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Articles by Joshua Brewer
Black Agenda Report
Jennifer Bates is an organizer with the BAmazon Union, the effort to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. BAmazon Union is affiliated with the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU). I spoke to Ms. Bates at the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference (SHROC) which was recently held in Nashville. SHROC is an opportunity for human rights organizers and defenders to come together to share strategies, learn from each other, and build relationships.
Deploy ElasticSearch, Kibana, and Beats in AWS EKS cluster Behind Application Load Balancer
Today we will be deploying Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes into our AWS EKS Cluster. An Existing AWS EKS Cluster [1] AWS Load Balancer Controller [2] EBS CSI Driver [3] Ensure that your EC2 instances are large enough to run the required workload.
Continuous Delivery with EKS and ArgoCD
ArgoCD is a continuous delivery tool used for Kubernetes. I see customers often submit cases where they need to understand why a service went down and who made the changes to this service. Unfortunately Kubernetes does not have a default mechanism to track these changes. I often recommend that customers implement version control and declarative methods to define k8s resources. Enter ArgoCD… An existing EKS Cluster. AWS Load Balancer Controller Installed.
Use an Existing ALB/NLB for Your EKS Cluster
Many AWS customers are now in the phase of modernizing/migrating existing application. During that process they often face the issue where they would like to use an existing ALB or NLB to route traffic to EKS In this article I will show you steps to accomplish this goal. Have an existing EKS cluster [1]. Have the AWS Load Balancer Controller add-on installed [2]. Have an existing ALB or NLB in your AWS VPC with target group [3]. Create a deployment.
Through the fire of fighting Amazon Workers… | Black Agenda Report
Chris Smalls, a leader of the effort to organize at one of Amazon’s Staten Island distribution centers, after the votes were tallied in New York City on April 1, 2022. (PHOTO: JASON SZENES/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK) Through the fire of fighting Amazon Workers… The fire this time: 55 gallon flames leaping reddish, Gathering up young workers ‘round warmth.
Bessemer Alabama Amazon Workers Continue Struggle to Unionize | Black Agenda Report
Amazon union supporter in Bessemer, Alabama, 2021 (Photo: William Thornton/al.com) The mostly Black labor force at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama will have a second opportunity to vote for unionization. This statement was originally published by the Southern Workers Assembly. The second Bessemer Alabama Amazon workers and Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) labor board union vote will be counted starting on March 28th.
Black Agenda Report
Amazon will not stop squeezing every drop from workers until those workers have more power.
The Lead Organizer for the Amazon Union Drive Has No Regrets
Interview by Luis Feliz Leon Everyone — including us — has published an analysis of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s election loss in a celebrated union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. But most of us are writing from a distance, and with only a few pieces of the puzzle. What did the campaign look like from the inside? Luis Feliz Leon of Labor Notes spoke on April 13 with Joshua Brewer, the campaign’s lead organizer, from RWDSU’s Mid-South Council.
Words are the soul of UX
This week’s guest author is Relly Annett-Baker, who writes some of the best, most interesting web copy around for clients of all sizes. She resides in Wokingham, UK. Words are the soul of user experience. More than any other design element, words communicate the bulk of the messages we communicate to others. Whether they are spoken or written, there’s a fine line between lazily sending generic, expected messages and taking a few minutes to say something truly special.
Knowing Your Audience: Lessons from the Gaming Industry
This week’s guest author is Matt Ventre, a user experience designer at MessageFirst in Philadelphia, PA. Now that we’re settling in to play our new, more-amazing-than-ever video games procured over the holidays, it makes sense to ask: “What can the UX folks learn from the wildly successful gaming world?“ In a word: audience. The video gaming marketplace’s vibrant success over the past five years is marked by leaders who focus on very different, specific audiences.
Keep On Learning
One of the greatest qualities in most creative problem solvers is a thirst for learning. Most designers and user experience professionals I know have some level of post-graduate education. But if you were to dig a little deeper, you would likely find that many have degrees in either partially or completely unrelated fields. The truth is the greatest thing you learn while getting a college education is that you alone are responsible for what and how you learn.
Kill Your Darlings
There is nothing like the moment when you suddenly come upon the answer to a design problem. Whether it is a particular interaction or the perfect design element, it is a moment of pure elation. However, in that moment, there is a always a risk of an emotional attachment being formed. Essentially, we have the potential to surrender our ability to see beyond the “perfect solution” we have just created.
Usability Testing: Getting Design Teams Onboard
This week’s guest author is Christine Perfetti, CEO of Perfetti Media, a Boston-based user research consulting and training firm. Many designers come to me for usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out is because they assume usability testing must be a complex, scientific process. As a result, they’d prefer to have an outside company conduct their usability tests. Then I tell them I rarely run usability tests anymore! Why?
Is UX the Key to a Long-lasting Business?
“But what if the firm was driven, not by the goal of short-term profitability, but by the goal of continuous innovation in service of finding new ways of delighting customers? The new bottom line of this kind of organization becomes whether the customer is delighted. Conventional financial measures such as maximizing shareholder value are subordinated to the new bottom line.
Why UX is really just good marketing
If you ask any User Experience Professional what the principles of their profession are, one of the first principles you’ll hear is “Know Your Users”. This makes sense: if we are to create great experiences for users then we must know something about them. You’ll also find this phrase if you stumble upon any sort of must-have usability checklist (long lists of Important Things are now in vogue, masquerading as content curation).
Forgiveness
“To err is human; to forgive, divine” - Alexander Pope Traditionally, as designers, we would interpret this to mean our users will always make mistakes and when we “forgive” them (help them get back on their way) we are exhibiting the divine. However, I would argue that we, the designers and developers, need to ask forgiveness from our users. Humans are inherently prone to make mistakes. We do it all the time. Misreading some copy and clicking on the wrong link.
Teach Your Users Well
In the Usage Lifecycle, the transition between First Time Use and Ongoing/Passionate Use can often be narrowed down to one crucial element: education. Here is a familiar scenario that all of us have experienced to some degree or another: You sign up for the latest social network/web app/photo-sharing site and are thrown into yet another system, which may or may not include some copy about how to get started and may or may not already be filled with content from other users.
10 Principles of UX
1. The Experience Belongs to the User: Designers do not create experiences, they create artifacts to experience. This makes all the difference. Since experience is subjective it cannot be designed in quite the same way that a physical product can. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t design the framework within which people experience our product/service. If our framework is solid, then great experiences will be a common occurrence. 2. UX is Holistic: The experience is not just the product anymore.
There's no right answer
When we are working on a hard design problem (or even on a fairly easy one), we often realise there are many ways we could go – lots of options and lots of potential solutions. It can be frustrating to figure out which is the right direction to take, the right components to choose, the right way to sequence things. In other words, sometimes it’s really hard to find the right answer.
Experience Precedes Branding
Do we all love the Nike logo because it’s inherently a great logo or do we love it because we’ve had good experiences with Nike shoes? How about the FedEx logo? The Apple logo? Chanel No. 5? Conventional wisdom, or a trip to Times Square, might convince us that logos and imagery change the way we think about companies. After all corporations spend billions of dollars a year sending messages our way to convince us that their offerings are the tops.
StartUXs
Our guest author this week is Whitney Hess. Whitney is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She writes about improving the human experience on her blog Pleasure and Pain, and can always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess. Learn more about her work with startups at http://startUXs.com. Startups start up with a single idea: a solution they believe the world has never seen.
The Local Maximum
Do you ever feel that your design has become stale and that despite your making lots of little changes to it over time without any big overhaul there is just no way to drastically improve it? If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as its ever going to be in its current incarnation.
Visual Hierarchy
We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know. Loud, messy, cluttered, busy. These words have been appropriated from other parts of life, of course, but we need them to express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content on a screen or page. We need them to express how unpleasant a user experience it is to not know where to direct our attention next.
What Does it Mean to be Simple?
All designers say simplicity is important, but what does it really mean to make something simple? Most of the time we think it means less, that by removing stuff we achieve simplicity. We think by keeping content above the fold we’re helping people focus, or by using bullets instead of paragraphs more people will read it, or by cutting text in half it becomes more clear. But simple doesn’t mean “less”. A better definition would be “just enough”.
Cohort Analysis - Measuring Engagement over time
In a recent post I recommended watching the startups for insights into UX. One example of a useful UX technique that came out of the startup space is the cohort analysis. A cohort analysis is a tool that helps measure user engagement over time. It helps UX designers know whether user engagement is actually getting better over time or is only appearing to improve because of growth. A cohort is a group of people who share a common characteristic over a period of time.
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