awesome.

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If you haven’t heard of a “sneckdown” yet, it’s a clever combination of “snow” and “neckdown” - another name for a curb expansion - that uses snow formations on the street to reveal the space cars don’t use. Advocates can then use these sneckdown photos to make the case to local transportation officials that traffic calming interventions like curb bumpouts and traffic islands can be installed without any loss to car drivers. (via PHOTOS: What Snow Tells Us About Creating Better Public Spaces on E. Passyunk Avenue | This Old City)

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(via Cities, Mapped by Where Their People Go Running - The Wire)

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In defense of unicorns — Medium

Colleague Chase Davis: "Forced specialization in newsrooms is shortsighted"

Newsrooms thrive on templates. Designers don’t report, they design. Photogs don’t write investigative pieces. People come and go, but beats stay the same. That continuity is no doubt a big reason why news organizations are able to put out a paper every day.

But it’s also lazy and outmoded, particularly now that students are graduating with a broader array of skills than ever before. Certainly some of my students have wanted to learn to programming specifically because they wanted to create interactives and data visualizations. And that’s great! But many have also wanted to use programming to augment reporting, writing, photography and other more traditional storytelling skills.

For a student who wants to write, but also happens to be a talented programmer, the temptation to accept a newsroom coding job is great. They’re easier to find, more lucrative and more secure. But reflexively shunting these students into templated roles cheats them out of a broader journalistic experience, which hurts both them and the field as a whole.