Hi there,

Thanks again for signing up. You’re ace!

We’re in the home stretch of 2020 now. Well done. I hope you are yours are keeping safe.

Meanwhile, I’m using a new email service provider for sending my newsletter so it may look a little different and hopefully behaves smoothly. Please let me know otherwise! By the way, for today’s newsletter, you’ll see all of the interest topics I write about. I think I’ll be able to tailor that in the future.

Warm wishes,
Di

Design

Data viz loading

Recently I was collaborating with a design team on loading states for a data visualization dashboard. I was surprised to find there are limited examples or articles on the topic, especially within design systems. I could find only 3 interesting links, one of which has broken since last week! (Disappointing, IBM!)

• The documentation on Adobe Spectrum: Line Chart reminds you to include a loading state, but says nothing about how to do that effectively.
• The demo on GitLab: Charts, Vue Component - GlAreaChart shows a chart growing vertically into view (either scaling or sliding, it’s too quick to tell). This approach solves the problem of introducing a chart of an unpredictable height onto the page and pushing content below downwards. I still find it an awkward animation style for the content at hand. It has no relationship to the data being shown.

I hope to write a longer blog post about this in the future when I’ve thought more deeply about it. In the meantime, here are some considerations for loading states in a data visualization dashboard.

Reduce page movement

On a dashboard there’s likely to be a lot of successive elements loading data. How much height will each visualization take up? A fixed height for each may reduce the amount of movement that occurs as they all load and shift the next visualization downwards.

Handle one or more errors

On a dashboard, if there are several charts with different data sources, there might be some errors on one or more visualizations. What’s the likelihood they’d all fail together or only one at a time? For example, would an individual data source fail, or the overall network connection? If it’s just one error, you might show an individual error message for that chart. If it’s likely to be several, you might replace all the content with a page loading error.

Handle zero data, zero measurements, and errors separately

In data visualization, data values of zero are meaningfully different from no measurements and different again from failing to load data. For example, if you’re looking at a sample of the site visitors to your website, you might see no data for several reasons: no one visited your website that day, analytics failed to record visits that data, or the data was recorded and the chart failed to load the data.

You might consider adding annotations or error messages to distinguish these scenarios.

What to show while loading

If you can fairly accurately predict the shape of the data, you might consider showing a loading skeleton that mimics the shape of the data. Given the variability of data, however, this is unlikely.

Otherwise, show a loading spinner.

If either time out, show an error message.

Learning the steno layout

The previously popular site Qwertysteno is down but we’re working on it. Meanwhile, Josh Grams has added a new section to Stenojig for learn-the-keyboard drills to help cover the gap. To use it, you need to to set up Plover and then disable the main dictionary so the raw steno comes through.

Stenography in history

So apparently Charles Dickens was a stenographer? He used written shorthand in court:

> The most famous Court and Parliamentary Reporter is Charles Dickens (1812-70), the distinguished British novelist. Dickens documented his career in the British Courts and Parliaments in his novel, David Copperfield, which was largely auto-biographical. His struggle and exhilaration in mastering the theory of pen shorthand are recorded in his letters, now published.

— A Brief History of Shorthand - The Steno School - court reporting - Captioning - Speech to Text - CART

Book review: Nicely Said

Nicely Said by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee

This is a short, introductory book to writing for the Web. It’s ideal for anyone new to writing online or to the tech industry. If you’ve worked as a writer, designer, researcher, marketer, I expect you’ll find most of the principles and processes familiar already.

It picks up a lot from chapter 5 or 6. There are some concrete examples for mapping content type, a reader’s emotional state, and appropriate tone. For example, a reader faced with an error message might be feeling confusion, stress, or anger, so a gentle, calm or serious tone might be appropriate.

The best chapter is chapter 9, “Touchy Subjects”. It covers responding to emergencies and writing graceful apologies. If I were a content strategist, sharing this with every person in the organisation would be my first order of business.

Consider the worst-case scenarios for your business. What would you do if there were an earthquake or data theft? If you depend on Etsy or Shopify to sell your products, how you would communicate if that service went down? … And if you’re planning for downtime or know that one of your service providers is, warn customers ahead of time.

You can also make an emergency contact list. Think of all the people you depend on to keep your business running. Who would you call if your website went down? What about your payment system or warehouse team, if you sell physical goods? Include a mix of subject-matter experts in case you need quick answers, and who to contact for late-night publishing approval, especially if you need to run something by a director or legal counsel first. Having a list like this can also help other writers when you’re out of the office.

Don’t want the book? You might still explore the nice resources section of the site for links to read.

JQ

I’ve been brushing up on my jq skills recently. jq is a command-line JSON processor.

I’ve been using jq to process package.json files I’ve fetched from GitLab using glab, an open source Gitlab CLI tool.

jq is a nifty tool. The documentation has room for improvement but if you can wrap your head around it, it’s useful for slinging JSON all over the place.

I also use it to format the current JSON file from vim: :%! jq .

Dev links

• Operator Lookup by Josh W Comeau is a search engine for JavaScript operators because special characters like => or ??= are so hard to search for online.
• Does it mutate? by Remy Sharp helps remind you which JavaScript array methods mutate and which don’t
• How to Report a Bug by Tom MacWright via polite.technology includes “some tips for how to write a bug report that will make both you and a software developer happy.”

Working 4 days a week

I’ve been working 4-day weeks for nearly 7 years now. I work Tuesdays to Fridays. I don’t work Mondays. People often ask me what it’s like and how to make it work. Here are some considerations before trying it and tips for day-to-day success.

Why?

Most of the part-timers I know started working part-time for 1 of 2 reasons. Firstly, they had been working 5 days then wanted to try 4 days so they could work on side projects. Secondly, they had taken time off as a carer or for parental leave and returned part time. My story’s a little different.

I took a few months off from employment back in 2013 when I was unwell. To ease back into employment, I started 3 days a week at a new company. As I began to recover and the role expanded, I worked up to 4 days a week. For a long time that was as much as I could manage, but then I also realised it was the right work–life balance for me. I’ve kept with it through two new companies since then.

This means that I’ve never needed to negotiate with a current company to reduce my hours. Instead, I told both prospective companies up front that, “I work 4 days a week” when applying for full-time roles. They were fine with that. I mention this because it doesn’t occur to many people that you can do this.

Companies and roles

Part time won’t work for every role or company:

• Are there deadlines you have limited control over? If there are no hard deadlines or you have control to adapt schedules to accommodate 4-day weeks, which can be common in product companies, part-time shouldn’t be an issue.
• Does your role require high availability? For example, if you’re an on-call developer, in a customer-facing role, or the only person in the business with your skillset, part-time might be more of a challenge.
• Will you have FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)? More realistically, will part-time work affect your ability to “own” projects or assets within your organisation? Would that bother you? I have seen product managers struggle more than designers or developers with part-time life, because of how responsibility is shared or distributed in different roles.

I wonder sometimes if part-time work will limit my opportunities in the future. As if it might not show enough “commitment” to the business. So far, however, it hasn’t held me back from leadership roles. You don’t need to be full-time to be a team lead, for example.

Which days

I know some people work 9 day fortnights (that is, they alternative 4 day and 5 day weeks). In my experience, that’s much harder for the immediate team to remember and schedule around. For example, planning an event 5 weeks out, they would need to specifically ask you if you’ll be working that week. In contrast, if they know you’re never in on Mondays, that’s easier to plan for.

Some people work half days on multiple days. That doesn’t work for me because that doesn’t let me “switch off” from work on those days. On the rare occasions I’ve worked a half day (e.g. taking an afternoon off for errands), I’ve found myself working slightly more than half the day, and thinking about work well into the afternoon. It works for some people, but not me.

As for choosing a day, I recommend Monday or Friday so that you can maintain focus and momentum during the work week, and enjoy long weekends every weekend. That lets you take 3-day trips whenever you like.

For Australians (such as myself) in multi-national companies, I recommend taking Mondays off. Many other countries are on their weekends then.

Fridays in many companies are social days, with lunches, activities, or even “after-work drinks”, so keep that in mind if you’re planning to skip them.

Mondays tend to have a lot of public holidays, so consider that when negotiating your pay and conditions. On a related note, part-time hours might have reduced sick leave days, but you’ll still get sick at the same rate as usual. You may need to budget for running short of paid sick days.

Is it really 4 days?

For me, yes. I don’t do 5 days’ worth of work in 4. I don’t work long days, Tuesday to Friday. I don’t get dragged into work activities on Mondays.

I know one person who worked in an intense “big 4” accounting firm where the culture expected long hours. When he switched to part-time, that gave him leeway to leave at sensible hours because he was “that part time guy”. He went from working ~50-hour weeks in a 5-day job to 30-hour week in a 4-day job, shaving off nearly 10 hours of unpaid overtime.

Coordinating with others

When I’m working with a new team, I let them know up front what to expect and what’s ok by me. I don’t mind if they message me (on Slack) on my Mondays off. I likely won’t see it until I’m next in office. If it’s urgent and important, they can text me. If I do happen to see it and it’s easy for me to unblock them, I might jump online to point them in the right direction, but I won’t engage in effortful work.

I don’t expect anyone to try remember my schedule, especially people I don’t work closely with, so I have systems to help prompt people at the right time and place.

Stand up

On Fridays, I prompt people (for example, during the morning stand up meeting) to think if there’s anything they need from me. For example, is there work I should review that afternoon ahead of being unavailable Monday?

Slack

At the end of the week, I set my Slack status to “Back on Tuesday (I don’t work Mondays)” to clear automatically at the end of the day Monday.

Calendar

My calendar also has a recurring 9am–5pm Monday “meeting” called “I don’t work on Mondays”. It used to be an “all day” event but that doesn’t seem to show up as prominently in most event booking systems.

Diversity and inclusion

If a company is flexible enough to support part-time employees, I take that as a positive sign that they don’t overwork employees, they can support people taking annual or personal leave, they can hire people with different needs, and their communication, collaboration, and project management skills are adequate.

If a company told me 4 days absolutely wasn’t possible, I’d be concerned about what else might be going on.

Anyway, I hope you or someone you know finds this useful!