Do you remember the early days of social media? Back then there were a lot of bloggers, marketers, and other digital communicators talking about how social media platforms were conversational. Less broadcasting, more back and forth. For whatever reason, in the research and evaluation reporting world, that message never really stuck. We still broadcast our […]
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6 Big Reasons to Ditch the PDF Report
Still delivering your final report as a PDF? You’re definitely NOT alone. The PDF final report is still very much status quo in the research and evaluation worlds. But I think it’s time we move on. We give too much up when we choose to use PDFs for our reports. And the features we give […]
Make Me Think
There is this fantastic book on usability written by Steve Krug called, Don’t Make Me Think. It’s not new, first released out all the way back in 2000. But if you have never read it, you should. Even if you have never really considered yourself a web designer. “Don’t Make Me Think!” Krug’s First Law […]
Grandpa Henry’s Potato Leek Soup
I’m taking a sick day today. Picked up a case of strep throat at the end of last week that’s now hopefully working its way out of my system. But sick days are boring, and instead of streaming yet another movie or show, I thought I would share the recipe for my favorite soup. My […]
Accessibility is NOT a Checklist
It’s time to change how we think about accessibility. For just about half of my career I worked at company called Westat on a variety of different federal contracts. And when you work on federal contracts you quickly learn that every report destined to be shared publicly needs to be “508 compliant.“ At a certain […]
Your Report is a Website
It’s time to stop designing reports for that one person who one time printed and then, subsequently, read your report. For the vast majority of people, your report is a website. It is read using a digital device, connected to the internet, and served from someone else’s computer (a.k.a. a server probably owned by Amazon). […]