While using Team Warren’s Medicare For All Calculator I was surprised and delighted by the ability to populate this prompt with a pre-calculated value:

Clicking a link lets you use the average cost for a family of four or for a single adult— and of course, she cites her sources for these figures.

This is a welcome improvement over the student loan debt forgiveness calculator she provided a few months back:

A while back, I wrote about what it means to incorporate UX principles into instructional design. I mentioned that the faculty perspective is often absent from these conversations, meaning that the UX of creating a good UX for students… is bad for instructors. I encountered a perfect example of this while helping to build a course site in NYU Classes, a Learning Management System (LMS) powered by Sakai.

NYU Classes has a tool called “Lessons,” which allows faculty to create structured sequences of material for students. …

I’m an entirely self-taught coder. Like many women who came of age in the 00s, I learned HTML and CSS in order to spruce up my profile pages for MySpace and LiveJournal. I didn’t realize how valuable those skills could be until I started creating and editing websites as an instructional technologist. Once I brushed up on my HTML and CSS, I decided to delve into Javascript in order to further strengthen my front-end skills. It’s been slow going!

Using CodeAcademy, I got familiar enough with Javascript to understand and edit existing code, but I wasn’t able to write my own code. Going through FreeCodeCamp’s Javascript lessons helped to further solidify my understanding, and working through their projects allowed me to plan, build, and deploy projects all on my own. …

***Note: the images embedded in this article are images of presentation slides, the content of which is discussed in the text of the article.

I work as an instructional technologist in the New York University Faculty of Arts & Science Office of Educational Technology. In effort to keep in line with the University’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we organized a panel on accessibility for classrooms and course materials. Our lineup included:

• A faculty member who has a disability, and who has effectively provided accommodations to numerous students with disabilities;
• A key stakeholder from NYU IT who is spearheading university-wide initiatives for digital…

After uploading my resume, I stared at this screen for almost a full minute, trying to figure out how to proceed with this job application. I was doubly frustrated, because many companies use this system for job applications, and I run into this issue every. single. time. So much for that “Quick Apply” feature.

Finally, I noticed the “Next” button, hidden away in the footer, to the left of the frame I’ve been interacting with. See where my mouse is? THAT’S where I was expecting to click in order to advance to the next screen.

I can’t think of any logical reason for the placement of this button. The Workday system has “Previous” buttons on all other screens, so it’s not like I couldn’t come back if I accidentally clicked “Next.” This isn’t a final submission or action button, so there’s no need to caution the user against clicking it too soon. …

As part of my freeCodeCamp Front End Development certificate, I was asked to build a random quote generator which met the following requirements:

• User can click a button to see a new quote
• User can click a button to tweet out a quote

Since I want to add this project to my portfolio, I thought it would be useful to explain, in detail, how I approached the process.

Brainstorming / Project planning

Before I start coding, I like to step back and think about what I’m about to build. Seems obvious, but sometimes it can be tempting to jump right into coding! …

I just finished up a one-week workshop on Learner Experience Design, taught by Jessica Knott from Michigan State University. As an instructional designer, I have been looking for ways to bring UX principles into my work, and Knott’s workshop certainly provided some inspiration. We discussed LX as the intersection of Service Design, UX, and Instructional Design, but I’m particularly interested in the overlap between the latter two.

Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb has been widely used in UX workshops and courses since 2004, and provides a blueprint for designing effective and valuable experiences. …

I first joined Twitter in 2008, and found it so boring that I doubted it would ever catch on. I suppose we can call that my Prince moment. Anyway, I joined before it was easy to share images, and now almost half of all tweets contain images.

Lately I’ve been wondering what it’s like to use Twitter if you have a visual impairment. Most tweets that contain images rely on those images to convey a point, and something is lost in translation if the image is missing. Imagine using a screen reader to read a tweet like this: