Accessibility, Artist, Music, Philosophy
You’re shopping online at your favorite store. You set up an account for future visits. You fill out your name, email, shipping address, billing info, card details. You save the info. You start shopping and add some items to the cart. The checkout form asks for all that information again.…
Imagine buying a car. You sign a contract. Then you discover the dealership changed the interest rate after you clicked “Accept.” Or you transfer money to a bank account. You confirm the transaction. Then you realize you sent it to the wrong person—and the funds are gone. These aren’t typos.…
You submit a form. An error flashes: “Invalid.” That’s it. Invalid what? Invalid how? Invalid because you used the wrong format, or invalid because the email is already taken, or invalid because the server had a seizure and forgot what an email even is? For all the user knows, the…
Before I Can Fill It, I Need to Know What You’re Asking There’s a form I encountered recently that had twelve fields. No labels. Just placeholder text inside each input that disappeared the moment you started typing. If you forgot what a field was asking for, you had to delete…
Trigger Warning & Note Before You Read This post discusses eating disorders, mental health, adverse medication reactions, and hospitalization. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a healthcare professional. You deserve support. Three months ago, I published “When Algorithms Forget You’re Human.” I wrote about my wife—recovering from an eating…
Finding a job these days is a brutal thing. Artificial intelligence is doing the initial screening and the interviews. There are ghost postings that never lead anywhere. If you do get through, people are facing five, six, sometimes seven rounds of interviews, only to be left hanging, wondering whether there…
We’ve all been there. You fill out a form. You hit submit. Nothing happens. Maybe the border turns red. Maybe a little icon winks at you. Maybe your computer hums aggressively. But nobody tells you what went wrong. You stare at the screen. “Did it fail? Did it work? Am I…
Why Labels Need to Match Across Pages You’re at a party. Someone introduces themselves as “Michael.” You shake his hand, have a nice conversation, move on. Later that evening, you see him again across the room. You walk over and say, “Hey, Michael!” He looks at you blankly. “It’s Mike…
Imagine walking into your favorite library. You know exactly where the fiction section is. It’s always on the second floor, to the left of the stairs. The librarian knows where you go. Your feet know the way. It’s muscle memory. It is a week later when you walk in, and…
You’re filling out your taxes. Your cursor lands in the first field. You start typing. And halfway through entering your email address—whoosh!—the form submits automatically. Now you’re looking at an error page because you didn’t finish. Or worse, you submitted incomplete data and lost what you had typed. Your screen…