The Family

Web usability is that corner of the web that says that people use web pages and that perhaps web pages should therefore be written and structured for people.

You can bring just about anything under the umbrella of usability. One of the mantras is that it should be part of the planning and design process, and that the more work you put into planning your usability the fewer problems you’ll have to fix when it’s all in production.

Which is all well and good.

There are several usability planning tools. One of them is variously called user stories, user scenarios, user narratives … you get the idea. (18F: User Scenarios) As a usability specialist (so to speak), I am more or less contractually obligated to have endless enthusiasm for user stories and to advocate for them in all projects.

And as you can tell – I am telegraphing this so well – my enthusiasm is more measured.

There are some particular folks at my work place (at national and local levels) who do have this user-stories-are-mandatory attitude, and I’m not sure how much of my lukewarmness stems from limitations of user stories themselves, or from these specific particular people. I do wonder about this.

But assuming it’s all legitimate, here are my thoughts:

Pro: You get a group of well meaning people together who all know the users, and tell everyone to design for the user, and everyone will come up with the same thing, right? Of course right. When you go through the exercise of writing down these things that everyone knows, it’s inevitable that everyone knows something different. So done right, user stories get everyone talking, get everyone coordinated, and give everyone a common structure for framing all their future discussions. Even if you’re just a single person team, the exercise of taking what you know and writing it down focuses your thoughts.

I mean, what’s not to like?

Con: In order to break through that wall of ‘what do I do with a blank page??’, there are all kinds of templates for how to write a good user story. Think mad libs: “As a [type of user], I need a [feature] so I can [task].” This kind of suggested format is great. It’s also horrible. For one, it’s terribly stilted. But worse, it gives everyone this formula. Just fill this out – or better yet, make your team lead fill this out – and voila, you’ve done usability. And then you have these 10 sentences, you do those 10 things, and anything wrong with the design is the fault of the person who came up with the user stories.

In other words, this tool is being used as a cudgel and a crutch. The developer doesn’t have to understand the user at all, they just have to require someone else to write user stories before they’ll undertake the task. And I think that’s horrible, because user stories are a summary; they are lecture notes; not the book. They work beautifully when you do know the full story and just need to focus on the salient points. But if all you know are the salient points … well, fill in your own example.

***

It is odd, being the usability expert in the room, and trying to throw cold water on the user stories the other person is insisting on.

It is very likely that Joseph will go out to the ranch again. Maybe just once, but it’s likely there will be at least that once.

But I will never be out there again.

We wanted to walk the perimeter and to stop and visit some of the far-flung corners where I’ve only been once. We wanted to go rockhounding and do those things that we have enjoyed doing; to have a good last day. We wanted to clean up a bit in the house and clear out everything.

It did not go according to plan.

Friday Joseph walked to one of those far corners and encountered numerous wild hogs. We decided that a visit to those corners with Eleanor along would be too risky. We looked for rocks a bit, but overcast turned to raining – just enough rain to make walking around outside unpleasant. Joseph found two good ones; I found three little chips. And for the house and the rest, we just … left. The house is clear. Well, we left them the trash can and the dish soap and paper towels. And certain other obvious things that are of the house (like remotes to the air conditioners). The shop is 99% clear, and the new owners can just deal with the dead mouse on their own.

And then we picked up a few more of the large centerpiece sandstone rocks, since Mom expressed an interest, and we came home.

The door did not lock any differently. The land did not seem any different, the cows did not behave any differently, the gate lock did not snap shut nor the gate clang sonorously as we left. It was all tremendously anticlimactic.

I’ve had this feeling so many times before as I’ve left a place for the final time. As if I am longing for some ritual goodbye process that will clear accounts with the old place.

Like one should braid one black and two green strands (one for endings, two for beginnings) and bury the strand in front of the doorway. That one should stand in each room with some ceremonial drink (tea, perhaps), and say “Thank you for being a good bedroom”, leave a newly minted penny in the center of the room, and back out of the room. But then at the threshold of the house, say “Thank you for sheltering my family and for being a good house. May we each have joy in our new lives” and turn and walk out of the door, closing it behind you without looking back.

There used to be all these rituals for each transition in life. We have lost almost all of them. I want some of them back.

On the other hand, I am tired of moving rocks. I don’t need to move any more rocks again for a long, long time. Just to quantify what we’ve done, mostly all within the last month, I counted our rocks.

All of these totals have been rounded down. And this is limited to rocks that we’ve brought from the ranch in the last year; the boxes of petrified wood that we’ve collected prior to this are not included. For petrified wood, I’m not counting the little chips at all.

Final tally:
Sandstone: 90
Honeycomb limestone: 15
Petrified Wood: 20 (this is no doubt low – there are 40 large/large-ish pieces about, and I’m not certain which were before and which after. So I halved it.)
Other : 10 (there are several odd ones in the mix)

135 rocks. At least.

With a combined weight of let’s say 7592 pounds.

We are done with moving rocks.

We did not get everything today. And yet both trucks were completely full.

There is still a lot of large stuff in the shop. Trash, but bulky. But by ‘a lot’ I mean 20-30 items; not an entire shop worth of stuff. The work done to date has been extraordinary.

And in the house, it’s a vacuum and a stepladder and some odds & ends. That’s really it. You could fit it all in a car. Maybe not a small car, because it is a stepladder. But it is a nothing load from the truck’s perspective. So it’s as good as everything.

Sigh.

Tomorrow will be my last trip there. Everything about the ranch makes me sad and it has been a huge burden these last several months – and yet I am sad to be leaving it.

This is not my type of landscape. I have no emotional resonance with Texas scrub. Give me soaring pine trees and mountains, any day. But in the last several years that we’ve been here, it’s just been their home. Landscape doesn’t really matter for your home. And then, when it wasn’t their home, we were free-er somehow to walk about anywhere we wished, to take the bulldozer or tractor here or there just because, and that liberty made a connection. And as we walked, Joseph told me this story and that story and pointed out these nearly hidden features and outlined how they had once been.

I knew they both loved it out there. I knew his Dad in particular was truly in the place he wished to be. But seeing such numerous and tangible signs of that happiness – seeing the energy and planning and life that had been there – in so many ways the ranch and Happy are connected. And we are leaving the ranch.

And yet – what we are doing is exactly what he would have wished us to do; what he told Joseph to do. We are moving into the future; supported by instead of burdened by this legacy.

It is still hard. And tomorrow we will say goodbye.

Hehe. It finally happened – I have been discovered to be posting things.

Knowing how long this site has been unused – not a single post all of last year – and also knowing how I ~still~ routinely checked in all last year – I’ve been wondering how long it would be. A week? A month?

Will this change what or how I write? Do I have enough practice and momentum to not be swayed by the though of an actual reader (hi, mom!)? We shall see.

Next question: how long till Chris checks in?? 🙂

So …

This is the last weekend. If we don’t get it now, we’re leaving it behind forever.

And we have officially reached the point where we can’t stuff any more stuff (large stuff, anyway) into our garage. Even our remaining path is getting a little crowded.

But the end is in sight! And not just chronologically. Joseph & I think that we could probably get everything in the truck in one more trip. We almost went out there twice tonight to reach that threshold, but it would have been full dark when we got there and also it would have been stupid. But tomorrow Dad is coming with and that means two trucks – no problem at all with two trucks. We’ll be fully cleared out tomorrow.

And I am STILL finding pieces of petrified wood out there. We’re picking up all this gorgeous sandstone to use as a flowerbed border. Now, when the ranch was in its full glory they’d picked up so many pieces and used them as borders for their own flowerbeds and around trees and such. This is very convenient for us now. We’ve pulled up the known areas, but today I just poked the shovel down around all the trees and found two more caches. One of which included this new foot long piece of petrified wood.

Which, by the way, is so intriguing. There are hints of color shifts and some distinct crystallization and it may be a very, very interesting rock on the inside. The outside is pretty nondescript. So it’s excellent rock saw fodder. Usually, the big rocks escape the rock saw because their interest derives from their size. But this one … I want to see the insides more.

It’s also amusing because as I was cleaning it, parts kept flaking off. This rock was fully buried, and there’s a lot of sand stuffed in all the crevices, and some very enterprising tiny plants have been doing their best for the last decade or two or three. So we have 3-4 flakes about the size of a fingernail – your thumb, perhaps. They’re totally remaining as part of the collection; will take one to work too (where I have many of these rocks). Oh yes, I will say. This is petrified wood. I worked hard to find all the petrified wood before we sold the property. This piece was buried a few inches down, but I found it.

I’m probably going to look for more sandstone tomorrow. We’ll see if I find any more petrified wood. For the last month I’ve been saying ‘but we’ve gotten all the big stuff already’ and I’m wrong practically every day, so now I’ve decided to say ‘I know we left some big stuff behind but I just couldn’t find it all.’

Eleanor had a nightmare last night.

She’s had bad dreams before, but this one seemed worse. Perhaps it was just that she’s finally able to describe the experience – but her panic and upset seemed greater than before as well. So I’m just calling it as the bad dream/nightmare threshold.

From what I could piece together through the sobs and muffled voice of someone who has their head buried in your shoulder, there were lots (swarms) of tiny ants crawling all over her left hand. And they didn’t bite her or hurt her, but they were scary.

She kept grabbing my arm and pinching it between her thumb and hand, though, so I wonder at that ‘not biting’ part.

We turned on lights and examined her hand and she confirmed there weren’t any ants there anymore. We went into her room and looked in and all around her bed and they weren’t there any more either. And we talked about nightmares and being scared and then waking up and being OK. And after a long while (OK, 10 minutes, but that’s a long time at 4am) she settled with daddy and pretty much immediately collapsed back into sleep.

Poor little one.

The first nightmare I remember, I would have been somewhere around 4-7, I think.

I wonder if she will remember this one. I wonder all the time about what memories she’s forming (though usually I’m wondering about happy memories).

Well, the project has been graded and I got full marks. Which is pleasant.

I did not successfully copy the page I tried to copy, but it is a very complicated page. And some of the effects may be from 3rd party libraries. I guess it’s OK if I can’t reverse engineer drupal in a weekend.

But there are two things that bug me. The instructor is out this week – he has a new baby, squeeeee – but he said we could do office hours next week and figure it out.

The page I’m copying is https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html.

When you resize the page, the menu gets smaller, and then it collapses into a pull down menu bar. The menu is a simple list; I don’t quite understand all the ins & outs of the collapse, but it’s handled by Bootstrap so I don’t have to.

However, it doesn’t quite collapse. The fourth element goes out of the list and stays visible. But here’s the thing – the menu is hidden once it collapses. The 4th element is part of the hidden menu. And yet it is visible. When the menu is visible, I can move that 4th element over. I just can’t figure out how to make it visible all the time.

And then there’s the sidebar. There’s a sidebar on the site; it takes up the entire length and is part of the page structure. At smaller page widths, that collapses into a tab that you can expand, where it floats on top of the page structure.

I didn’t even try. It’s part of the larger page, then it just goes away. It was on my list to figure the ‘remove from the site flow and make this tab bar’ … but it was near the bottom of the list.

I even tried to convince myself it was some 3rd-party add-on, thus letting myself off the hook for figuring it out, but then I found the same menu behavior at http://www.bearlakewatch.com/. And their page is quite slick, but it’s not quite as layered as NASA, and I can ~kind of~ see how they’re doing that collapsing sidebar. But still – really low on the priority list.

There’s also a collapsing sub-navigation bar that I didn’t attempt, the way the main content of the page links, the way images are associated with articles (I just hard coded it – figured that perhaps their content management system is also hard coding it in post processing, and I just had to make it look right).

So these are all important things, yes? Some of them are major structural and functional and highly visible things, too. And yet … full marks.

Of course I am pleased, but I am also somewhat unsatisfied. I want a comment or something that says the gaps were noticed but that they didn’t rise to the threshold of dinging points. Or that the complexity of the rest of the attempt made up for the parts I didn’t figure out. Or something. Otherwise I’m left wondering if the details I think are important are even noticeable.

Today Chris came out and helped us pick up pretty rocks. Not things we needed – not things that had to be removed to keep faith with the contract. Just things we wanted to have. And it wasn’t a big deal to coordinate – we asked, he said sure.

We have had such amazing help during this last year.

When everything first happened, my colleagues at work – and in particular my boss – were nothing but supportive. And more than just letting me take time off as needed. So many people asked caring questions, listened to me, checked in on progress. I got the feeling some of them would have come to the funeral, if I’d asked.

Joseph’s friends really stepped up. They came out and packed and carried and hauled; they watched Eleanor – and they called and talked and listened and made sure he had their full support. There are tales of people feeling isolated and set apart by grief and circumstances; the absolute opposite happened here. There were times that I would just feel overwhelming gratitude that we had such amazing generous friends.

And my family – I know I’m talking to you guys here, and it’s a little awkward to tell your gratitude to someone directly … but oh, you guys. We could not have had more, or better, support. Chris has come out multiple times to do major heavy lifting moving things that we very literally could not have moved without help. Christina who has watched Eleanor and who has been the absolute epitome of an active listener. It has all helped so very, very much.

And Mom & Dad. Where would we have been without you? The only reason it has been possible to clear the ranch is that you’re letting us hold so much of it at your place. Without that option, we would have lost so much that would have hurt so badly to lose. Mom who has taken Eleanor every week, often multiple days a week, keeping Eleanor on an even keel in those first awful months when we were falling apart and now again in these last critical weeks. And in the middle, the constant known date that we could just pause and breathe – that has been the biggest thing keeping us in any equilibrium throughout the year.

Dad, who has come out every weekend of late; who has stuffed his very new garage that he had barely even started to enjoy. Who has appreciated these things that Joseph’s dad appreciated; that Joseph himself appreciates. The loan of the trailer; the option to fill up two trucks; the help deciding each thing that would stay or go there in the shop – even just the expertise in tying down a load securely. We could not have done this half so well, and in many senses we could not have done it at all, without you.

Thank you all. We are truly indebted to you, and will always be grateful.

Today we finally hit the threshold where all the things we’re doing look like they might be making a difference.

Everything is off the walls or detached from whatever it was attached to. The things that are staying have been decided on. Almost all of the important things are moved; almost all the heavy things are moved. And – get this – everything in the kitchen is boxed up.

I’m as surprised as anyone else by this. The last several boxes can’t be taped – all the bulky & tall stuff, like cookie sheets, that will not fit in either the book boxes or small boxes we had on hand. So they are standing up and the box isn’t shut. Whatever – it’s all in a box, it’s all coming home.

There’s still stuff that needs to be boxed, and there are still so many trips that need to be made. But I think that it’s down to the point where we’ll be able to finish next weekend.

And tomorrow I won’t be packing kitchen boxes. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.

Class. I just talk about class now, don’t I? Well, it’s the thing that’s happening in my life, unless you would be entertained by the intricacies of packing kitchen boxes. I have made progress. I really have. Only 1000 more boxes to pack.

So in class, the instructor keeps saying things like ‘oh, this won’t be for a grade; just see how far you can get.’ Which has seemed a bit unfair. I mean, I know I’m going to do it; he knows I’m going to do it, but the trade off is that he has to look at it and say ‘good job’ and give me a sticker.

As I mentioned, this adult education approach where we’re actually supposed to believe that learning the material is more important than the grade we get has some serious drawbacks.

However, there has been an interesting personal development. Remember oh so many weeks ago when I had to make a web page, and wanted to do one thing outside of scope, and couldn’t quite talk myself into it? Well, this spirit of rebellion has been nurtured by the “these aren’t really assignments” tasks.

Cause if they aren’t assignments, and they’re not graded, then I don’t have to follow their instructions. This is the third not-assignment where I’ve done this, and the first one where I realized why I suddenly felt free to do so. It is interesting. Because I’m certainly doing more with the assignment; often doing slightly more difficult things, and that’s unquestionably a good thing from the point of view of learning. Repetition, challenge, so forth.

And yet, I can only do so when the assignments are turned into not-assignments, and I get mad about it, and do all this extra stuff because I’ll show them, dang it, tell me this isn’t really the assignment and just look at what I think of your so-called instructions. So there!

But likewise I’m not likely (as in, I don’t do this) that I’d just seek out some novel challenge, say hmm let’s see if I can do that, and then do it … except in the structure of a class where I have to do these things; they’re assigned.

Psychology. It’s a strange odd world inside of one’s head.