But then, what really defines a bedroom? Only lately I realised that my definition of this mental concept had blurred the line. For half a year, my bedroom was also a living room, as we had moved the bed mattress to our living room and in exchange moved our office into the former bedroom. The consequence was unexpected and as it seemed at the time: unavoidable. My smartphone had returned next to my bed at night, now that I got all confused by bedroom semantics. But one summer night, when the cars in front of our street-faced bed-slash-living-room-window were exceptionally loud, and the people residing there at night (for whatever reason) were exceptionally lunatic, my girlfriend had enough. In her typical frenzy, she did what she does best: she reorganised our flat (bless her). The bedroom ought to be moved back to its original location! The bedroom ought to be a bedroom again!

Now that the tides had turned, the world made sense again. Immediately it felt wrong to want my phone by my side at night. Why need it? Isn't its presence alone decreasing my sleep quality? There still is the occasional sleepless night, which at times feels like my new default. Is plugging in my earphones, starting a podcast with a 15 minute sleep timer an acceptable remedy? Or is it considered cheating? Am I relying on it too much? Associating my phone's proximity with guaranteed sleep? For that, I still don't have an answer.

But one thing is crystal clear: No smartphone in bed, man! 👲

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So here I was, on Instagram, but unlike what you might think, I did not come here to mindlessly indulge myself in Instagram Stories. I did not come here to scroll until my earthly doom. I did not come here to swipe through Reels, to get lost in highly-personalised micro interactions that do their best to shorten social media users' ever so short attention span. Do you remember why I came here? I came to write a message.

But apparently, it was I who did not remember. Within mere milliseconds I forgot what I set out to do, when my eyes faced two feeds–one horizontal, another vertical–both with an unmatched algorithmic accuracy, after years of studying my likes and yearnings, all with a single goal to distract me and make me forget why I originally came here. Suffice to say, that I ended up exactly where they wanted me.

I got caught up in a whirlwind of distractions, immediately checking on an Instagram Story of an old friend, which so temptingly appeared in the Stories feed. Seemingly, as I noticed right away from his profile picture, he had found himself a new girlfriend. This got me curious. And since my friend had not a single post on his profile, which shortly interrupted my act of curious snooping, I checked his girlfriend's profile. Lucky that I was, her profile was public. She had posted a Story too, which I checked willingly. Then, a recent post in her feed had me swipe pryingly through a gallery of vacation pictures until something happened.

What happened was that it suddenly hit me: these bastards got me. Five minutes had elapsed until I awakened from my algorithmic fever dream and remembered my original mission: to write to my friend! Five minutes doesn't sound like much, but once you add it up–say, if you've been using social media for 5, 10, 20 years–how many minutes have you lost?

The Instagram Directory

There's two reasons why I still have an account on Instagram today:

1. To converse with businesses who seem to offer no other communication channel to contact them.
2. To converse with my friends from around the world, whose preferred communication platforms differ from the ones we use in Europe, where Instagram turns out to be the common ground (for instance: South Koreans like to use KakaoTalk, Japanese and Taiwanese like to use Line, Chinese use WeChat–platforms predominantly unknown or unused in Europe).

For the last years, I have used Instagram mainly as a directory for my friends, but after this episode of losing control one too many times, I'm looking for ways not ever having to interact with it again, because it's evil, it's sneaky, it's designed to toy with the most natural human instincts.

Just using it as a communication channel proofs rather tricky. There used to be an experimental "Instagram Direct" app but it has been sunset, so I suppose it's time to ask for my international friends' email addresses and phone numbers.

In the meantime, I'll just add my Instagram Inbox page to my browser bookmarks, and access it via the web, so I don't have to face a feed full of distractions.

Getting out of the Pit

Tristan Harris described the problem with smartphone usage in a 60 Minutes segment with TV journalist Anderson Cooper, which I have found in Cal Newport's book "Digital Minimalism":

"This thing is a slot machine," Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.

"How is that a slot machine?" Cooper asks.

"Well, every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see What did I get?" Harris answers. "There's a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible."

"Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks.

"They are programming people", Harris says. "There's always this narrative that technology's neutral. And it's up to us to choose how we use it. This is not true—"

"Technology is not neutral?" Cooper interrupts.

"It's not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that's how they make money."

Of course, none of this is new to you. We are all aware of the "attention society", created by Silicon Valley, in which we, the users are the product and still, that doesn't stop most of us from using social media. What might be new to you however, is the fact that social media hasn't always been this way.

As a matter of fact, there used to be social media that wasn't engineered to manipulate its users, that didn't profit from users spending as much of their time as possible on it. Remember MySpace?

Here goes Cal Newport:

The whole social media dynamic of posting content, and then watching feedback trickle back unpredictably, seems fundamental to these services, but as Tristan Harris points out, it's actually just one arbitary option among many for how they could operate. Remember that early social media sites featured very little feedback–their operations focused instead on posting and finding information. It tends to be these early, pre-feedback-era features that people cite when explaining why social media is important to their life. When justifying Facebook use, for example, many will point to something like the ability to find out when a friend's new baby is born, which is a one-way-transfer of information that does not require feedback (it's implied that people "like" this news).

Ever since I've become a happy computer user, when my dad introduced me to this exciting world of interactive media, I've never had any doubt in my mind: software is what I want to dedicate my life to. With the emergence of the web, that promised a platform for millions of users to express themselves, with the computer as a productivity tool, with open protocols like the web, email or proprietary formats like MP3, with the magic that user interfaces and design have had over me ever since this long ago, had I believed in the notion of good tech.

But as the so-called "Web 2.0" ran its course in the late 2000s and evolved from a harmless and joyful place to follow friends and post funny status messages about the odd behaviour of our cats, social media as a platform mutated to a monster and the playing field of insidious companies and their privacy-threatening, mind-manipulating practices in the form of surveillance capitalism. With social media being as addictive as crack, it represents everything I despise about software today.

While I myself have found a way to stop it dominating my life (by stopping to use it–well, except for seldom interactions like the one told above), the majority of the world is still at its mercy. More often than not, it's still considered harmless, funny and totally "normal", when in reality, it's dangerously addictive like a highly-potent drug. The reason why many don't see it the way that I do is because it's fun, it's happy and most importantly, it's stimulating our brains in ever so satisfying ways. Social media isn't so bad right?

Today, unfortunately, it's taking hold of us, no matter the age, culture or social background. Even at a very early age: I've seen a toddler recently, no older than three years old, doom-scrolling on TikTok, while his mum cheerfully sat next to him (which is even more troublesome, as the kid has been exposed to a recommendation algorithm that has been trained on an adult and there is no "TikTok for Kids". But I'm on the fence whether a children-friendly version of such a devious tool would be the solution here).

And yet, as I'm trying to discover a more optimistic outlook on life these days, I believe that there can be good social media and that there's some excellent ideas on how to make social media good. Already today, I have the feeling that many people in my bubble, especially on the small web, challenge themselves to spend less time on social media and on their smartphones altogether. This gives me hope that we're not entirely lost and each and everyone of us has the potential to live without social media and regain control over their time, with no more engineered distractions.

If you are using social media, I don't blame you, of course. All the blame goes to the social media companies!

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While the themes on Max's website take inspiration from Mario Kart 64 tracks (there's Koopa Beach, Choco Mountain and Rainbow Road among others), I wanted a similar vibe, following another 90s obsession of mine: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or Hero Turtles as they were called in Europe because "Ninja" sounded too violent).

My childhood was dominated by the Turtles: I remember the action figures, a TMHT school bag that came with a pencil case, watching the cartoon series and live-action movies and playing some of the video games–my favourite was the 1993 Tournament Fighters on the SNES. I was a huge Turtles fan and with today's release, I want to do them justice: pick your niqwithq flavour according to your favourite Hero Turtle. Leo's theme will remain the default theme for new visitors, because let's be honest, he simply was the coolest member of the gang (and also he was the bluest 🤷‍♂️).

There will be unlockable themes in the future! Stay posted for hints. I'll be happy to receive feedback regarding colour accessibility and of course: your favourite Turtles memory.

Cowabunga, everybody! ✌️

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As soon as they appreciated our presence, they turned back to sipping on their coffees, playing on their phones and conversing amongst each other. "Coffee Connection" in Metro Manila seemed like an veggie oasis in a culinary desert made up of a diet that consisted almost exclusively of meat, some rice and some more meat. But Coffee Connection wasn't just about greenwashing the Philippines' carnivore image. Of course, there was also the coffee–and the connection.

And boy, were we in for a surprise!

With every cup, a story is told,
An affection that grows sevenfold,
We connect with every sip we share,
Bring people together, show them we care.

The kitschy K-pop-style music roared from the speakers as I shuffled the cards and we started to play a cultivated game of Monopoly Deal. When the chorus started, something unexpected happened:

Coffee connection, where hearts align,
In every brew, a moment divine,
Friends and strangers, side by side,
In this place, we confide.

"Sophia?", I asked my opponent, as she, in turn, asked me to pay her two million of Monopoly money in rent.
"Does this café have its own soundtrack?". The next song sounded equally kitschy, equally bland, equally unoriginal. And then it became clear to us: we had just sat down in an AI Café.

Connecting hearts,
One cup at a time,
Coffee connection,
Where you'll be fine.

As I glanced around, the Gen Z crowd seem unbothered. They were still deeply invested in whatever was happening on the screens of their phones.

A month prior, I had been a little put off, when I heard the famous AI song "Walk My Way" by Breaking Rust in yet another café, that time in Kuala Lumpur:

You can hate my style,
you can roll your eyes,
but I ain't slowing down,
I was born to rise.

I felt disgusted. But the owners of the place didn't seem to share the sentiment. They just continued to play the entire artificially created album. Is this the future for music?

So kick them rocks,
if you don't like how I talk,
I'ma keep on talking
and walk my walk.

There's a message hidden behind the gruff voice of this non-human singer. AI music is on the rise. If you don't like how they talk, well, apparently they'll keep on talking.

Is this so wrong? If you asked the AI enthusiasts out there, they'll remind you of the invention of the calculator. "You aren't calculating in your head any more, are you? The same way that people use calculators today, they'll use AI in the future. No more need for you to do this in your head."

Been beat down, but I don't stay low,
Got mud on my jeans, still ready to go,
Every scar's a story that I survived,
I've been through hell, but I'm still alive.

However, what AI enthusiasts seem to overlook is the fact that mental arithmetic isn't an expression of human experience. Even though Breaking Rust claims this in their lyrics, they actually never had mud on their jeans, never had a scar, never been through hell and above all else: they have never been alive. Their idea of human experience is an output of a machine that has been fed with hundreds of thousands of lyrics to statistically determine what could be some average country singer's struggles.

The way that my visit in Coffee Connection turned out, I got a strange feeling. I felt deeply offended and wondered how we can let this happen. To let this artificiality, this inhumanness, this average bland of cheesy pop music happen. But why was no one around me bothered? Is mediated life in the 2020s only about mere stimulation? Have we lost touch with our quality of being human? Is AI music the future?

Anyway, I can't wait for the first AI concerts. I wonder in what form good old Breaking Rust will manifest themselves. Will they just put a desktop PC on stage and have them wear a cowboy hat? 🤠

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...the cause of–and solution to–all of life's problems?

Without RSS (therefore: feeds) how would addictive (and often manipulative) social media work today (problem)?

Without RSS (and feed readers) how could we escape the world of manipulation and advertising? (solution)

To RSS! 🍻

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Originally, mobile phones were build to make phone calls while on the go–something that we tend to forget in this day and age. The BlackBerry added emails to the mix. The iPhone combined the essentials of the iPod with the capabilities of a mobile phone. Suddenly, you didn't just make phone calls, but listened to music, took photos, wrote down notes, used a calculator and even navigated with maps.

When social media emerged, our relationship to mobile phones started to change. Phone users unknowingly became victims of the attention society we live in today. We started to succumb to the screen, every single day.

But fret not. If you want your phone to be more of a tool again, consider the different levels, from the Phone Phone (taking phones back to their original purpose) to the Modern Smartphone (which unfortunately seems to be how most people use their phones today):

• The Phone Phone: Uninstall all apps except the Phone app and the Messages app. Install an app called "Snake 2" (or similar) from the App Store. Cancel your data plan. Live a happy life. Alternative: Ditch smartphone altogether and get dumbphone.
• The Light Phone: A phone that's still a phone but is also your companion for the essential tasks of everyday life: Phone app, Clock app (Alarm and Timer), Maps app, Music app, Notes app, Calendar app, Podcast app (hey, no email)–inspired by the actual Light Phone.
• The Productivity Phone: Includes the Light Phone apps but also a Browser app, Voice Memos app, Messaging apps, Mail app and Banking apps. It's a productivity tool.
• The Modern Smartphone: A phone filled to the brim with addictive social media apps and mostly used to explore said media (optional: addictive games). Altogether used with the purposes that today's attention society has in mind.

Today, I try to use my phone as a Productivity Phone. I write down notes, I record voice memos, I listen to podcasts and music, I do my banking, I research, I watch a little YouTube, I read in my feed reader, I write to friends and family, I take pictures. Despite my good intentions, I still spend more time on my phone than I would like to. Actually, that's no surprise considering that it's such a powerful tool.

That's right–phones are tools. Use them wisely! 🤓

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It's already a design flaw that it's the more prominent button of the two that lets you accept cookies, when actually it's not in your best interest. Additionally, for the longest time, rejecting cookies required (at least) one extra click. No wonder that many users made it their default to just always accept cookies. Instead of "Accept cookies" the label could say "Make the annoying banner go away". But equally could it say "Feel free to track me across the web".

Today, I suggest a new default: to always click the less prominent button. For your own benefit. Sometimes it does require that extra click, but I have noticed that over the last couple years, most cookie banners make it equally easy to reject cookies. Especially compared to 2018, when the GDPR was introduced. Your right to privacy matters. And you really don't want these cookies.

Happy International Data Protection Day, everyone! 💓

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1. ...I woke up in the morning... (so far so good)
2. ...reached for my phone... (first mistake)
3. ...to open up the YouTube app... (second mistake)
4. ...and let myself get dragged into a stupor of algorithmic self-indulgence... (thirst mistake)
5. ...while allowing this to be the first thirty minutes of my day... (fourth mistake)
6. ...and doing this every morning for the rest of the week (can you imagine?)

Suffice to say that I felt like a complete loser for letting myself lose this much control so easily. During the time when this was my default state, I had no defence mechanism against this compulsive behaviour. Heck, I didn't even consider it a problem. It took me months before I slowly found strategies on how to overcome my YouTube addiction.

Here's how I got off the drug and how today, I can enjoy YouTube again.

Away with the app!

The logical thing to do would be to set App Limits to have more control over one's own consumption, but let's be honest–iOS makes it too easy for you to just ignore these limits. Since that didn't work, I had to come up with more drastic measures: deleting the damn app. That alone had me consume so much less altogether.

The app, of course, is designed to maximise the time you spend watching videos. I uninstalled it and restricted myself to only ever watching YouTube on my laptop.

Today, I stick to a life without YouTube app and I haven't looked back.

Avoid the feed

The feed is a malicious human invention. A vortex to get dragged into so easily, no matter how high your self-control. It knows everything about its victims–their likes, their dislikes, their passions, their guilty pleasures, just exactly what makes them tick. Don't fuck with the algo–it's a losing battle. The remedy is simple: just avoid the damn feed. But how?

Never (I repeat): Never go to the YouTube homepage. Usually, when visiting YouTube, you have a purpose. Experience has shown that "I am bored" is not a good purpose. A better purpose would be looking up a topic you are interested in or checking up on a particular channel you have subscribed to.

I often use YouTube in preparation for a trip. Say I wanted to visit Cebu (Hello Filipino readers by the way, I know you're out there), I'd often check travel vloggers I'm already subscribed to in order to find out if they had already been there. If not, I'd just search for "Cebu" or "Cebu vlog". Now, how do you search YouTube without going to the homepage? One strategy would be to blindfold yourself so you can't see all the tasty treats your feed has come up with. But there's another way.

I found DuckDuckGo's bangs to be my answer of avoiding the homepage. It's an ingenious feature that lets you search YouTube by typing the corresponding bang followed by the specific search term into your browser's address bar:

!yt cebu vlog

This command asks DuckDuckGo to ask YouTube to search for me. After I hit return, I get directly taken to the search results page. In Firefox, you can switch between search engines next to the address bar. That way, bangs works even if DuckDuckGo is not your default search engine.

Thanks so much, duck!

Disable Auto-Play

Auto-Play is yet another malicious human invention intended to make its users lose control. No matter if it's Netflix, Disney+ or YouTube, if you're an addict, Auto-Play has no right to be active.

The recommendation trap

I was quite happy with myself having made it this far. However, I still occasionally fell victim to senseless consumption of video content. Mind you, it was content I really enjoyed but never intended to watch in the first place. The algo got me again. How, you ask? By displaying recommendations next to videos I had purposefully watched. Now, how to get rid of those?

Simple! There's a browser add-on called Unhook which removes them for you. And it doesn't stop there: it also removes video recommendations on the home page and offers to disable comments and Shorts.

That only leaves recommendations that pop-up directly inside the YouTube player once you have finished watching a video (somehow Unhook doesn't remove them for me). To avoid these, just be careful to stop a video before it reaches the very end.

Web over app

I've only did the following once I've been living with the above tips for over half a year: I've noticed that there will come the time when watching on your phone will be more convenient. And that's fine, if you just stick to YouTube in the browser.

The website is a lot more cumbersome to use and doesn't run as smoothly as the app, making the whole user experience a lot less enjoyable, which of course is a good thing in this case. There's no automatic switch to landscape mode, if you have orientation-lock enabled, there's no support for chapters, you can't skip ads if you're using Premium, double tap left or right to scrub doesn't work, and so on.

How to overcome YouTube Addiction

So here it is: my remedy for YouTube addiction. Life is much better if you're not addicted to stupid software that's–frankly–doing everything in its power to make you an addict.

I really love you, YouTube. But only if we're in a healthy relationship. 🫰

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An endless stream of content, constantly feeding my restless mind with more, when clearly, it needs less! What a mess my mind is. It doesn't need non-stop stimulation. It needs rest, it needs organisation, it needs system.

Why hello there, 2026, by the by. I haven't see you come in? Usually, I never have New Year's resolutions. But this year, everything's different. It's time to address the digital mess I have accumulated over the years. I'm looking at you, notes in Bear, bookmarks in Firefox, files in iCloud. And don't forget about photos on my iPhone, online accounts in general, contact cards, emails, podcasts, playlists, RSS feeds and apps.

It's time to put my mind in order.

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So here goes a year in review by using the four seasons as signposts.

Winter

After skipping most of 2024's winter, it hit even harder than usual in 2025 as we were mostly exposed to summer the year prior travelling in Southeast Asia and South America. It took only a few weeks before my post-travel depression mixed with a winter depression. Life outside my window disappeared into a thick layer of fog and my feet were cold for three long, dull months. It got so bad around my birthday in mid-January, that I wrote these words that perfectly summarize my state of mind then:

During the day, there's a thick, grey cloud covering the entirety of the city. It's persistent and dense. At the end of the day, darkness approaches and wraps itself over the city. If winter's mood is really nasty, you get one layer of darkness over the layer of clouds. What the actual fuck, winter. Can you please just piss off?

I hated the past winter. It didn't help my mood that my educational leave ended and I had to restart a job that I already dreaded before I went on leave. My girlfriend Sophia and I relieved the pain by eating out 4-5 times a week, which is fine if you're in South America, but proofed to be rather expensive if you're in Austria (especially in times of inflation).

My depression manifested itself as a writing block that lasted three gruelling months and only the arrival of spring could remedy.

Winter was my least favourite season of the year. My winter dream would be a bath tub. Oh, how I would bathe every single night.

Spring

Luckily, the first several weeks back at work didn't demand too much from me. I embraced the opportunity of working remotely by staying in my hometown, Graz. As I stayed there a whole month, it allowed me to spend quality time with friends and family and rediscover the city I had left behind a decade ago. Graz has the perfect size, allowing you to go everywhere by bike, while it still offers a lot in terms of places to go or nature around it. Too soon, I decided that I was feeling better, when deep down, I still felt depressed.

Back in Vienna, I continued working remotely and rediscovered the home office:

I've never particularly liked the home office. Of course, it's nice to get up a little late, take my sweet time in the morning and maybe even do some exercise right before work. But I usually get cabin-fever after just a single day at home. Not these days. Suddenly, I really enjoy the home office. Things are too officy at the office anyway. More home office, please.

Then, unexpectedly, my TV broke down, which finally made me realise that I had been living in a comfort zone that I had created for myself, aiming to protect myself from the real world out there. It revolved around 90s sitcoms such as Friends, King of Queens and retro video games such as Pikmin and Metroid Prime. The home office also did its part to shield myself from confronting this new thing in my life called "work".

As everything started to bloom, temperatures started to rise and the sun reappeared, I noticed how slowly, I became my old self again.

Spring would have been my favourite season, if I hadn't still been caught up in post-travel depression. My spring dream would be an extension of spring from a shoulder season to eternal spring.

Summer

We just couldn't sit still. So we left Vienna once more–but this time, to travel in Sophia's home country, Germany. Only months before, I was convinced that I needed to be faraway to feel the bliss of travel again. But travelling to Germany alone, whose culture I know very well, inspired me and had me return to the best version of myself. Oh, how I've had missed travelling.

Germany was so good to us. Dresden with it picturesque green landscape, its beer gardens, its small ferries over the Elbe, its Eierschecke and of course, Sophia's lovely grandma. Berlin with its hip cafés, its Spätis, its nature, its history and of course, Sophia's lovely mum.

Back home, Viennese summer was equally nice. I love this season, when the mornings feel brisk and Danube's water still has a refreshing effect before the midday heat sets in (I love morning swims). When the days are long and you can spend the evenings in your favourite bar with outdoor seating.

We spent our summer holidays in the border region between Albania and Montenegro, hiking the Peaks of the Balkans trek (honorary mention: Kosovo–officially also part of the trek but we didn't make it there). I've seen some breath-taking views, met some very friendly people and altogether if felt like an adventure in the great outdoors (Shout-out to our hiking buddies Chris and Ewa).

At the peak of summer, I made a decision.

This year, summer was my favourite season. I guess travelling, nature and spending time all by myself really helped. My summer dream would be a balcony.

Autumn

While autumn wasn't yet around in Central Europe, it had already made its way to England, when I travelled there at the end of August. I visited my old friend Anthony, solo travelled a bit in London and Brighton and attended a stag do in Newcastle. I discovered an affection for Guinness (and stout in general) and enjoyed the wholesomeness of spending my time in pubs.

Back in Austria, the Guinness tasted like piss, but at least I could spend the last warm days of summer going for swims in the Danube. Then, the decision I had made weeks prior re-emerged in my mind. Suddenly, it was September and I knew it was finally time to quit my job and go on a trip again. Quitting my job was strenuous but I knew right away that it was the right decision.

In the meantime, I got the official driving licence for driving scooters in Austria, hiked up Lower Austria's highest mountain, Schneeberg, had a lot of bicycle trouble and attended two weddings in Styria (why is everyone getting married or pregnant?).

It started to show that I had been neglecting my exercise routine throughout most of 2025, as I developed a constant pain in my lower back, which is when I had no more excuse but to finally get a move on!

The outlook of what came next helped me to pull through.

I found a new appreciation for autumn thanks to the culinary delights of the season: pumpkin and cabbage. The lower temperatures also helped and the fact that this autumn in particular was wonderfully sunny. My autumn dream would be less foggy days.

Winter, again

Just like in 2024, we decided to skipped yet another winter. Right around the time that we first had temperatures below the freezing point, we left. We left for warmer temperatures. We left to drink chai and visit mosques at the edge of Europe. We left to be in the jungles of South Asia. We left to visit Buddhist pagodas, Hindu temples and sandy beaches. We left to be in the nature, see monkeys, elephants, peacocks, turtles and bats. We left and we're still gone, doing what one's supposed to do while between jobs.

Being out there, figuring out what this world is about, while at the same time living a little in between the madness of it all.

Winter No. 2 didn't feel like winter really but rather a comeback of summer. My second winter dream would be to skip winter every once in a while if my first winter dream of a bath tub doesn't fulfil itself.

In summary

I never noticed before how much seasons affect my well-being. How cruel winter can be but without it, how could I really appreciate spring? How nice the outside world gets in summer and how wholesome it feels to eat pumpkin soup in autumn.

Seasons are a pretty sweet concept.

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This post is part of the series Year in Review

Ever since the aeons of my web browsing history (aka the year 2000), I've collected bookmarks. I've found wonderful things out there. Oh man, I certainly have.

But do you think I actually held on to those fine bookmarks from bygone days of an unspoiled web? With so many Windows reinstalls in between? With so many bookmark exports I forgot to do? With so many browser switches? So many operating system switches? So much data loss? Of course it's all gone now. And I don't blame myself. I blame the act of bookmarking, that never made it easy for us bookmarkers.

It took the browser makers years before they added bookmark syncing. Years, before bookmarks weren't bound to browsers installations any more, when the only way to move them was in static HTML files.

Not only the syncing issue made it difficult for us to bookmark. Add to that something, that is still bothering me today: maintaining a system of bookmarks. Oh, how much work is involved to properly organise your bookmarks. How do I categorise them so I can retrieve them again with ease? How do I establish a system that not only works today, but also ten years from now? Everything is about to change for the better, as I'm trying to establish PARA in all digital areas of my life. Well, at least I hope that it will declutter the mess that I have made over the years.

I wonder how others cope with bookmarks. I'd be happy to know that there's people who are lucky enough to still have the bookmarks that they saved twenty years ago. Do you bookmark at all? Do you have a working system? Do you save them in the browser or use bookmark managers such as Raindrop.io? Are you looking for a better way to bookmark just like I do? Or maybe you don't care at all.

Someday, I'll be a good bookmarker. If you feel you can support my journey, feel free to reply by email. ✌️

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Now imagine this: you're somewhere in the mountains, deep in the back country, in a strange land. You've awoken to a thick mist outside your window that looks like it will stay in the valley forever. But then, suddenly, the sky clears up and the clouds make way for this breathtaking scenery of rolling hills. There's tea plantations as far as the eye can see. Sun's out and it's immediately making you feel happy. A little while later you're sitting on a scooter, affectionately called "scooty" by your wholesome host, Jagath. As you're exploring, the sun's feeling really warm on your skin. The locals aren't used to the look of foreigners. A broad smile appears on their faces when they see you. Some even wave. You pass by people who work in the tea gardens, who smile ever so broadly.

Then you wonder: how goes the old thinking again? No transition phase, eh? Just go from one miserable job to the next without allowing yourself a single moment to breathe, to reflect, to feel? Fuck that!

You don't live just for work, do you? What do you want out of a job? What went wrong with the last one? What's next for you? Maximise your time between jobs, goes the new thinking. And don't forget to live a little.

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It's a tool that seems immune to enshittification, that didn't let itself get carried away with the AI hype, that didn't grow out of bounds so that it is now a juggernaut enslaved by capitalism, that doesn't sell its own soul for profit, profit, profit (and even more profit, because did I mention capitalism?).

In their latest release notes, they didn't announce "an AI button", they didn't introduce collaboration, they didn't increase their prices by 20%, they didn't grow out of proportion. Bear is personal, it's AI-less, it's wholesome.

Today, Bear is still Bear. And I wish there was more software in my life today more like Bear! ✌️

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No? Well, the reason why you don't remember is because I haven't told you yet. Anyway, that's what happened. One of the reasons, why I thought it would be time to go back to Linux is GNOME, particularly GNOME's "Core Apps". Among them: A native contacts app and a native calendar app. Even though very rudimentary in their appearance, nevertheless it's beyond my wildest dreams to have dedicated apps for calendar and contacts–something that is totally missing in Windows.

But think again, Niq. Windows actually does have a contacts app. I realised this, when I extended my contact page to offer a downloadable contact card (I know–pretty cool idea). But before setting it live, I wanted to try out my vCard locally. And when I did, I didn't expect that this would even work on Windows. I downloaded the VCF file and was convinced that it wouldn't recognise the file format. Wrong! When I opened it, it offered me to open the vCard in "Windows Contacts". Windows Contacts? What in the bloody hell is that?

It is a legacy app in Windows Aero style, whose only reason for existence seems to be rare use cases such as this one (backwards compatability)! But don't get your hopes up just yet, as you can't use this app autonomously to manage your contacts, but merely to open VCF files. 😔

Still, I found it funny how Microsoft left this program in Windows 11 but didn't bother to translate its design from Windows Aero, which was the design language used in Windows Vista and 7 to its modern flat UI design, used in Windows 10 and 11.

Before I discovered this odd user interface anomaly, I was confronted with yet another strange Windows Aero UI. I had just reinstalled Windows (mind–without any drivers for my built-in keyboard, trackpad and network adapter), and when I finally made it to the desktop, well–I still didn't have a working network adapter to download aforementioned drivers so I wondered how to continue from there?

Wise people on Reddit (god bless them), suggested setting up USB tethering from my phone. I opened up the network settings and what did I find? Yet another legacy dialog.

And the story doesn't end there. Today's Windows is full of remnants from older generations of the old operating system: Character Map, Control Panel or Windows Media Player Legacy, just to name a few.

In the end, I think it's charming that Windows is full of legacy tools and user interface bits that remind its users of where it's coming from.

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We had plumbers in our flat, servicing our gas boiler.

"Wait, I'll calculate it for you", he offered. There was no melody in the way he talked. He spat out the words as if speaking a foreign language. It was hard to follow his explanation as he spat and spat relentlessly. Then, he pulled out his phone and opened his calculator app. "It's 200, you know, for the large service. Then 100, you know, for the new electrode and what was the last thing we said earlier? Ah, yeah, another 200 for our working hours".

Not only was it ludicrous to ask this much money when the thing had only undergone major repairs the year prior-additionally, the guy just didn't make a very trustworthy impression. He was in his mid-twenties and was already balding. He wore torn up jeans and appeared to be more of a school yard bully than a professional technician. The back of his nylon sweat suit was covered in quality seals, vouching for his alleged excellence.

Obviously, I don't know shit about gas boilers. The guy could have told me anything, which he probably did, and I would have believed him. Still, all throughout the time the plumbers were in our flat, my tummy gave me this feeling that something wasn't right. You know the one. The strange feeling that something was seriously dodgy.

Nevertheless, for lack of an alternative, we let them do their shady business. We just wanted the damn thing taken care of. When my new favourite plumber wrote the bill after, he had a special offer for us.
"15% off if you give us a rating on Google."
"OK?", I wondered.
"But does it have to be a good one?", I almost said but quickly decided against it.

I gave them 4 stars, wrote a nice review and accepted the 15% discount with pleasure. With the gun to my head, how could I have given the guy an honest rating, when he just sat there next to me, waiting for me to write a favourable review, that he also wanted a photo taken of as proof?

Later, when the horrible visit was over and I was still uncertain whether I had been fucked over, I edited my review to make it clear to the world what an awful company had just left my flat.

Fake online ratings are a thing

The severity of fake online ratings, where the actual customers knowingly partake, only dawned on me weeks later, when we visited Istanbul. Our Airbnb was okay: it was in an excellent location on the Asian side of the city, was relatively bright and rather calm. But the bed was horribly squeaky, my feet extended beyond the foot of the bed and the furniture was really cheap. In the end, the flat did not look at all as advertised on the photos of the listing.

"You can use the 10% discount we offer to guests who leave the property in good condition and rate us with 5 stars by messaging us before your next stay.", the host wrote to us after we checked out.

Unbelievable, I thought when my girlfriend read the message aloud to me. Another temptation to fake an online rating for personal benefit. No wonder that this particular Airbnb had an overall rating of 4,93 by over 80 people. What has become of the internet?

Fake online ratings destroy a system of trust

Online ratings are built upon trust. Of course, every person has their own rating system, but still, if anything on the internet has a rating close to 5 stars you can usually expect it to be a genuinely positive experience.

Fake online ratings however, destroy this system of trust. Dear people of the internet: Don't take the bait out of personal greed to get a lousy 10% discount when you have to sell your soul in exchange.

Awful services deserve negative reviews. Be honest and let the rest of the internet know if something doesn't meet your expectations. If you aren't, you're ruining it for the rest of us.

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Why am I doing this again?

Deep down, I always knew that the consulting business is not a world that I would ever feel comfortable in. But I wasn't ready to discover this truth just yet.

My thoughts were going in circles, everyday life didn't make any sense and to top it all off, I relentlessly immersed myself in the bullshit world that my clients felt so content in. No wonder I felt burned out. I reached a stage of burned-out-ness where I wouldn't believe anyone that simply said "just take a few days off". What difference will a few days off make? I was convinced that my misery was long term.

Nevertheless, we left. We left the noise, the big city traffic, the bullshit. And what did we find? Darkness. But opposed to my gloomy mental state at the time, this darkness felt soothing. Darkness, so pitch-black, the stars would illuminate the night sky. We found silence. Silence, so serene, we would notice our own breathing. I was blown away by how dark and calm the nights could get out here. We lay down on the patio and watched the Milky Way dance its beautiful dance with millions of stars above us. Pretty sure we caught a few shooting stars too, but maybe it's just me romanticising how clear everything suddenly seemed. The air was fresh. The nights kept to their soothing darkness. The days were sunny. The water of the lake was blue and the woods smelled like pine trees.

Sometimes, when the bullshit just gets too intense, take life back to where it makes sense. Where the nights are still dark, the air is still fresh and the lake is fuckin' blue.

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The result is an attempt to organize my thoughts and break them down to filterable tags:

• User Experience
• Accessibility
• Travel
• Small Web
• Productivity
• Blogging
• AI/LLM
• Writing
• Emoji
• Insomnia
• Work

An added benefit: a framework that allows me to classify my blog post drafts. Over the years, I have accumulated dozens of them. After several attempts of categorisation, I now feel confident that this way, I can pick up on some ideas that have been sitting in my drafts folder for months.

Tag your blog posts now!

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In the land of Aotearoa, that became the template for Middle Earth thanks to its never-ending beauty, we met French solo traveller Simon. Little did I know how important music actually was to him. But then again, already on the second day after we've met, he played Bill Withers' "Lean On Me" enthusiastically on the piano while we stayed at the legendary Forest Lodge, somewhere in the mountains of Canterbury.

When he joined our travel group, he would chant and sing along on our roadtrip to the likes of "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac, "Zou bisou bisou" by Gillian Hills and "La ballade des gens heureux" by Gérard Lenorman, which could easily be Simon's very own anthem. If there's one track that sums up what kind of a person Simon is, it would have to be "the ballad of happy people", because that's exactly who he is. He always carried a smile on his face and oftentimes a tune on his lips. In the end, it was no surprise that it was him who introduced me to the idea of Blog Post Soundtracks.

I realised only much later that they made their way into my own blog posts:

• Obongjayar's "I Wish It Was Me" goes well with Insomnia Hobbies.
• "Sjurvival" by Forest Sword and Please Look After My Dog For Me just belong together.
• And then there's Fred again's piano version of Kyle (Northern Line), a perfect match with Travel Joker.

I even took it a step further when I created entire playlists dedicated to posts such as Blissful Travel Mind and 2023 in Music.

I guess I always had wise man Simon in the back of my mind, whistling a happy tune, when unknowingly, I introduced Blog Post Soundtracks to my life.

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1. First it claimed, it can't create a table.
2. As compensation, it showed the information in an ordered list instead. The track listing looked correct at first glance, especially since it showed the tracks in the original track order of the album. When I looked more closely though, I noticed that a few tracks were missing (among them, not only bangers "Say What You Say" and "'Till I Collapse" but interestingly also the most successful single of the entire album, "Without Me")
3. While ignoring Mistral's mistake at first, I had it create a similar list–yes, a list, since it momentarily forgot how to create tables–for the Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem's third studio album that was released before The Eminem Show. This time, it very obviously hallucinated, inventing track names such as "Hate Me This Much" and "The Kids", mixed in with track names that actually existed. Moreover, the LLM claimed that the album had a total of 30 tracks (and just kept repeating track names after track number 18).
4. Next, I gave Mistral the chance to correct its mistake from before, when I simply prompted it to "try again with The Eminem Show". This resulted in a similarly faulty list, but at least it remembered its ability to create tables ("You can use this information to create a table in your preferred format". If you need a table, here is an example in markdown").
5. Finally, I corrected its obvious mistake, namely that it forgot about "Without Me". Now, it created a wonderful table from the get-go (without showing a list at first), included "Without Me" in a random spot (as track number 2 rather than track number 10) but again omitted "Say What You Say" and "'Till I Collapse".

This is a harmless example but it illustrates how easily AIs lie to us. Have a guess how likely I am to trust the actual information I enquired Mistral about (the name of the individual producers) after so much hallucination and confusion on its part?

All of this chaos, even though the requested information is so easy to look up–there are Wikipedia articles for both, The Eminem Show and The Marshall Mathers LP–with the individual track listings.

The age of lies

Today, already, you can't escape AI's grip. For many of us, it's replacing a good old web search–it doesn't help truth that search engines themselves advertise AI results above the traditional results, allegedly faulty.

Apart from replacing search, almost no mainstream software product has been spared from introducing AI to its user interfaces, by adding an "ask AI" button, search bar or similar. Today, software products that resisted enshittification are extremely rare. I have developed a new-found respect for software makers who would not let themselves get carried away with the hype but stayed true to their values (and truth)–honorary mention: note-taking app Bear.

I assume that many users are getting mislead by AI without consciously noticing that they are being lied to, since so often the information looks correct at first glance. We adopted AI as a technology, because we consider it a time saver. Since no one seems to have time for anything these days anyway, we don't notice that the time it supposedly saves leads us to believing information that is actually untruthful.

Unintentional versus engineered lies

What we used to know as "software bugs" with "traditional", AI-less software are taken onto a completely new level with AI. Software bugs are old news. When software messes up today, the results are hallucinations and lies. Many times they are unintentional, as a result of the nature of how LLMs work: they are probabilistic and actually don't know anything.

But apart from the hallucinations, there's something even more troubling. The case, where AI companies actually engineer and orchestrate output of LLMs in order to create alternative facts, aligned with political interest: Be it US-American AI companies, who are Donald Trump-friendly or Chinese AI companies, where undoubtedly, criticism of political leaders or geopolitical matters such as the sovereignty of Taiwan would be unthinkable.

At this point, three years into the AI craze, we should ask ourselves this: do we want to live in a world where a delicate matter such as truth is dictated by the likes of AI companies?

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Right, I just remembered: even though native keyboard accessibility became part of HTML very early on (it was introduced in HTML 4.01 in 1999), many websites of today offer awful keyboard accessibility.

Users agree:

• People who like to lounge and use their computers from their couches (hullo!).
• Power users who know that relying on the keyboard is the proper and most efficient way to use a computer.
• And obviously people who can't use computer mice at all—with disabilities such as severe arthritis, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy or visual impairments.

And yet, making the web more keyboard-accessible is incredibly simple:

• Add skip links.
• Style your focus indicators (don't be shy with focus styles).
• Make modal dialogs closable via Escape key.
• Add keyboard controls for video streaming, including space bar to play/pause, arrow keys left and right for scrubbing and arrow keys up and down for volume control (looking at you, Paramount+).
• Add access keys if you're old-school (and if your users are, too).
• Offer one-letter keyboard shortcuts for web apps, but only if there's a way to disable them since they might interfere with (other) assistive technology.

Many of these features literally take minutes to implement and would nevertheless improve the lives of so many users. I'm convinced that the poor keyboard support on the web is a matter of visibility. This concerns a lack of accessibility awareness on the one hand and the fact that keyboard features usually remain hidden from view for people who rely on mouse control.

So listen closely, builders of the web, when I hereby make my demands: We need keyboard accessibility for everyone! 📣

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The Breakup Letter as a tool isn't limited to breaking up romantic relationships. It can be used just the same to end work relationships. If you ever find yourself in an unhappy job, it's wise to compile a Breakup Letter. Ideally, you write it even before quitting your job, as it helps to put your mind in order and have the motives for your resignation in writing.

"Dear future Niq", my most recent Breakup Letter goes, "this job didn't make you happy and it never will", before it breaks down in detail why it's finally time to move on.

Farewell, unhappy job! I hope you can make someone else happy, but I won't miss you!

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• "We have to make an impact!"
• "We have to secure relevance!"
• "We have to create value!"

What is everyone talking about?

It used to be different

When I started, things were different. A small design agency with around 30 people. That's the company I joined.

Of course, it had only previously been bought by a big corporate enterprise with more than 700K employees. But we were the cool design agency, unbothered by corporate dynamics. When I started, we didn't play by the same rules.

Three kinds of people

More than five years had past since I joined and when I returned from a year travelling past February, everything around the office had changed. A weird "fog" seemed like it had emerged. It made my co-workers, people that were once like me, suddenly talk gibberish:

• "What's the deliverable?"
• "That looks like a quick win to me!"
• "Let's focus on the low hanging fruit."

Can you talk like a normal human being, I thought to myself. Has everyone been talking this way and I just didn't notice? Did I once talk like that? Or is it the fog that's taking its toll on my co-workers—people I once could have a regular conversation with?

Over the first weeks back, I noticed an undoubtable presence of corporate fog and decided that my co-workers all fit into one of the following three categories.

The first kind is completely unbothered by the fog. They wear outfits that are smart and casual. They climb up the corporate career ladder. "We have to create value!", they yell.

The second kind gets irritated by the fog, but only in the beginning. "What strange world", they wonder. But soon they accept it as the way things are, and shrug it off. "We have to create value!", they yell in unison.

The third kind gets dizzy by the fog. They are disgusted by the non-words that their co-workers proclaim. "What has this place become?", they ask themselves.

Cut the crap!

I wonder whether it has always been this way or if I had to be away for this long to notice the fog? But slowly I realise that I never meant to work in a corporate job ever again. And yet, here I am and it's as corporate as it gets.

Dear world of corporate enterprises, design agencies, and consulting people! May you make your impact, secure your relevance and create your value. May you figure out what the deliverable is, embrace your quick wins and pick your low hanging fruit. But I've seen enough. I'm out.

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This post is part of the series Corporate Schmorporate

So my blog turns 100 today–in a way. Hooray, Hooray, Hooray! 🎺

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Travelling requires my whole-hearted attention. The impressions of a trip alone keep my mind busy. There is so much to a foreign culture, to a foreign geographic area, to a foreign society. Writing a travel diary alone is challenging enough.

Travel blogging happens in retrospect—slowly, mindfully and in a way that I get to re-experience parts of the journey long after they took place.

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

Sleep is overrated

The longest I ever went without a proper night of sleep was a nine-month period. Within half a year in that period, I concluded that "sleep is overrated anyway". After having tried for that long to regain the ability to sleep, I had finally given in to a default state of sleeplessness. "That's my life now—but who needs sleep really?".

Luckily, sleep did return eventually.

Four years later and I feel a lot wiser. I don't just succumb to desperation. Sleep isn't overrated. It's essential. One needs to rest, to recharge, to process. And yet, insomnia has been a constant companion for all that time now.

An agitating button

So what's keeping me up at night? An annoyingly loud group of reckless partying neighbours in their mid-twenties? A body longing for exercise? A screen that demands an infinite amount of my attention?

In the end, it's my mind. A mind, so agitated that it seems untamable. So very agitated, a mere button can stop it from resting. Not because I spend my nights racking my brain over its implementation. It's because I love building user interfaces, apparently even as much as I love writing. I just get too excited over things I love to do.

If only I could sleep. I mean seriously—It's just a button.

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Two of the coolest features of Skype revolved around landline capabilities. For one, Skype allowed you to make calls to landlines all around the world via data (Skype to Phone). The other allowed you to purchase international VoIP telephone numbers (Skype Number). Both of these features are paramount if you're travelling as much as I do.

So many services in our modern world rely on the legacy technology that are landlines. I used Skype to Phone to make local phone calls abroad or international phone calls to my home country. My Skype Number came in handy, when I relied on a local phone number to receive SMS, e.g. for 2FA (which is—sadly—still awfully inflationary in today's day and age).

So what happened to these two paramount features, when Skype has been taken apart to become MS Teams Free?

The dial pad

The features are still here, just very hidden. In the menu of the MS Teams mobile app, you can access them via "Skype Dial Pad".

But what happens next is an insult to every user out there: The Dial Pad opens in a web view, which obviously is breaking the user experience. A login prompt loads and at least they made the effort to pass along the login info from the app.

Then, you find yourself on the screen you know and love from better days: when Skype was still Skype. However, the whole experience is absolute shite. The Skype Dial Pad lies atop the actual app in a web view and feels entirely broken.

Not just the experience is broken, but also my heart as a UX Designer. However, the design teams must have had their reasons for tearing Skype apart like that (more on that later). I discovered a little workaround that allows me to use the Dial Pad as a separate app on my iPhone that opens natively instead of as a web view. Also, you don't have to login every single time you open it, or access it via the menu of the MS Teams app.

Once you have the dodgy web view of the dial pad open, click the share button in the bottom of the screen and choose "Add to home screen". Name it "Skype Dial Pad" (or similar) and you'll have it as a separate app that lets you access the desired features (near-) natively.

Even though I'm very proud of this workaround, I have found that the infamous slaughterhouse—more commonly known as "Microsoft"—are apparently phasing out these wonderful features that have done so much for me over the past years. If you still have Skype Credit, you can use it with my workaround, but you can't recharge it any more, so I reckon it's just a matter of time before they remove the features altogether.

Another amazing service on the internet that was sunset by big tech, apparently because that's not where the money lies. Rest in peace, Skype to Phone, Skype Number and Skype Credit. Rest in peace, Skype. You will be missed. 🪦

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Leaving behind a wasted mind, that's been exposed to everyday life just a tad too long. Escaping thoughts, that have been going on in circles. Getting out there means getting new perspectives in. Exploring new places means experiencing new realities. Meeting new people means learning something you haven't thought of before. And it's all thanks to this magical thing called travel.

Oh, blissful travel mind. I hope you never change.

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Now I wonder if the world leaders of today were once like that. Sitting on rocky beaches, throwing stones, aiming to hurt people, while sat next to their parents who haven’t learned this lesson either. Never learned that one should not hurt people. For fuck’s sake, you idiots, would you finally stop throwing stones?

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Unsurprisingly, also before the age of Generative AI, you were able to become a creator. Only before, it took effort. Nobody likes to work hard though! Today, you can be a respected creator and all that is asked of you is to feed a tool with a sentence. Typos and misspellings are forgiven of course, so you don't even have to try that hard (at this point, please forgive my cynicism).

Generative AI fits right into the fast-paced times that we are living in right now. It's all about efficiency, speed and effortlessness. I understand that AI has useful applications too, but for the life of me—I just can't share the sentiment that people strip away the creation process of creating and call themselves creators.

Why would I want to bother reading a book that no one bothered to write?

The quote above perfectly summarizes the problem that I have with Generative AI. It does a wonderful job taking the fun out of creating something by removing the part were you actually create something. Just writing these words feels incredibly dumb. In the end, you outsource the process of creation to a computer programme and then actually call yourself a creator? What.

It's not really enjoyable to make music now. [...] It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

These are the famous words of Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, a Generative AI tool that lets you create catchy music using nothing more than a prompt. According to him, all the music producers out there hate their jobs, hate to create, hate to make music. If I were a music creator, I'd feel deeply offended.

Personally, I don't feel comfortable handing off my craft—writing—to a machine. It's nonsensical, idiotic even. Why would I want my passion taken away from me?
Something I do everyday, because I love to do it.
Something I'm trying to become better at by practicing it vigorously.
Something that helps me put my mind in order.
Something that inspires and touches the lives of others.
Feel free to do my dishes, my laundry or vacuum-clean my living room. But write for me?

It hurts me to see that we are making our lives so effortless when it comes to something that it supposed to be effort, supposed to take time, supposed to make us grow. But today, it seems, we are going in a different direction. I can only be hopeful that people will value authenticity over artificiality, and in the end, creators—people, not machines—who honstely love to create something, will win the day.

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How did I get here?

Falling asleep was so easy—always is—so easy. It feels like so much time has passed in order for me to get here. Here is in my dark bedroom, on a hot summer night. Very much awake.

Why can't I sleep?

I've been here before

And right away, I know that I can't just turn to the side and fall back asleep. No, I've been here before.

Immediately, this strange, familiar sensation gets a hold of me. It's an overwhelming mix of refusal and longing for a state of mind that defines this inertia. Obviously, I'd rather just sleep, but here I am—wide awake. No part of my body feels tired. Even if I wish I were—I can't be.

I know this place.

An insomniac place

It's calm. Absolutely quiet. My girlfriend is fast asleep. I can feel the hot summer air on my skin. Just like the night before, this song starts to play in my head.

And I pray, pray you never lose your star. I'm so proud, proud of all that you are. I wish it was me.

And so, on yet another night, I indulge in my insomnia hobbies. I watch another episode of a captivating show on Netflix, that I've been looking forward to since last night. After all, I need a hobby that keeps me busy, while insomnia is my default state.

As sleep still seems to be a million miles away, I open up Spotify, put on The Insomnia Tapes Vol. 3, am greeted by the voice of Obongjayar and listen away into the night.

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"Really, dad?", I wondered when one day, I observed the new device in the cabinet above the telly. Of course, I supported his mission to be up to speed with technological advancement. "But, dad? Have you considered our vast collection of VHS?" This device, sleek in its appearance as it may have been, did not look like it could fit the clunky, rectangular-shaped cassettes into its tray. There was no in-built downward compatibility, for people who carried literal weight of the past television era.

But dad didn't care! "We'll just have to replace the VHS tapes with their DVD counterparts, because times are changing and we have to adapt." Better screen resolution, better sound, better everything. On top of that, DVDs came with DVD menus that opened up a world of exclusive behind the scenes footage! Doesn't the future sound promising?

And so, the times of the DVD were upon us.

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This post is part of the series Retro Emojis

Writing this travel blog feels like a never-ending mission. The trips that came after and are still waiting to be written about don't particularly support its completion. Four travel diaries down, eight more to go. 😩

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

If you're out vacationing, you don't have to leave your phone at home. But it's paramount to remind yourself of the times when a potential emergency was the only justification to own one. Put yourself in this noughties mindset, when a phone was simply that - an actual phone (you know, one that wasn't "smart").

Now, ask yourself this: do you need to check the news? You are in this remote place, and all you really wanted was to escape everyday life. So why did you bring the news with you?

Do you need your messaging app? Sure, your friends and family keep on texting you, even if or particularly because of your vacation. But now, you're here (reminder: far away). Why did you bring your mum, your dad and your friend Manu and everyone from this group chat along that goes on about organising your other friend's stag do? It's people you have never met in your life, and you might not even care about. What the hell are they doing on your trip?

Do you need social media? Do I even have to explain why opening Instagram 20 times a day on your vacation probably won't benefit but spoil it instead?

When I was travelling in the Balkans a few weeks ago, the best thing I did was to bring my phone without using it the way that people use phones today. No news, no messages, no social media, no nothing. I did use it to read my ebook before going to bed (my e-reader was left at home as I had to drastically reduce the weight of my backpack). Some insomnia podcasting also occurred in those nights when I really couldn't manage to fall sleep. And then, of course, I occasionally used my notes app when the moment for a great idea presented itself and I just couldn't resist writing it down.

Altogether, looking up what "hello" means in Albanian probably was the best use case for bringing my phone along (a warm "përshëndetje" to all the nice people hosting us in the Albanian Alps 👋🏼)

If you're out vacationing, then vacation away. You've deserved it. But do it the right way: vacation like it's the noughties.

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Right now, as you can see, I struggle to describe this interaction. We're still interacting with computers obviously but looking into the future, how will this interaction evolve?
Will we still use screens?
Will we use laptops with keyboards and mice? Phones with touch interfaces?
Will we still be users?
Will we even use something?
Or is the way we consume services, communicate online and acquire information about to blur the line to become the most natural form of interaction: having a conversation?

No one really knows. Are browsers dead? And with it the web? Will we start to carry around a little AI-enabled device that fulfills all our wishes?

No one really has an idea for the "platform" that AI will operate on. Browsers is what we know, what we have used as a platform for the last three decades. After we have been playing around with far too many chat assistants, integrating them more homogenically is the logical next step. So the answer for many seems obvious: AI browsers.

It could be that the ultimate platform for AI will be something else entirely, something we haven't thought of before, something we can't even imagine or the world isn't ready for. For the time being though, I don't see screens disappearing from our lives.

But maybe I'm too narrow-minded and like the rest of the world, just not ready to envision what the next user interface is about to look like.

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Where are your users? Out there, of course. Chilling in the sun, enjoying life, probably longing for refreshment.

Who are your users? Male? Female? Diverse? In their teens? Twenties? Thirties? If only you could pick them at will. Even without hiring a company that does the recruiting for you. Because they're out there. Waiting to be interviewed.

How do you test in the wild? Pick a sunny day. Prepare refreshments and put them in a cooling box. Beer cans, soft drinks, the good stuff. Cut up pineapple, melon and cool them too. Grab your favourite usability friend and head out to the island. It's summer, after all.

Spot the user base according to your criteria. Approach them and don't be shy. Ask if they want to join your usability study, outline the experiment and estimate the time it'll take them to complete it (just don't actually call it an "experiment"). Last but not least, show them what they'll gain: refreshments on a hot summer day.

Do the usability test as usual. If it seems fitting, you could even play some quiet background music, if it loosens up your users and makes the whole operation more accessible. Get precious feedback. Thank them for it. Give them their treats. One drink, one slice of pineapple. Do some more testing. Refresh your users.

Happy usability testing in the wild!

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I'm out in the world again, making new travel memories, while I'm not even halfway done writing up the travels of last year. But as it turns out, I need this. I need to travel in order to think, in order to feel, in order to be. Travelling keeps me going.

Writing in retrospect

In my mind, I'm still in The Philippines. To me, it was a place of rest, where I could take a step back, find a routine and recover from months of intense travelling. A place, where I could write and be close to the ocean. It's where I experienced my first tropical storm, where a dog stole my shoe (No one wears shoes in The Philippines, I had to learn that the hard way), where I've made so many friends and where I've learned surfing.

But beyond my personal experiences, only today do I get to really appreciate what kind of a place The Philippines is. The mystical mountain province, the recognizable purple yam called "Ube", or how Spam became a national treasure.
Balikbayan boxes, the outbreak of the volcano Pinatuba, the legendary tattoo artist Apo Whang-Od. The Philippines is a place filled with magic.

As I'm writing my travel blog with a considerable delay, I don't just get to take myself back to these places. I also get to learn about them, better understand their history and discover what they are really about.

Writing in retrospect is wonderful.

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

The shards of my writing block filled me with self-doubts and caused a customary identity crisis:
I have a blog, don't I?
But what is my blog about, again?
I broke writing.

It took me a while to realise that I was stuck inside a comfort zone, a cosy place both in my mind and on my sofa, where I wouldn't have to face the real world. I wouldn't have to face the 9-5 lifestyle, this "artificial intelligence" everyone is going on about, the cold of European winter, the absurdity of war and the lies of right-wing politicians. Fuck off. I just want my freedom back! Get out into the world again. Live from day to day. Travel.

Weeks of a blinking cursor in an empty editor window went by. Nothing happened. Sometimes strangers found out about my blog and asked me:
Oh, you have a blog?
What do you write about?

What do I write about?

It's simple, really simple. I write about travelling, at least if you believe my past year. Arriving in new places seems to be a theme. And lots of travel blogging, because some people actually believe it's a good idea to start a travel blog and half a year after their travels ended realise that it will take them another year to finish it.

Then, I write about retro emojis. Yes, emojis that are very retro and remind me of simpler times. There's a CD emoji, a telly emoji a phone emoji, even a fax emoji. What even is fax? And there's definitely more retro emojis to reflect upon.

For anyone who hasn't noticed: all of my blog posts seem to have an association to emojis. Half the fun of writing a blog post is picking emojis that summarize a topic in emoji-form. And yes, there's a slight chance that I think too much about emojis.

In this past year of blogging, I've also discovered that blog post can have and often should have sequels, just because certain topics reappear in your life and as you get wiser, your relationship to these topics evolve and deserve recontemplation. If you connect individual posts together you end up with blog post series, which is not only beautiful but also very soothing to my brain.

Equally soothing is digital cleanliness. I decluttered my taskbar and did the same to my contact book and afterwards felt like a new person.

And then again, there were more posts about travelling. I thought about the people who acted as travel jokers and wondered why so many Uber Eats drivers picked awful profile pictures (and in the process realised that I picked equally awful pictures for my about page).

Eight months of travelling made me miss video games. The Andes made me write about designing visited links, a better web and how I ended up writing a blog in Spanish. Also, when Peruvian food delivery services let me down, I had to write about web forms again, and I might have blown off some steam there.

Last summer's obsession with British television made me switch from American to British English (about bloody time!) and when I was suddenly back in Europe, my insomnia returned. Sleepless night in Austria reminded me of sleepless nights in the Philippines and with the return to everyday life, the aforementioned writing block was just around the corner. Shatter.

Comeback to blogging

Oh hello, internet! How have you been?

Hello also to you strangers, who seem to be curious about my hobbies and want to get to know me a bit better. I'm back and if you really want to know, I write about my travel nostalgia, my comeback to blogging and my experiences as a software user. But that's not set in stone. I write about whatever I feel like writing about. It could be retro emojis, it could be about being a user and doing what users do. But most important isn't what I write about. Most important is that I write.

Two years of blogging and blogging still is the best thing I ever did on the internet. Happy birthday, niqwithq.com. 🎈

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This post is part of the series Years of Blogging

But there's hope, because if we're being honest, you don't have to be perfect and your standards of your own work are probably too high. My way of dealing with this character trait is to embrace a Minimum-Viable-Product-Mindset™ (excuse the software engineering terminology). Enter "First Drafts". Instead of writing a perfect blog post (which happens almost never according to my standards), I write a "good enough" post. Or even less than that. A draft, really.

Once that draft outlines my idea, it's ready to be put out there. Out onto my test environment, a place on the web with a secret URL that I visit more often than I care to admit. I let it sit there and let some time pass.

Later in the day or even the next day, if I'm not too eager to publish, or the idea needs some more time to blossom, I revisit it. Now, I have a foundation. I don't start from zero. I continue with a first draft. I edit, I simplify, I rephrase, or to put it briefly: I have fun. Editing is amazing! Once I've done a couple of editing iterations (more drafts that I periodically "snapshot" and push to my test environment and later start off from as a new foundation) I tend to be happy with what I have. Then it's time to publish.

What's great about having a first draft is that it sets my thoughts in motion. There's something I started to think about. It's out there – and I think that's the important part. It might still need a little something, before it can evolve and finally make sense to the world. Or at least to me.

Fuck you, perfectionism.

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And that's the price to pay if you live in the vertical tabs world. But it's an absolute fair price, since vertical tabs change the game. I can only wonder why it took browser makers over 30 years to realise this.

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I try to use this stream of energy as much as I can. My brain is constantly working and provides me access to cognitive spheres that were before unattainable. It's as if I were driving a car and my brain acted as navigation assistance, telling me where to go, while all I really have to do is drive and let myself be taken to these places. Ideas appear out of nowhere and suddenly feel so obvious.

Branded niqwithq T-shirts? Of course, I need branded niqwithq T-shirts! Why haven't I thought of that before?

I try to keep track of these thoughts and write them down, before they disappear into oblivion.

The side effect of these episodes is that they can get out of control. Often, this energetic flow has no bounds and the ideas keep on coming relentlessly, even when my system is supposed to shut down at night.

A love letter to Taipei. Another great post, because obviously, I love Taipei. Also, I've wanted to write about my Asia Game for so long. Oh, and isn't it time to finally build that random blog post feature for my website? And a guestbook. And when I release either of these features, I write a feature post. It was supposed to be the "last big adventure" with our old dad. That's the perfect start to the blog post I wanted to write about my dad, in response to Robin Rendle's Sleepless in San Francisco.

One thought chases another. The thoughts keep on coming at an uncontrollable velocity. At the peak of these phases, which usually last for one or two weeks, I can't sleep for days.

Lately, I've managed to get a better grip on them. I started to explore them with the help of psychotherapy. Today, I'm looking for ways to channel this energy and get as much use of it as I possibly can, while protecting myself in the process.

After returning from a year-long trip, I've suffered from depression, which had me lose hope that I would ever be able to enter this state of mind again. After half a year of inertia, even though I was aware of the down side, I was longing for my inspiration to return. When, eventually, it did, I welcomed it as a friend and let it unfold.

This time around, for the first time ever, I was able to absorb the energy and make good use of it, while maintaining the ability to sleep at night. I won't let it get out of control again.

And that... is pretty great. ✨

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For the past one and a half years, I was convinced that using country emoji flags as blog post tags for my fancy travel blog was a neat idea. This allows my users to filter blog posts by country with the added benefit of displaying the respective country's flag in the best imaginable style: emoji-style. Neat! So neat indeed!

But then, on one not-so-sunny day, for reasons I cannot remember, I left my insular Firefox world, where everything seemed to be in order and opened my website in Chrome. Suddenly my neat idea didn't appear to be so neat after all.

The colourful flags of my visited countries disappeared to make room for ugly, lifeless two-letters country codes.

What the...?

What the bloody hell?

First of all, and most importantly, why has no one, in all this time, told me about this? Mum? Dad? Auntie? Anyone? I know, you've been busy. But I also know that you have been reading along and could have just reached out:

Boy! Something seems off. What's with these strange country codes showing up in your tags list?

— Imaginary email that no one bothered to write me

Second of all, what actually happened here? To begin with, this is an issue that only affects Windows. Windows uses its own Segoe UI Emoji Font Family to display emojis. As it turns out, the font doesn't support displaying any country emoji flags. In fact, Microsoft as an emoji vendor altogether doesn't provide any designs for country flags. If you ever wondered why you won't find any flags in Window's native emoji panel or on Microsoft Teams it's because Microsoft never implemented them.

Third of all, why? Why won't you let us have country emoji flags, Microsoft? Well, we can only speculate.

But I can take away that this probably has a political background. In the same way that Apple blocks the Taiwanese emoji flag within China, Microsoft apparently wants to stay away from the geo-political minefield that is the world we currently live in.

But I really want country emoji flags!

Then you should have them!

One obvious fix is to force all of your users to just stick to using Firefox. Why? Because instead of using Segoe UI, Mozilla uses Twitter's Twemoji font on Windows platforms to properly display country emoji flags, just the way god (or in this case: Unicode) intended.

If force is not an option, there is always this sweet Country Flag Emoji Polyfill, which I have now implemented on my travel blog that follows a similar approach: if your platform doesn't support country emoji flags, it downloads a subset of the Twemoji font into the user's browser and thus, again, enabling them to see those beautiful flags.

Last but not least: use a custom library of flag images (such as Flagpedia), where you won't ever run into encoding problems.

Country Emoji Flags for Everyone!

The influence of geo-politics on our digital world isn't a new development. This topic reminded me of the fate of the .io top level domain.

The United Kingdom is currently in negotiations with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of one of their overseas territories in the Indian Ocean: The Chagos Archipelago, aka the "British Indian Ocean Territory" which holds the .io domain. The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which governs internet domains, has a well-documented procedure, once a country or territory ceases to exist: its respective domain gets deleted. So look out, all you cool tech start-ups with your cool .io domains! By the way, guess what country holds the .ai domain, which had an obvious increase in use in recent years? Exactly, yet another British Overseas Territory: a little island nation in the Caribbean called Anguilla.

Just like with domain names, there is a formalized procedure that describes the introduction and removal of country emoji flags. Unicode, which governs emojis, uses the internationally recognized list of countries and territories (ISO 3166-1) to maintain country emoji flags. The most recent addition to this list marks the island of Sark, which is a (yet again) "British Crown Dependency" in the English Channel and apparently now qualifies to make it to said list.

Therefore, with the release of Unicode 16, Sark did get its own flag emoji and the territory is in the process of getting its own top level domain (.cq) too. Go Sark! The island is tiny (5,44 km2 / 2.1 square miles), is a dark-sky preserve and apparently, to quote Wikipedia, "one of the few remaining places in the world where cars are banned from roads and only tractors, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles are allowed". Shit, I really want to visit Sark now.

Altogether, we can say that Microsoft really has no reason to bother excluding our beloved country emoji flags from their emoji implementation.

Enough said.

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On my travel blog however, things look different. I post three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Instead of articulating my ideas concerning a certain topic like I do on this blog, I'm telling the story of the past year's travels. I'm just telling the story in the chronological order of how it happened. This way, it's much simpler to follow my posting interval.

If you're a blogger, how is it for you?

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Someone wrote something here, in the comfort of a WYSIWYG editor, which is nothing less than the digital equivalent to writing a letter. The recipient reads this message far away from the buzz, the noise, the splendour. Email is so inconspicuous, so foreign to this fast-paced world of ours, that when someone actually still replies or reaches out via email instead of social media, we can take a step back and fully appreciate: thank you for writing.

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This post is part of the series Reply by email

I've been here that long, it's starting to feel like home. I'm living in the jungle, not far from the waves. The hassles to get here were definitely worth it.

Bruce's sister reads the words from a post card, four decades after he has passed in 1985. What follows is a collection of video clips, recorded with a Super 8 camera, post cards and recordings of Bruce's voice as he gives status updates on his travels.

On the recordings you see all the exciting adventures of a world traveller. The jungle, the surfing, the crazy traffic, the waterfalls, the volcanoes, the monkeys, the bats, the happy children, a feast of Lechon spread out on banana leaves, the works. You can tell he's been living the good life, exploring a world so foreign to him.

"I still miss him", goes his widow Gina, whom he had married while he was out there travelling the Philippines, as she's looking at old pictures and recordings together with Bruce's closer family. Happy people wave in the video. "Doesn't get much easier, does it?". "Please look after my dog for me", Bruce says in the end. And you sure know, he's not coming back.

More than anything this had me thinking about travelling in times before the internet. It's pretty exciting to be out there in the first place, but what a genuine adventure it must have been without social media, without "10 places you must see in place XYZ", without Google Maps, without smartphones, without the crowds.

One can only imagine.

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But of course, my first sentiment was that this isn't over. I did what any sensible TV owner would do: I tried to fix it. When the prominent remedy of turning it off and on again didn't do its typical magic, I've watched this infamous troubleshooting video of this guy ruling out every potential issue my TV could have ran into that apparently tens of thousands TV owners like me had turned to in despair. The dedication and knowledge of this guy, although with a weary expression on his face, left me impressed and slightly amused. Never would I have thought that I would find myself in a situation where I had to understand the inner workings of my telly, but now more than ever, it needed me. And isn't me spending an hour trying to understand how to fix it the least I could do for it, in return for years of unconditional screening of entertainment television?

Although I was convinced that with the power of this guy's (aka Tim Daniels) instructions I would be able to fix the issue, from the very moment the unfortunate flickering appeared, I could sense a strange feeling. I felt like this was meant to happen. I took a good look at myself and the kind of person I had become over the past half year. I became someone, who couldn't even have a meal without the presence of the telly. Someone, who would easily spend 2-3 hours every day in front of it instead of doing anything remotely useful.

Then, the words of my friend Nga from the other day popped into my head:

The real world happens outside of your comfort zone.

That's when I realised, that my TV created the perfect conditions for me to be in said comfort zone. I knew right away when she said it, that it was finally time to change something. To finally take the necessary steps and get out of there and leave this comfortable world of 90s sitcoms behind me that I had immersed myself in for the past six months. With so much of my time chipped away by the mighty TV, how would I ever call the plumber to finally get our bathroom sink unclogged? How would I spend more time with friends again, plan my summer and future trips, figure out a master career plan that allows me to work remotely, get a scooter driving licence, work through my notes and wonderful ideas I wrote down during my trip, clean out the office cabinet, pick up a sports routine, migrate the last apps from my old phone and finally get down to writing more on this blog? This all sounds dreadfully annoying right now. But I know that in the long run it would make me feel so much better.

It took me longer than I would care to admit to disassemble my TV set, mostly because there were more than a dozen screws and as usual I only realised at the penultimate one that I should have used the battery-powered screwdriver. I removed layers of dust that accumulated after years of operation, I reattached the cables, as instructed by the optimistic Tim Daniels. However, in the end, my efforts were fruitless. The telly's time had come.

But damn it, so has mine. Not the time to stop operating. But the time to finally leave the comfort zone.

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Nevertheless, we have learned to trust the software that we use. Why would software lie to us?

The duck costume

I'm not entirely sure why oat milk packaging has a tendency to have cool design. But one thing I am entirely sure of: I'm a sucker for oat milk packaging that has cool design.

So when we got oat milk from a coffee shop a while back, we got Minor Figures Oat Milk. On its packagings is an illustration of a guy in a duck costume wearing sun glasses and swim fins (not sponsored). But why? Why a duck costume? An undercover agent wearing a cow costume would have made more sense to me. You know, a milk dressed up as regular milk, but actually it's oat.

Why indeed, I wondered, and passed on the question to AI:

The "Minor Figures Barista Oat" Milk features a character in a duck costume on its packaging. This is because Minor Figures is a company that has partnered with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, to promote their shared values of privacy and anonymity. The duck costume is a nod to DuckDuckGo's brand and mascot. Minor Figures aims to reflect these values in their own brand identity, and the duck character has become a recognizable part of their packaging and marketing.

WHAT?

Minor Figures has a partnership with DuckDuckGo? There's oat milk that promotes privacy and anonymity? That cares about a healthy internet and the protection of users' rights? Shut up and take my money!

But then, I took a step back. This sounded too good to be true. Where's your proof, Llama? So I asked it for a source, while fact-checking on my own (using DuckDuckGo of course — not sponsored either):

I couldn't find any information or source confirming the connection between Minor Figures and DuckDuckGo, or the reason behind the duck costume on their packaging. It's possible that the character is simply a branding choice or a creative decision made by Minor Figures. If you're looking for accurate information, I recommend checking the company's official website or social media channels for more information about their branding and packaging design.

I see! So you admit that you were bullshitting me? Why couldn't you have said that in the first place instead of misleading me like that?

The truth

AI coming up with a peculiar story of the duck costume's origin just made me more curious. I just had to know. And since my DuckDuckGo research didn't produce any results, I reached out to Minor Figures.

Helena responded, shattered my dreams a bit (because I really would want oat milk that supports the mission to save the internet) but told me the actual, no less peculiar story behind the duck costume:

Our first products was actually cold-brew coffee in a carton, and around the time we rebranded in 2018, We found that one of the earliest records of Cold Brew style coffee was from Kyoto, Japan which has a famous river called the Kamo-gawa which translates to "Duck River". On a whim, we made a few different designs involving ducks, and our current design with the delightful Penny (Pronouns: He/She/They Gender: Oat) was the clear winner.

There you have it! The mystery of the duck costume that we all have been wondering about, finally revealed!

But the real lesson here is the significance of fact-checking in the modern age. Because we can't and never should trust software entirely. This year, Mark Zuckerberg eventually gave in to political pressure by Donald Trump as Meta stopped its fact-checking programs on all their platforms, which validated the information in posts and downranked them if they contained falsehoods. Add to that the fact that Meta also loosened their content policies and you have a platform that not only supports the spread of more misinformation but also promotes hate speech.

So while you should be more skeptical about information shared on social media, beware of a certain new, shiny and very hyped up software technology called "AI". According to a study, AI actually hallucinates less, if you treat it extra nicely. It's a people pleaser, that might go as far as lying straight to your face, just to make you happy, but if you include an offer for some money or chocolate in your prompt you tend to get better results and it might even admit that it doesn't know something (don't worry, you don't actually have to pay the AI for its services).

When consuming information on the internet these days, tread carefully. If you want to know the truth, you have to dig deep. Fact-check, fact-check and fact-check again. Then fact-check once more. Find the truth.

Now, more than ever.

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I remember days when I had ideas, wonderful ideas. I was productive, incredibly productive. I was able to write without consciously thinking about it. Words just appeared out of nowhere and made their way into my text editor.

And now this. It's hard. It's frustrating. Nothing works.

I broke writing.

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Now that I have noticed it, I've been thinking about my progress.

I'm already back home, my infamous trip around the world over and yet I'm still in the midst of it. These days, I'm writing about travelling in Vietnam, in April of last year. I've fallen so far behind that I sometimes doubt if I can ever catch up. The past week, I could even sense feelings of surrender.

But then, on the way out of a shitty week, a shower thought emerged: Everyday life returned too soon. So soon, that my travel memories faded away with a surprising velocity. Could travel blogging be my remedy?

I can take myself back to the places I have visited. Relive the individual moments. Think the same thoughts again. Travel blogging feels powerful. My remedy to the speed of everyday life. I could go on with my contemplation. But rather than contemplating, shouldn't I just travel blog?

It's time to catch up.

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

As soon as I opened up the door to the living room, the tropical heat of this summer night greeted me. I left the lights out and avoided exiting through the balcony door. Instead, I used the rear entrance of our summer domicile. I had got used to entering the terrace this way, in an attempt not to wake the dog of the house, Kabud, who was sleeping in front of the balcony door, as expected. I approached the wooden rocking chair and when Kabud awakened after all, she gave me a worried look. "It's fine", I said to her. "Just go back to sleep".

I opened up my laptop to do the usual. Write. At that point, I still wasn't sure if it was actually soothing me and helping me wind down or rather intensifying my insomnia. Once I ran out of fuel, I continued my routine: read other blogs, listen to music and watch YouTube videos.

As the clock struck 4.00 am, I noticed nature's call. I knew by then that going to the bathroom would disturb the sleep of my girlfriend, which I so envied. So, I left the house and headed to the beach, as I had done on every occasion in a series of sleepless nights. The mighty Pacific was roaring, as I stood under this dark, big sky and relieved myself. Black waves were crushing on the beach that I could only make out by sound. Swoosh!

Somehow I felt trapped. Trapped in my mental state defined by the inability to sleep. And yet, I loved the calm of the night, loved the serenity of blogging away my thoughts in the rocking chair, loved to witness the sounds of the ocean at night.

Oh, bittersweet insomnia in the Philippines.

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Today, it still hasn't come. The world doesn't care as much as I would like it to about the bloggers of the small web. Niq who? Niq with Q? But a blogging challenge has emerged amidst the blogosphere! And my blogging friend Thom challenged me to partake. I feel honoured and shall accept the challenge.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

When my friends talk to me about my blog, they often call it my "business blog" or my "tech blog". I know where they are coming from. When I launched this blog, I thought of it as a blog solely dedicated to web accessibility. I felt like a missionary, educating the world about it.

But over time my blog evolved. I realized that I don't want to write just about web accessibility. It is very close to my heart but so is travelling, productivity and the small web. Today, I write about anything that I get enthusiastic about. Anything is possible when writing a "personal blog".

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I built my website with NextJS, and I'm hosting it on Netlify. My decision to do so was influenced by my co-workers. There was a big buzz going on around NextJS.

It came in handy that once I completed NextJS's Get Started Guide, I had the foundation of a blog in front of me.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

After I have been blogging for a while, I tried out other platforms. I've built my travel blog with 11ty and my Spanish blog with Neocities. Last year, I also created a Bear Blog.

I'm so glad that nowadays it's so easy to start writing a blog. I wish more people would embrace the small web and leave the capitalistic world of social media behind.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?

When I feel really inspired and the words for a topic just appear out of nowhere, I immediately pick up my phone, open Signal and write a "Note to self". This is also the place where I collect ideas for potential blog posts. Sometimes, I manage to write entire blog posts in Signal.

Then, I pick up the draft or ideas from there and copy them over to a local Markdown file. The fine-tuning happens in Visual Studio Code.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I identified four areas that raise my inspiration:

1. Movement (taking a walk, going for a run, riding a scooter).
2. Change of scenery (going on a day trip, spending time in nature, travelling in general).
3. Social interaction (meeting friends, attending events, talking to my girlfriend).
4. Consuming media (reading books, reading other blogs, watching movies/series, listening to podcasts).

In general, I believe that my inspiration builds up over time and once it has enough momentum, I'm in an elevated state. Then I feel most inspired to write.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I write a first draft and then push it to my test system. Usually, I'm not very happy with it at this point in time. What matters is that it's out there. It feels like progress.

I let it sit there and take a break from the computer. When I return, the editing starts, which I love to do. I simplify, I cut out, I rephrase. Sometimes I'm ready to publish a second draft, other times it's only my seventh. As a writer, story telling and writing style are very dear to me. Therefore, I take my sweet time before eventually publishing a post.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

When I launched my blog, I believed that I needed to know all the answers right away. What to write about, what features to build, what the website had to look like. It's no surprise that I soon felt frustrated.

How not to write was my freedom post. When I realized that I can write about anything, rather than stick to a theme rigorously, it changed my relationship towards writing. Today, I know that not knowing all the answers is among the best things of building something new. You just start with something and see how it evolves over time.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

So many. My blogroll and a /uses page have been in the making for quite some time now. I also want to introduce a guestbook.

The problem that I have with adding new features is that I always have to balance out whether I want to spend my time on writing or whether I want to spend it on building. Even though I love to build features for the website, writing usually wins!

Passing the torch

Let's keep the challenge alive! This is a great opportunity to motivate my blogging friend Paulo to write on his fantastic blog again. But no pressure, mate.

Blog Questions Challenge

In the end, this did feel like a proper interview, even though I basically interviewed myself. Finally, my time has come.

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Dynamics in the living room changed when one day, out of the blue, dad took my brother and me to Toys "R" Us. In the store, he placed us in front of the brand new Nintendo 64 and announced, "we take one, won't we?", as if it were absolutely obvious. This was so typical for my dad. We couldn’t believe our luck.

Dad didn't know that this meant that we would constantly roam around the living room, eager to play video games. My parents regularly reminded us that our eyes turned square from all the gaming.

When dad decided to buy a new TV for the living room, the old one would be moved to our room. He told us that we weren't allowed to play on the new TV, because the video game graphics would be "burned into the screen". Of course, we believed him. But today, my brother speculates that dad just wanted us out of the living room, so that he could have it to himself, turn on the record player and listen to his music undisturbed.

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This post is part of the series Retro Emojis

January

When are you really ready to set off on a trip around the world? Well, first, you need to get the boring but necessary matters out of the way: the tedious project handovers at work, the bureaucratic nightmare of applying for educational leave and the tiresome relocation of all my possessions to the basement of my girlfriend Sophia's.

Driven by the idea to further improve my writing, I secretly launched a travel blog called Niqs Reisen. I was convinced that writing in my mother tongue German would make me a better writer. I'll let you be the judge of that.

My favourite places in January were the Schmelz, my old home in Ottakring, my new home in Penzing and the Kuffner observatory.

February

February hit just the way you expect it to in harsh European winter. Vienna's unforgiving winds and bitter coldness reminded me why I had decided to start this journey at the worst time of the year (Sorry, February).

When finally, the day to start the trip that I had been dreaming of for an entire decade had come, I couldn't yet fully grasp the freedom that was lying ahead of me. We travelled across 3 continents and 4 time zones within a week. When we made it to Christchurch on the 11th day of our trip, we reunited with our friend Manu, who was our travel companion for the following weeks on a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand.

It took me weeks before I could comprehend that I had made it to the other side of the planet, where people drive on the left side of the road and travellers you come across talk about their "past lives". Many agree that there is a life before and a life after you made it to New Zealand. It's a country whose natural beauty is nothing less but inflationary.

We observed the Southern Cross on the antipodean night sky, became friends with Simon, a French solo traveller, and drove by the snow-capped mountains of the Southern Alps only to watch dolphins at the Pacific Ocean mere hours later. We swam in ice-cold and aquamarine lakes, took boat tours through breathtaking fjords and whatever we did, New Zealand just wouldn't stop being absolutely stunning.

My favourite places in February were Geylang Food Market and Haw Paw Villa in Singapore, the Forest Lodge, Franz Josef, Knight Viewing Lookout and Albert Town in New Zealand.

March

When March came around, we made it to the south of the island to explore more of the local wildlife. The inhabitants of the beaches were sea lions, magnificent creatures who wouldn't allow themselves to be bothered by tourists as insignificant as us.

We took the most popular of hikes, the Hooker Valley Track, which left our minds blown by the shear view of Mt. Cook, the highest mountain of the country. At Lake Tekapo, I observed the brightest night sky I had seen in my entire life, at Kaikōura we watched dolphins swim in the distance after sunrise. In the Abel Tasman National Park, eventually, I realized, that I had been travelling too fast and needed a break.

We took said break weeks later, when our 4600 km (2860 miles) road trip had ended, and we travelled back to Australia. I had originally pictured another road trip on the east coast, but for the time being we had enough of sitting in a car.

My favourite places in March were Lake Manapouri, Twizel, Lake Tekapo, Tui's Nest and Albert Park in New Zealand and Woolwich Point in Australia.

April

April started with culture shock. We flew over Australia's bleak and lifeless red interior and once we got off the plane, we found ourselves in a place where our language and credit cards suddenly stopped working. Add to that crazy traffic, crazy heat and crazy people, and you're in the right mindset for Vietnam.

I became obsessed with riding scooters, visiting Buddhist pagodas and eating fresh fruit. We drove in the wild traffic of Phu Quoc, Da Nang and Ninh Binh, we explored the islands of the Mekong Delta and travelled in night busses from South all the way to central Vietnam. We reunited with our friend Nga, who properly introduced us to this foreign culture. Da Nang became a great base for day trips and allowed us to rest, recharge our batteries and plan the next steps of the trip.

In Ninh Binh we were faced with a heat wave that peaked in temperatures of 41 °C (106 °F) and still Sophia managed to catch a cold.

My favourite places in April were the Riverside Hotel Pool and Shamballa in Ho Chi Minh City, our Bungalow home on Phu Quoc, the temple in Duong Dong, Lady Buddha and Con Market in Da Nang and the Hoi Van Pass.

May

In Hanoi we were both mentally burned out and done with Vietnam. When we arrived days later in Hong Kong we were culture-shocked yet again, because all of a sudden we seemed to be back in the Western world. We visited Lamma and Lantau island, had amazing views from Victoria Peak and made a day trip to Macau, commonly known as the Las Vegas of Southeast Asia.

I loved everything about the culture mix with British and Chinese influences that shaped what is now Hong Kong, with its vertical buildings, its pineapple buns, its malls and its beautiful islands. We were nevertheless happy to leave the density of our 11 square meter flat behind and be en route to the Philippines.

Unlike the Vietnamese and many Hong Kongers, Filipinos were very fluent in English which allowed us to reclaim the ability of communication. For the first time in my life, I stood on a surf board, power outages occurred on a daily basis, one of my shoes was stolen by a local dog (that I had bought only weeks before in Hong Kong) and altogether being in the Philippines meant that we could finally rest and recover from all the adventures, all the travelling and finally embrace everyday life again.

My favourite places in May were Bai Dinh Temple Complex in Vietnam, Bake House, Victoria Peak and Happiness in Hong Kong and Pacificio on Siaragao island.

June

In June, we were enjoying everyday life on Siargao island: writing (or drawing), going for morning swims at the infamous secret beach (one of many), having breakfast in General Luna, taking a siesta around lunch, more writing in the afternoon and having dinner at our favourite Indian place.

The animals of the house grew so accustomed to our presence that they started to anticipate our arrivals. Brownie, the dog and Drama, the cat (at least that's what we called her) would wait in the corridor and compete for attention. We returned a couple of times to the Northeast of the island, to surf at Pacifico and spend time with our new-found friend, David. Siargao, we miss you.

After a short stay in Manila, on which we discovered some appealing sides to the unbeloved city (such as the oldest Chinatown in the world), we took a night bus up North to Baler. Rainy season had started, and we seemed to be the only foreigners in this place. We rented another scooter, swam in the ocean and died from the heat. And we started to realize that it was time to up our surfing game.

My favourite places in June were Rotti, Canijugan Peak and Secret Beach in Malinao, Roots in General Luna and Gagay in Baler.

July

Baler was a boring place, in the supposed off-season of surfing. But boring was exactly what we needed. And the surfing season was far from over!

Soon, the Baler spirit took over and made me feel the bliss of being in the Philippines. In the mornings, my surfing instructor Chad would look out to sea and announce the conditions. While on Siargao, I had believed it was only a matter of low or hide tide, in Baler, I learned that it was far more complex to forecast proper surfing conditions. But once you sat down at the little cabin on the beach, it didn't really matter if you surfed or not. Sitting on one of the bar stools, eating Chad's spectacular food (the best I've had in the Philippines), blogging away, planning the next steps of the trip or simply enjoying the good company in this place: the Baler spirit was real.

When two months of resting in the Philippines ended, it was time to travel again. And with it came all the bad things of being out there: packing, exhausting days of travelling and again the language barrier. But also the good things: immersing in a new culture, eating fantastic food and a glorious reunion with my Korean friends who I had last seen 8 years prior.

My favourite places in July were Oung and Cemento in Baler, Cheonggyecheon stream and the Hangul Museum in Seoul, the Seoraksan National Park and Pelican Chicken in Seoraksan.

August

Two weeks of travelling in Korea had us drained, overstimulated and exhausted. When we arrived in Taiwan, both of us wanted to quit. But when we asked the oracle at Longshan Temple whether that was a good idea, what do you think it answered? No! It was clear that we had to carry on.

Taipei was one of the greenest cities I have ever been to, filled with the most beautiful temples that are mounted by porcelain dragons and its local cuisine is nothing less than mouth-watering. The streets in Taiwan are designed to benefit scooter drivers and that I had to experience for myself. We discovered the beautiful green landscapes of this country, the funny and interesting culture of the Taiwanese and the fact that you can spend a lot of money on electronics.

I could have stayed in this place for the rest of the year, but this trip demanded to be completed, and planet Earth demanded to be circumnavigated. And so, after Taiwan, we spent ten amazing days in Tokyo. With all the love I have for Japan, I have to say that I can do without its tourist crowds.

My favourite places in August were Bishanyan Kaizang Sheng Temple, 來了就吃, Hao Gong Dao Dian, Guang Hua Digital Plaza and Lion's Head Mountain in Taiwan, the Nintendo Store in Shibuya, Gansozushi Akihabara Manseibashi in Akihabara and teamLabs Planets.

September

We crossed the Pacific Ocean and thus ended our 5 months in Asia. All of a sudden, we were in California. The United States brought cooler weather, self-driving cars and the Golden Gate Bridge. Out of all places, we learned how to play Mahjong in San Francisco's Chinatown.

En route to South America, we decided it was best if we took another break from travelling and stay in Cancún. We enjoyed having iguanas in our backyard, we went for morning swims in the pool, we took occasional trips to the beach, and we were hit by the tropical storm that days later became Hurricane Helene.

My favourite places in September were the Carlton Hotel, Bob's Donuts and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Ritual and Playa Delfines in Cancún.

October

I challenged myself to write one blog post a day in Spanish for every day spent in South America. As a consequence, I started to adapt a Spanish mindset once we made it to Peru.

We skipped the obvious gringo route that would have taken us south to Machu Picchu. Instead, we went north to the Andes. It felt fantastic to live in the mountains and have our base in Huaraz, 3000 m above sea level. After adjusting to the altitude, we took wonderful hikes, explored beautiful lagunas and trained our Spanish every day in this exciting place full of Quechua people, alpacas and hiking enthusiasts.

Taking colectivos to get around felt like an adventure, but even more so was riding a horse at 5000 m above the sea. The ultimate adventure though was when we hiked Nevado Mateo equipped with ice axes, crampons and joined by experienced mountaineers. And even though I'm so happy that we came around to undertaking this adventure, at the end of it, Sophia exhaustedly announced "Nunca más". Never again.

My favourite places in October were Julieta in Lima, Café Andino and Cantú in Huaraz and Laguna Churup.

November

In November, I was reminded of the freedom that riding a bicycle entails. Especially so, when we rode on the majestic cliffs of Barranco and Miraflores. I ended our time in Peru with an exciting activity in the sand dunes at the edges of Lima: sandboarding.

We made our way to Colombia and visited Medellín, the city of eternal spring. In Bogotá, we climbed the city's local mountain Montserrat, drank hot chocolate and let cheese melt in it (as one does) and spoke more Spanish. We flew back to Europe at the end of the month.

The original plan to return to Austria from Spain by train, fell apart within two weeks of being back on the old continent. Europe was cold, expensive and full of tourists. But we were glad to reunite with Simon, who we had met in February in New Zealand.

My favourite places in November were Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, Blues Kitchen, Museo Nacional de Colombia and Montserrat in Bogotá and the city walls of Girona in Spain.

December

Returning to Vienna was very strange. Everyone spoke German and life was just the way it had been before we left. While we circumnavigated the planet and so much had happened in our lives, it felt like this place stood completely still.

We did everything that the Viennese heart desires: spend an afternoon in a traditional coffee house, eat Wiener Schnitzel, go for a hike in the Viennese woods and feel extraordinarily grumpy because this fantastic year had come to an end.

My favourite places in December were The Bakery Corner in Toulouse, the medieval town Corde-sur-ciel, Café Kriemhild, Happy Buddha, Otti and Breitenseer Lichtspiele in Vienna.

In summary

2024 was the year that I had been dreaming about for so long. I finally went on a trip around the world.

I visited 17 countries, met beautiful people around the world and lived my best life. Thank you 2024, for doing what you did. 🙌

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This post is part of the series Year in Review

Monday a week ago was the first day in what feels like forever that the sky showed just how blue blue could get. It felt nice to be out there and soak up some sun. But no matter how bright the sun, no matter how blue the sky, when the wind is blowing you'll be reminded of how relentless winter in this place becomes.

The fog

Thursday morning, 9 o'clock. I get up and make coffee. I pour it in my cup, walk into the living room and take a sip. I look out of the window.

I see fog. Fog, so thick, that you can hardly make out the people walking in the street. I put on my running gear and walk outside. It's everywhere. The fog swallowed the neighbourhood, the district, the city.

I battle through the haze as I go about my run. The people I come across look like they don't belong here. They look trapped inside the impenetrable density of this screen of fog.

I realize that the fog swallowed the people too.

Where am I?

Everything is the way it was. After travelling for a year, I cannot comprehend that it's over. The first weeks back feel like I had just imagined the trip. While I was gone, I became a different person, discovered a new side of me, had wonderful ideas. In the meantime, this place stayed exactly the way it was.

Returning home reminded me of the person I used to be. Also, it got me worried, that I'm still this person and the trip just happened inside my head.

I haven't felt as lost all year.

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This post is part of the series Arriving in a New Place

"How cool would that be?"

An idea

I was only 24 years old when I had this idea the first time. Having spent a four-month term abroad in Northern Finland, I had acquired a taste in travelling. On top of that, I was newly in love. You know what that means: Everything was possible! But then, life got in the way.

I was young. Maybe too young. I was about to graduate and hadn't even started a first job. I soon realized that it wasn't all that easy to just pack up my bags and travel around the world.

Half a year after I first had my idea, it vanished. Suddenly, I was girlfriendless, jobless and clueless. Back in my hometown, without an idea where to start and what to do with myself. I was back where I started. My everything-is-possible-attitude had faded away. But somewhere, in the back of my head, I was still convinced: someday, I will take a trip around the world.

Someday

For 10 years, I've told myself "someday". "Someday", I've also told my friends.

But you know how it always is: I found excuses. I became lazy. And at times I even forgot about the idea entirely.

Travelling is a privilege

Today, it seems strange to me that the primary reason for me taking this long to eventually go on my trip came down to making excuses. Of course, it's not easy to take a trip such as this! Of course, you need to come up with a plan! Of course, you need some money on the side! But if you really want it, it can be done. That I was always sure of.

The reason why it seems so strange to me is that we hold a certain privilege. When I say "we", I mean us Europeans, North Americans, Oceanians and so on. People who live in high-income countries. We take the opportunity to travel for granted.

Some of us are lucky to get to travel, others aren't. It starts with a question of wealth and continues with a question of what country issued your passport. In the end, your place of origin defines whether you hold the privilege to travel.

It is beyond unfair, but there's nothing I can do about it.

When "someday" arrived

My 2023 finally made me remember this beautiful idea to circumnavigate the world. Already in the beginning of the year, I felt that I needed a change. I realized that I couldn't go on the way I did, that my job didn't fulfil me, as I had been telling myself for far too long.

Instead, I started to look for new potential sources of happiness. Apart from building this beautiful website and writing this beautiful blog, I knew that deep down inside me there was still an idea slumbering.

An idea to take a trip around the world.

A trip around the world

Today, once again, I'm back where I started. I return from a trip that lasted 10 months, spans 5 continents, 17 countries and 8 timezones. I'm incredibly lucky that I was able to circumnavigate planet Earth.

I went eastward as far as east took me:

• From Austria to Greece.
• From Greece to Singapore.
• From Singapore to Australia.
• From Australia to New Zealand.
• From New Zealand back to Australia.
• From Australia to Vietnam.
• From Vietnam to Hong Kong.
• From Hong Kong to Macao.
• From Macao to Hong Kong.
• From Hong Kong to the Philippines.
• From the Philippines to South Korea.
• From South Korea to Taiwan.
• From Taiwan to Japan.
• From Japan to the United States of America.
• From the United States of America to Mexico.
• From Mexico to Peru.
• From Peru to Colombia.
• From Colombia to Spain.
• From Spain to France.
• From France back to where I started.

All the way around the world. And eventually, I did return from the west.

How cool was that.

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This post is part of the series Trip around the World

Sometimes, creating a blog post series could simply mean that you spent more time thinking about a topic you have written about previously:

• My Labelling the Web series, where in a first post, I explain on a technical level what it means to label the web properly, followed by a post that is more directed to a designer audience, followed by another iteration, where I find a new metaphor, taken from real life, for the problem of an unlabelled web.
• My Where Are You? series, where I think about the /where page and its evolution as I spend more time thinking about it.
• My Travel Blogging series, where I reflect on my evolution as a writer of a travel blog.

Other times, creating a blog post series could be a way to tell a story that evolves over time:

• My Trip around the World series, where I tell the story of a year-long trip and my circumnavigation of the planet.
• My Driving a Scooter series, where I become a person obsessed with riding a scooter while travelling through Southeast Asia (and beyond).
• My Retro Emojis series, where I look at different emojis that emit a certain retro vibe and what these emojis evoke when I think back to simpler days.

I'm convinced that most of us, who write a blog, know the feeling of becoming wiser in the process of reflection on certain topics.

Blog post series are neat!

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This post is part of the series Blog Post Series

It has become dark [on Phu Quoc island]. After I turn the engine on, it dies off right away, as I'm driving my scooter uphill. Maybe getting fuel from the plastic bottle was a bad idea, after all?

But then it's starting up, and it's fantastic. I'm driving through the cool evening air, and it's better than any air conditioner. I'm overtaking other drivers, I'm accelerating, I'm having a good time. Many don't have lights, but I'm cautious.

— Wer ist Tương Nguyên? / Who is Tương Nguyên?, loosely translated to English.

Sometimes it's asking a lot of me to force myself back into a particular point in time. In July, I finally reached the point of my travel blogging where I started writing about my adventures in Vietnam. When I left Australia behind mentally, it took me a couple of weeks to get in the spirit of travel blogging about this new country.

Coming to Asia again after such a long time was a big deal for me. What thoughts went through my mind then? What was the culture shock like? What did it feel like to leave the comfort of an English-speaking country and have no way to talk to anyone without the use of a translator app? What was so exciting about Vietnam?

The challenge of writing a travel blog is capturing the sensations of being in a place far away. If you let a lot of time pass between experiencing these sensations and actually writing about them, you'll forget a lot of the details that define your trip. As a consequence, my travel blogging becomes less and less accurate over time. The blogging sandwich was a way to keep up with the habit of writing about my trip. But that didn't really work out during intense times of travelling.

Writing in the moment

The amount of details that gets lost if you travel blog with this much delay is immense. These days, I'm writing about the Vietnam adventures that took place over half a year ago. Of course, I took notes that I can refer to. Also, I took pictures that take me back. But is it really enough to tell the story accurately? Is it really enough to do my Vietnam trip justice?

A couple of months ago, with an effort to capture more of the sensations that define my travels, I tried something new: writing in the moment. When we were in Japan, we stayed in probably the most boring place the suburbs of Tokyo had to offer: a little place called Takasago:

Takasago is the epitome of the Japanese suburbs, the epitome of boredom. If you walk through the little town's streets, you notice how everything looks the same. Just as the streets start to become slightly more interesting and bring a bit of colour into the sadness of the suburbs of Tokyo, there's hope raising in the mind of the Central European visitor to discover a coffee house.

But this is still Takasago and the colourful road markings are not introducing spaces to satisfy the desire for caffeine but instead for beauty parlours, hairdressers and a small vegetable market (that seems to be a highlight of this town, as a long queue of Japanese suggests). Takasago represents a sharp contrast to the over stimulation that is usually associated with the Japanese culture.

But in all its boredom and dreariness it still emits a soothing effect on the weary mind of the traveller that has travelled for too long and subconsciously longs for a place like Takasago. A place that offers seclusion, boredom and calmness in a world that is far too exciting, far too fast-paced, far too much of the modern world.

— Takasago (unreleased), loosely translated to English.

Also, the somewhat boring Playa Delfines on the beaches of Mexico's Cancún can be exciting if you pick up a pen and write into your little notebook here and there:

"Sophia!", I shout. But Sophia's not responding. "Sophiaaaa!", I shout again, this time louder. "What kind of crazy waves are these?", I shout as she turns around. Three seconds later an enormous wave crashes over me. Whoosh! Another one hits me. At this moment I have to think of my surfing instructor, Chad. When I had missed the opportunity of riding a perfect wave and just fell off my surfboard instead, another wave was never far away. Oh, the swell!

Back on the beach, under the protection of a big parasol, I observe a middle-aged man as he's taking a stroll. He extends his arm, in which he holds his smartphone. At first, I think he's casually filming the shades of the Caribbean blue, without properly looking out to the sea. But then I realize that he seems to be in a video call, supposedly sharing the moment with his loved ones.

Two parasols to our right, I see a young woman in a bikini, wearing a hat and turning around in a circle, as if she's dancing. What joy of life, I think for a moment. As I look out to the ocean and see its breathtaking beauty, I can relate to her. As a matter of fact, I feel like dancing, too! But then I notice a tripod standing next to her. Mounted on top is a smartphone. "Instagram", I think bitterly. "What artificially constructed joy of life", I conclude my inner monologue.

— Playa Delfines (unreleased), loosely translated to English.

Isn't it ironic that everyone in this short story didn't seem to be right there in the moment, whereas I, the silent spectator, captured the sensations of this time and place perfectly thanks to the power of writing in the moment? 🤓

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

Here they are:

• the telly 📺 ,
• the floppy disk 💾,
• the DVD 📀,
• and the CD-ROM 💽.

To be honest, I think it's odd that there are so many optical disc emojis. Who in the emoji community actually cares to differentiate between the three? But yeah, you gotta be precise. If you mention the old Age of Empires PC game to an old friend, be sure to stick to the proper emoji terminology. God forbid if you weren't!

When I think of the original CD emoji though, I think of this beautiful time of the early 2000s when I became a music collector. With a dad that owns over 7300 LPs and 4400 CDs, you have to start somewhere (PS: where's the LP emoji, Unicode?)

The first CD I ever bought with my own money must have been the Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem. Of course, I was a big fan of his music. He opened up the world of rap music to me, which was part of my collector's journey for at least a decade.

The 2001 debut album of the Gorillaz was also amongst the first CDs I owned. Everyone loved Clint Eastwood, 19-2000 or Rock the House. But if your taste for the band was more matured, Tomorrow Comes Today was the shit. I love this album to this day and re-listen to it every once in a while (also while writing this post).

Closely linked to the purchase of CDs was of course ripping them and burning your own, which is exactly what I did. When on the go, I listened to my favourite albums and self-burned CDs on my Discman (the natural evolution of the Walkman), which was anything but a portable device. Trust me when I tell you that it didn't exactly fit into the pockets of an 11-year-old. Also, the occasional shake when I rode the bus to school made the CD jump and my music stop. So the "shock protection" that my Discman so proudly advertised, didn't really do what it was supposed to do. But that was the price you had to pay if you wanted to listen to your music on the go and feel like a really cool kid.

The age of the MP3 player wasn't too far away and when it finally came, I was ready. After all, I had ripped every CD I had bought and combined with the music I downloaded from popular file-sharing services (debatably illegal) I had a collection of a couple of hundred MP3s.

The MP3 player changed the game and the way I consumed music forever. I stopped burning CDs. I stopped creating mixtapes for my friends. There was still the occasional exchange of MP3s via USB stick, but that was far less romantic than handing your mate a self-burned CD with a printed inlet of the track listing (and sometimes even a cover inlet). At least the device was more portable! But if there was a way to get a hold of my old, blue, clunky Sony Discman, I would probably spend hours listening to my old CD collection which is hidden away somewhere in the basement of my brother and be overwhelmed with feelings of nostalgic bliss.

Even though my CD journey ended back then, I'm far from being done talking about retro emojis. In the optical disc era alone, we still have to discuss CD-ROMs and DVDs. And that's what I love about retro emojis and their inclusion to the Unicode standard. They take me back to better days. To childhood days. To simpler days. To the nineties and early two thousands.

Never forget.

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This post is part of the series Retro Emojis

What this means for you is that you have to get used to changes in my writing, including:

• Using "colour" instead of "color".
• Using "neighbourhood" instead of "neighborhood" (hmm, or maybe I'll just use "hood").
• Using "favourite" instead of "favorite".
• Using "holiday" instead of "vacation" (apparently).
• Using "bloody" instead of "f*cking" (well, most of the time anyway).

As a non-native speaker of English, I had actually made a choice which variety of English to learn and focus on. Since I had been exposed to a lot of American sitcoms when I was learning English in my teenage years, I've naturally drifted to the American variety.

But the truth is that I love British English (and English television, too)!

Dear American readership: Sorry, dudes and dudettes. I mean: I beg your pardon!

I'm a speaker of British now! 🇬🇧

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Nine years of work experience were filled with struggle. Many times I've tried to change something about myself to fit the narrative that I had made myself believe for so long. Changing jobs, changing professions, changing careers. I struggled because somehow, work didn't fulfil me. I struggled, because somehow, work didn't give me purpose. For quite some time, I believed that something was wrong with me for not being able to find the happiness that I had promised to myself.

At the beginning of last year, I gave up looking. Suddenly, I felt convinced that my twenty-four-year-old self had been wrong. I felt convinced that I won't find happiness at work. And so, I made a decision. A decision to reduce my work hours to a four-day week. A wonderful decision to work less and live more.

FREEDAY

And with that, Friday got a new meaning. "Freitag", directly translated from German means "Free day". Of course, "Freitag" has been called that for centuries, but what changed was that now I would take its meaning literally.

And since Friday was now such a special day to me, writing it in all caps felt like a necessity. FREEDAY was born! FREEDAY was special. I'd have brunch in the sun in one of Vienna's coffee houses, I'd go to the museum, I'd go on hikes in the Vienna Woods, I'd go to the Kuffner Observatory to follow my newest hobby, stargazing. FREEDAY was exciting!

Also, it seemed to be the perfect time to seal the deal, because all of these activities I didn't do by myself, but with Sophia. And right around that time, Sophia and I became a couple.

Living too much

If you have FREEDAY in your life and are head over heels in love with somebody, the world is your oyster. Endless possibilities emerged in my mind. We hiked in the Northern Limestone Alps in Styria and Lower Austria with overnight stays in wooden cabins. We did stand-up paddling on the Old and morning swims in the New Danube in Vienna, before summer really kicked off.

And all of a sudden, life became what I always envisioned it to be, if you only work for four days a week. We worked less and lived more. We took a week-long trip to Berlin, to do remote work from the German capital, meet parents, babysit a cat, go pedal boating, ride bicycles and reunite with my childhood friend Chris.

And we were far from being done. After a week of travelling through my own country with a friend from Finland, we took a trip to Graz, my hometown (to meet more parents), followed by a week of holiday on a remote Greek island and a weekend in Prague to see a DJ act.

Right about that time, we realized that we lived life with almost too much speed. And yet, there was still the matter of the wedding in Northern Italy, that we had been invited to. But that's the deal if you live so much. Your leisure time almost becomes stressful. We were longing for an exciting life, but we couldn't cope with all the stress, because there was still standing something between us and absolute freedom: the fact that we still had to work four days a week!

A grand decision

The grand decision we took then would reduce our work week by four additional days. A decision to not work at all for an entire year and travel around the world instead.

Living too much caused some kind of stress, but it seems that's because there was still too much work mixed in between all that living. Today, I wonder why I hesitated. I've known for years that the government supports people working in Austria to take some time off to educate themselves. Why not spend this time travelling?

The /been page

After coming up with the idea for the where page and travelling for quite some time, I realized that the list of visited countries grew and grew. That's when I decided to log the countries I have visited. It's nice to look back and appreciate being able to travel as much as I do right now.

And with that, I announce the /been page, which shows a list of all the countries I have visited this year and the years prior. Looking back at all the travelling I have done in the previous years, I came up with themes for every one of them. Last year's theme obviously was "living too much", this year it's "trip around the world".

I'm convinced that a decision to work less is never a bad one. No one on their deathbed has probably ever said: "If only, I had worked more".

Rather these are more common sentences someone would probably say:

If only I had spent more time with friends and family.

If only I had travelled more.

If only I had lived more.

Ever since I reduced my work hours, I've found new areas to look for my happiness: writing, travelling and most importantly, living.

We all need more FREEDAYs in our lives!

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This post is part of the series Where Are You?

What has changed is my perspective. The UX Designer self that I have been shaping over the last decade has always just accepted the status quo. The idea that we need to design forms. This idea underlies the common notion that we need forms.

But do we really? I remember a 2018 software conference that I was visiting. "User data is the new oil", the first speaker proclaimed wisely. His words have left an impression on me.

But times are changing. Enough is enough.

The curse of Peruvian food delivery services

Peruvian food delivery services are giving me a hard time. I'm lazy. I don't want to leave the house. Everyone's been there. I just want to watch Netflix and have food delivered directly into my tummy.

The first service I try doesn't deliver in the Andean town I'm currently at. Fine.

The second service seems to offer a website (Yay! This means that I don't have to download an app). I carefully select a cuisine, followed by carefully selecting a restaurant until I carefully select a meal. And then I'm suddenly made aware that yes, I'll need the app to continue. Wow, why do you even have a website in the first place?

Then I install the bloody app, and it's asking me to verify my phone number. They only allow Peruvian, Ecuadorian or US phone numbers (Ever thought of European foreigners that might want to order your food?). Luckily, my Skype number is the latter. So I copy over my phone number from my notes app and click the shiny, orange button that happily announces "Continue" and nothing happens. Did I not apply enough pressure? I click and I click and I click. Nothing happens. I click once more. And..... Nothing happens. No user feedback. Just nothing.

I realize that my copied phone number contained blanks that seem to cause an issue. This apparently friendly button that so kindly wants me to "continue" wouldn't let me continue without any explanation. Actually, it didn't even have the technical capability of its only purpose, which is of course to let people through.

Just like Gandalf the Grey, it stood there and thought:

You shall not pass!

But unlike Gandalf, it didn't actually say these words, leaving users to guess what the problem is.

At this point, I'm already fed up and at least 20 minutes have passed since the initial growling of my tummy. Luckily, smart that I am, I could solve the riddle of the "Continue" button and once I deleted the blanks, it let me pass.

But! Oh, yeah, another but! I never receive the SMS. And, unfortunately, this riddle I leave unsolved. What I'm left with are 20 minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

The third delivery service... no, you know what... I'll just go outside and get the food in person.

Enough is enough

I remember a time when software was supposed to make our lives easier. Around that time, the term "user experience" seemed to be very popular. Nowadays, a good user experience, one where going digital is actually easier than going physical has become very rare.

Services ask us to download apps, they ask us to verify phone numbers, create accounts, allow notifications on our phones, share our physical locations and enter forms. They ask us to enter so much data that I wonder why? Why do you need all this data?

All I really want is my pizza. Remember my tummy? It needs to be fed.

So in order for me to get my pizza, do you really need to know my middle name? My birthday? Do you really need to know my birthday? Trust me, I'm old enough to order pizza. And while I'm at it, do you actually need to know my name?

After I gave up on this madness and just physically walked over to the restaurant to get my pizza in person, no one cared what my name was. I just handed them my money, they accepted it with pleasure and gave me my delicious pizza. Incognito. Anonymous.

They didn't care about my name. And they didn't mean any offence. They weren't unfriendly people, they were just practical. They believe in a well-established business formula. Exchange money for goods.

Why has life become so difficult? By now, I'm starting to believe that technology is making our lives worse. Getting food delivered has become unnecessarily complicated and by now it actually takes more time to fill in bloody forms and download apps and verify phone numbers than actually going over to the pizza place itself (or you know, making a phone call to order the pizza! Do people still do that?).

Enough is enough.

A new formless world

It's not just me. I'm a patient man. As someone who loves to fill in web forms I'm actually out of the ordinary. Usually, people despise filling in forms. So if even a patient guy whose open to the world of web forms becomes fed up, the entire world must be fed up by now. We don't need any more forms. What we need is less forms!

And I firmly believe that a good user experience in this day and age follows a new formula. "User data is the new oil" is obsolete.

The new business formula is called "less is more":

Less data. Less effort. Less web forms.

Any uprising Peruvian food delivery service out there, here's the idea. Skip the form. All you really require is the address of the user. Just like any other delivery service in the world, live tracking of the food delivery person's location and a messaging system between hungry person and delivery person takes care of the rest.

The age of data collection is over. We are waking up to a new world, and it's beautiful: less data, less effort, less web forms.

Because less is more.

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This post is part of the series Web Forms for Everyone

If you believe one early essay of my schoolboy self, my mum was obsessed with the telephone back then. She could spend hours on the phone, talking with her girlfriends Gabi, Ute, Elke, my auntie or my granny. When one day, our household was hooked up to the internet, things changed for her. These were very exciting times for my dad and me. The internet! In our home!

Mum wasn't the biggest supporter of us blocking the phone line for hours on end. She had important phone calls to make! I on the other hand, never understood how she could spend so much time on the phone. I kept my phone calls brief.

A typical phone call I would make sounded something like this:

Hi, Chris. Let's go outside and play!

A variation of the above, in case it wasn't Chris, who picked up the phone:

Hi, is Chris at home? [...]

Hi, Chris. Let's go outside and play!

Of course, I had similar phone calls with my other friends Max or Mario. There was so much to discover outdoors, why would I want to spend so much time on the phone?

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This post is part of the series Retro Emojis

Since regulations have been quite lax so far, many people decide to spend the time travelling, while educating themselves in a not-so-demanding way. In my case, I'm learning Spanish. I'm attending an asynchronous online course, where I have to hand in my homework once every month. By email. Oh, yeah!

So for half a year, I have been doing my Spanish homework while travelling through Oceania and Southeast Asia. Let me tell you, apart from the Philippines, whose languages were somewhat influenced by Spanish colonialism (Kumusta in Tagalog vs. ¿Cómo està? in Spanish), the language isn't all that useful in Asia. But then, we made it to the Americas and all of a sudden knowing Spanish was paramount to getting around.

Learning Spanish in Mexico

When I arrived in Mexico, I suddenly decided to take my Spanish homework more seriously. Also, simply leaving the house meant that I could practice:

• Randomly running into our Airbnb hosts led to Spanish conversation.
• Going grocery shopping led to Spanish conversation.
• Eating out in restaurants led to Spanish conversation.

All of a sudden, I felt really motivated to learn this language. But still, doing my Spanish homework felt like a chore.

Habit hacking to learn more Spanish

One day, on a stormy September evening, shortly after tropical storm (later Hurricane) Helene hit Cancún, I was in a mood. A mood, I usually find myself in, whenever I feel uninspired. I felt too uninspired to write. I felt too uninspired to build something. And yet I wanted to write! I wanted to build something! Now, what to do?

The problem? I want to learn Spanish, but I'm too lazy. The solution? Combining something I love to do with something I'm too lazy to do. The result? A blog in Spanish.

Building a Spanish blog

The magic of habit hacking is this: I don't want to do the hard work of learning Spanish. But, I want to build a new website, because building websites is fun. Plus, I love to write! Maybe also in Spanish?

So I did what I do best: I chose a new platform (as I like to experiment with technology) and created a new blog. I ended up with the most basic and down-to-earth solution of building a blog these days: Neocities. Neocities is a static web host without the fuss of building something on the modern web.

I've built this website with the basic ingredients of the web: HTML and CSS! No JavaScript. No framework. No fuss. (Shoutout to Geocities, Neocities' mental predecessor.)

Learning Spanish in South America

Right from the get-go, I wanted to challenge myself. I already knew that I was about to spend almost 2 entire months in South America. I already knew that the best way to learn a language was to spend time in a country where the language is spoken. What better way to learn Spanish than spending two months in South America? Apart from Brazil (Portuguese), Guyana (English), French Guyana (French) and Suriname (Dutch) the whole continent seems to agree on one thing: we speak Spanish!

So the challenge I formulated was the following:

As long as I'm in South America, I want to write one blog post in Spanish every day.

Let's do this!

Making mistakes

Another factor I considered was that I will make mistakes. I might even embarrass myself. More than that: I have to make mistakes, because making mistakes is the best way to learn! Therefore, my Spanish blog has a clear message regarding mistakes: I will make mistakes and whenever I do, I ask my readers to reply by email and help me become a better Spanish speaker.

Writing a Blog in Spanish

The good thing about this is that I had very low expectations concerning my writing. I'm an absolute beginner. I haven't written any Spanish before. As such, for many of my blog posts, the word "blog post" is an exaggeration. Many contain no more than 2 sentences and some much rather call them "tweets" (or "toots" for anyone living in the Fediverse).

Many times, I've turned conversations or situations that I've had into blog posts:

• My neighbour doesn't stop the music at night? ¡Para la música!
• The fire alarm goes off in our flat? ¿Fuego?
• For some reason the backseat of our Uber is wet? ¡Está mojado!
• I'm riding a horse in the Peruvian Andes, in the highest altitude I've ever been in? El punto más alto.

Writing a blog in Spanish helps me to react to certain situations. Writing a blog in Spanish helps me to develop a better understanding of the language. Writing a blog in Spanish helps me to build a Spanish mindset.

By now, I'm halfway through with my challenge of writing 50 blog posts in Spanish. If you are a native Spanish speaker, a novice or intermediate or just curious about me learning a new language, follow along my Spanish blog.

¡Vamos a escribir un blog en español! 💃

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The Bundesland

Now, what is a "Bundesland"? It's sounds like the most German word ever. Also, it sounds surprisingly similar to "Bundeslade" (The Ark of the Covenant), which was a legendary biblical relic, hunted by myriads of archaeologists, among them Indiana Jones and of course the Nazis (well, at least according to Steven Spielberg).

A "Bundesland", however is a federal state in Austria. There are nine (and obviously Styria is the most beautiful) and apart from bureaucratic and political power, the Bundesland now has a button!

The Bundesland Button

Where, why, wow, what? How can a Bundesland have a button? I've asked myself the same question when I discovered this gem on ORF's (Austrian Broadcasting Agency's) recently relaunched streaming service, called ORF ON. Since the ORF offers Bundesland-specific content, their design team needed a way for us users to select their respective Bundesland.

You can find the button in the shape of Austria in the bottom right corner of the video player, next to the "settings" and "enlarge" buttons.

And i think its a rather clever solution. Chapeau, ORF. Chapeau.

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In the praying hall stood a golden buddha statue. In front of it were wooden bowls filled with limes and oranges: sacrifices for the buddha.

Following my typical tourist routine, I snapped a photo of it and sat down on the floor. Then I noticed the music. Like every other tourist, I could have just taken my pic and be done with it. But this buddha statue came with its own soundtrack.

I opened up the Voice Memos app on my phone and took my first sound.

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This post is part of the series Taking Sounds

A web that didn't exploit users for maximum profit and surveillance capitalism. Today, it seems, whenever companies build a product, all the user exploitation is ingrained into the product's design by default.

Can't we build technology for the benefit of users instead of abusing their data, their privacy, their freedom?

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Niq, where the bloody hell are you right now, Mr. Worldwide?

Please don't call me Mr. Worldwide.

Anyway, I'm still travelling. This is my ninth month on the road.

And I'm still keeping you in the loop. With the newest revision of my /where page, I've just had to radically simplify it. There used to be so much going on, but now I want to focus on the essentials. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Also, with this new design I feature not only the country I'm currently in, but also the specific place. All the best from the Peruvian Andes! In case you don't know, I'm currently living my best life, as I'm travelling around the world.

If you want to introduce a where page to your own personal website, here's a handy guide. Where pages for everyone!

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This post is part of the series Where Are You?

Even websites that go back as far as the early 90ies differentiated visited from unvisited links. How is it possible that this basic feature is missing on your website? I mean, this is 2024.

Niq, aren't you supposed to be this accessibility nerd, who cares about this kind of stuff?

There's this person in the back of my audience, who has been reading my blog for a while now, complaining that my website is missing this fundamental feature. But they are standing way in the back and instead of replying by email and finally telling me about it, they just complain to themselves, where no one can hear them. The feature that has been missing from my website is that visited links should stand out from unvisited links.

To be honest, I don't know if there really is this person in my audience who has been missing this feature. The quote from above is made up. But for a while now, I have been asking myself whether users care to know that they have already visited that particular link and don't accidentally want to visit it again?

Until recently, I have considered indicating visited links to be a nuisance. "They just mess up my design language", I thought. But then one day, I found myself in a situation where I profoundly understood the significance of indicating visited links.

And I thought again.

Indicating visited links

The idea of visited links is as old as the web itself. Browsers remember which links you have visited and would like to inform you about this by showing visual indicators. Visited links are typically styled underlined and in purple colour.

If you use a screen reader, visited links are announced audibly or through a refreshable braille display, as soon as you put them in focus.

While you can't take away the information of whether a link has already been visited from screen reader users, you can take it away from everyone else. If designers overwrite the visited default state of links, you will be in trouble.

You've watched this

These days, there are many website designers, which seem to have a similar notion to the old me, when it comes to styling visited links. They just don't feel the necessity to remind users of content they already interacted with.

But then, there's YouTube or Netflix, which clearly highlight the content you have already watched. Instagram does the same with Reels. Podcast apps do it too. Heck, every email program is doing it, because who wants to read an already read email again? It's a convenience feature, which is improving the user experience of these services.

But why doesn't this logic equally apply to the rest of the web? Do we need to style visited links?

Why visited links need indicators

Recently, I discovered some new blogs about Austrian politics. Unlike the typical blogs I read, their creators don't seem to understand why RSS is amazing and therefore don't provide RSS feeds.

Apart from offering the convenience of having all the content I care about inside one app, RSS readers do exactly what YouTube, Netflix or Instagram do. They show me if I have already read a particular blog post of a particular blog. They remember for me, if there's still content out there that I might want to read in the future.

But not everyone is nerdy enough to use RSS readers (much to my disappointment). Many users read blogs in their browsers and as such benefit from visual indicators to know which posts they have or haven't read. If they read blogs without visual indication of visited links, website designers are asking them to find other ways of keeping track of the posts they've already read.

I don't know, maybe some people actually write this down in their notebook. Anyway, it's a bad user experience if websites don't do this for you.

Indicating visited links with colour

One thing that has been breaking my accessibility heart is the fact that by design, visited links are only indicated using colour. As most of us accessibility nerds know, information that is only conveyed through colour is hard to perceive for users with colour deficiencies (or not at all) and is thus breaking not only my accessibility heart but with accessibility guidelines too:

Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

— 1.4.1 Use of Color (Level A) - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

I've tried to come up with a more accessible solution. My idea was to attach labels to visited links that said "visited" or similar. I imagined that in a list of blog posts, visited posts could show this label next to them. The "visited" label could be styled with a border to prominently announce to users that a blog post has been visited in the past.

However, when I tried to implement this solution, I was soon faced with some privacy restrictions of the browser:

Before about 2010, the CSS :visited selector allowed websites to uncover a user's browsing history and figure out what sites the user had visited.

— Privacy and the :visited selector (MDN)

Thanks to so-called "history sniffing", website makers were able to detect which websites a user had visited by exploiting CSS and JavaScript. As a consequence, all browser makers restricted the possibility to style visited links.

This restriction meant that I had to go with the solution that's out there and has been implemented by millions of websites already. Indicating visited links with colour.

This is the new me and the newest feature of my website! Oh, yes!

In light mode, I've decided to go retro. All links, of course, are still underlined (please underline your links), unvisited have no colour, visited links are in purple and active links in red (you've read that right, I even have active states now!). In dark mode, unvisited have no colour either, visited use a neon-red and active links use a yellow.

For now, I stick to colours, but if you want to get fancy, there are more sophisticated solutions out there, that found ways to circumvent the restrictions of :visited. Here are some recommended blog posts of people, who have thought about designing visited links before me:

• Revisiting :visited
• Hacking :visited
• Pushing the limits of :visited with CSS blend modes

If you have a colour deficiency, I'm happy to hear from you and your feelings about indicating links with colours and whether my colour combinations work for you.

Which links need visual indicators?

I think it's a good practice to apply visited link styles to all your links, except for menu links and footer links, since those links appear to be more "transactional".

Also, the content of some of these pages might change in the future. I regularly update my about page, now page, or where page, so these links don't get visited link styling.

The Design of Visited Links

To me, this is not a question of how, but rather a question of if. Do your users benefit from indicating visited links? And the answer most probably is a resounding "yes!".

I'm quite fond of my new visited link indicators, that I've already applied to all my blogs. If you've been following along for some time now and have been anticipating this feature, I have great news. This new feature works for you out of the box, because your browser remembers the links you have visited here from your past behaviour.

No need to visit these links again. ✅

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• The app icon of Apple's Voice Memos app shows the waveform of the sound that the word "Apple" makes if you speak it out loud.
• If you are trying to open a website while offline in Google Chrome, you can play a little platformer game with a T. Rex, if you press the space bar (you can also access it if you type chrome://dino in the address bar).
• For Instagram's 10-year anniversary, they introduced a hidden setting that let you change the app icon to the way it used to look in its glorious days (before the reign of Meta and before the short-lived web trend of colour gradients).

Creators like to call this little fun an "Easter egg".

The beauty of Easter eggs is this: if you don't notice them, you just don't notice them. Life goes on. If you do notice them, you may think to yourself: how very clever that they did that.

Here's my Easter egg. A logo that changes, based on the continent I'm currently on. I introduced it on my travel blog Niqs Reisen.

When I launched at the beginning of this year, its logo has been the emoji for planet Earth, showing Asia and Oceania, my first destinations. And it has been that way until two weeks ago, when I made it to the Americas.

When I arrived on the new continent, I changed my logo. It's still the emoji for planet Earth. But it now shows a different part of the world: North- and South America. Once I make it back to Europe, I'm going to change the logo yet again. The continent-based logo. Similar to a /where page, but in logo form.

I wonder if anyone notices. But in the end, it doesn't matter. I notice. And that's the beauty of Easter eggs. No matter if people notice, or they don't: everyone's happy.

I love Easter eggs! 🐇

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As such, I never became homesick.

Being gone

Being gone meant seeing something I wouldn't see in my everyday life. Every year in summer, my family and I went to Northern Italy, to a place called Lignano Sabbiadoro, just at the tip of the Adriatic Sea.

Unlike home, all of a sudden I had access to the sea. I could go for a swim whenever I wanted. There was the beach, which gave my brother and me limitless ideas on how to spend our time.

Build sand castles, take a mud bath, collect seashells or bury our dad in the sand. We spent hours playing Bocce on the beach, a game, where you throw a small target ball into the sand and the players take turns shooting their own balls as close as possible to the target ball. My dad, with his relentless ambition for winning, was unbeatable. If we ever got tired of the sea, we still had the swimming pool.

We played games of UNO with the family and our friend's family, where the loser would get thrown into the water. We played pool ball toss, seeing how many times we could keep the ball in the air, before it touched the water. Sometimes we just hung out on the beach chairs, playing Game Boy games. Yes, much of being gone was about playing games!

Back then, Italy didn't have the Euro, but the Italian Lira. And their currency was nothing less than inflationary. Equipped with 3000 of those bad boys I was a lucky child. I could get two slices of pizza, two scoops of ice cream and still have enough to buy myself an Aqua Ball.

Aqua Balls were popular collectible toys in the 90ies: made out of rubber, they fitted perfectly in the fist of a six-year-old. You could soak them in water and have them squirt it out again through a small hole. There was a variety of Aqua Balls that you could collect: a shark, a frog, a football, a pig. They came packaged in shiny aluminium bags. I loved the mystery of buying them: you never knew what you would get. If you got one that you already owned, you would swap with your friend!

Oh, how I loved being gone.

The arcade

One of the most beautiful associations I have with being gone was spending time in the arcade. That was another place I wouldn't see in my everyday life. For me, arcades only existed in Northern Italy.

My brother, a friend and I spent the evenings in endless sessions of everything the late 90ies had to offer in terms of arcade magic. Point Blank was a light gun shooter, that let you play alone or with a friend in 5 to 20 second long mini-games. In one game, you had to shoot the apple off the guy's head. But all you had was a single bullet, so you had to aim precisely. In another game, you had to shoot the baddies while avoiding shooting the civilians. The light guns of the arcade machine came in blue and pink. Oh, how I loved Point Blank.

But there was so much more. More light gun shooters. House of the Dead, Time Crisis and Ocean Hunter. When I think of some of these game titles then immediately the word SEGA appears in my head (yes, in uppercase letters), followed by a choir of angel-like quality chanting the magical word. SEGA was big in the arcade market.

Apart from the light gun shooters there were the more traditional arcade games, that you played with a red joystick and 6 colourful buttons: the Neo Geo. I remember Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug or Pang.

And there were racing games! It was so much fun to sit down inside the cockpit of a car. To grip the steering wheel and use your feet to reach the pedals. When you took control over the car, you could feel the steering wheel vibrating, as you took sharp turns in games like Sega Rally Championship or Cruis'n USA.

I could go on forever reminiscing.

Travelling

As I enjoyed being gone so much, it's no wonder that I became obsessed with travelling in my twenties. Likewise, it's no wonder that I set off on this trip around the world in my thirties. And just like in my childhood and pre-adolescent years, I never became homesick.

But now, that I have been travelling for 7 months, I realize that I haven't been gone from home for this long in my entire life. And I realize that I do miss something from my life back home.

And funnily enough, it was the arcade that reminded me of my longing to play video games. When my girlfriend Sophia and I were on a shopping spree in Taipei, I was left alone in an underground shopping mall, on the hunt for Nintendo Switch games (electronics are so very inexpensive in Taiwan).

After I had found the games that I had been looking for, I discovered something far more interesting. A little arcade. In the front it was filled with crane games. In the back it had some legit old-school arcade machines from the good old days. It had some racing games and hidden away in the corner, there it was. Point Blank.

I couldn't believe my luck. I was set back in time. As I inserted coin after coin into the arcade machine, it just hit me. I thought of bygone nights spent in the arcades of Lignano Sabbiadoro, where it all began. I thought of my brother and how I wished that he could play with me at this very moment. I thought of the one thing missing from my life as a traveller.

I miss video games

My craving for video games only intensified when we made it Tokyo. Of course, I had to visit the Nintendo Store in Shibuya. Of course, I bought stickers of Super Mario Bros. 3, one of my favourite games from my childhood. Of course, I participated in a game of Nintendo World Championship, where I battled 7 other visitors of the store.

And then came Akihabara. Spending a day in the electric town must be the dream of so many Europeans, who have grown up with Nintendo. I found old Nintendo games on sale. NES games, SNES games, Nintendo 64 games. I held in my hand Wave Race 64, in its original packaging, the first game I ever owned on my Nintendo 64, back when the console released in Europe, in 1997.

After we discovered the hidden talent of Sophia at playing the crane game, we got obsessed with the little capsule machines, that you can find everywhere in Tokyo. Once you throw in coins into the little machines, it's up to luck to determine which gacha figure you will get. Immediately, I was reminded of the mystery of buying Aqua Balls in my childhood days.

In Japan, I have reached the point, where I just couldn't take it any more. I had to play video games. I thought of the Switch games, that I had bought in Taiwan, that just made my longing to play unbearable. These consisted of Nintendo GameCube games re-released on the Nintendo Switch, that I hadn't played properly in the 2000ies: Pikmin 1+2 and Metroid Prime. I also got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Cowabunga Collection, a collection of the best Turtles games from the areas of the NES, the Game Boy, the SNES, and the arcade. Man, I'm so retro.

I tried all kinds of things but wasn't able to satisfy my desire to play video games. Emulation just isn't doing it for me. I spent way too much time to get RetroArch to run on my laptop, only to be reminded why I always preferred playing on the console over playing on the PC. Console games just work. You put them in and then you play. And even if I had managed to emulate some old games on my laptop: using my keyboard as a control will just never live up to the haptics of holding a legit SNES controller in my hands.

In that sense, for the first time ever, after being gone for so many times, I finally know what it feels like: I'm homesick. I miss video games.

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What on earth happened?

The time machine

Imagine a traveller. The traveller is on a very special mission on September 3 of 2024. At the first glance, nothing seems special about his mission: he wants to travel to San Francisco. He's a traveller after all.

What's so special about his mission is that he will embark on a time-shifting experience. He will stretch his third of September to become 8 hours and 20 minutes longer than what us Earthlings are used to.

For that, he will sit inside a time machine, that will take him to another continent. Setting off from Tokyo's Narita airport, he will cross the Pacific Ocean in order to reach his destination San Francisco. While crossing the biggest of all oceans, something will happen to time. It will reset. Back in Tokyo, the traveller was ahead of time. In the land of the rising sun he was among those countries on Earth that were the first to witness a new day.

While crossing the Pacific, he passed the International Date Line and all of a sudden he was behind time. All of a sudden, he was among those countries on Earth that were the last to witness a new day.

Circumnavigation

The traveller had lived part of September 3 in Tokyo. He spent 21 hours and 35 minutes there, before he embarked on said time machine. Once the traveller arrived in San Francisco, it was still September 3.

But since he passed the International Date Line, he was set back in time. He got off the time machine in San Francisco at 15:15.
At the time of his arrival, 10 hours and 45 minutes were left of September 3 in San Francisco.

You might have guessed it: the traveller is me. For me, and all the other passengers on the flight from Tokyo to San Francisco, September 3rd lasted not 24 hours, but 32 hours and 20 minutes.

I'm one big step closer to the circumnavigation of planet Earth.

And let me tell you: resetting time was a spectacular experience, for which I'll still need time to understand what has actually happened.

What an extraordinary Tuesday!

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This post is part of the series Trip around the World

It's a phenomenon I stumbled upon many times in the recent weeks. After an increased frequency of food delivery orders out of laziness and an ever-increasing desire for a bit of routine on this trip around the world, it's something that I could observe many times.

People always look so very badass on their profile pictures when in actuality, they make such friendly and polite first impressions (at least from what I can tell after a half-minute-long interaction).

Then, I thought about social media and how I had witnessed the same phenomenon there: people are really bad at picking a profile picture.

It took a while before I turned inward and thought of my own profile representation:

Please be aware that I look really badass in all of my pictures on this page and I really don't know why.

It was standing there, on my about page, for an entire month. Right in front of my eyes. A sentence, I had recently added, where I apologize sincerely to the visitors of my about page.

I actually had noticed this fact and still didn't make the connection to my recent observation. I myself, had become a victim to the same phenomenon: I'm really bad at picking a profile picture.

I don't know what changed or how I eventually made the realization that the pictures I had used just don't represent who I truly am. What matters is that eventually, I did.

And with this, I announce an about page with friendlier profile pictures.

Because people, we really have to start picking proper profile pictures.

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This post is part of the series Online Identity

Who do you trust most:

• Google ratings?
• TripAdvisor reviews?
• Random YouTube comments?
• ChatGPT?
• Or your friend, a person you actually know, and who is originally from that place?

Enter the travel joker.

The idea

The idea seems natural. If you are lucky enough to have a person in your life that comes from the country you are about to visit, you will contact this person and ask them:

• What to see?
• What to do?
• Where to go?
• When to go?
• How to get around?
• What to eat?
• Where to eat?

Better than any algorithm in the world, your travel joker will give you amazing advice. They are your friend, after all. Not only do they know the beauty of their home country, but also do they know you. They know that you like hiking, nature and adventures. They know that you don't like overly touristy things. Their advice guarantees an awesome trip.

That's the simple idea of the travel joker.

The Vietnam Joker (Nga)

For me, it all started in Vietnam.

In a country, whose culture is so opposed to what you are used to if you come from Central Europe, I was lucky to have someone explain it to me. This person was my friend and co-worker, Nga.

It started with the most important of all questions: what to eat for breakfast in Vietnam? Unsurprisingly, but yet unconventional to someone who loves French toast, porridge or Viennese breakfast the answer is a 3-letter word: "Pho".

Nga spent part of her childhood in Vietnam and has successfully assimilated in this culture after being away for some time. She gave me the ultimate advice, when I was about to drive a scooter in this crazy Vietnam traffic for the first time in my life:

Don't shit yourself, just take it easy.

With Nga it feels like we really became friends thanks to her jokership and the time we spent together in Vietnam. No matter if she showed us around Đà Nẵng, my favourite city of the country, or if she gave us the best advice anyone could ask for in our WhatsApp travel group called "Hello Vietnam": I always felt in good hands with a Vietnam Joker like her.

Danke, Nga. ✌️

The Hong Kong Joker (Anthony)

For the last 8 years, I have thought of Anthony, when I thought of visiting Hong Kong. We met in Osaka, during my first time in Asia in the cutest little hostel, that only allowed 6 guests at a time.

After our time in Osaka, we managed to reunite in Kyoto and both of us made it to the peak of Mt Fuji, the highest point of Japan, although each one on their own.

I was very happy to finally visit Hong Kong this year, but unfortunately during my crazy adventures in Asia, Anthony was having his own crazy adventures. In Europe!

Nevertheless, he became my remote Hong Kong joker. And he did make all my Hong Kong dreams become reality. After all, he was the one who introduced me to the pineapple bun:

It's just a name and it has no pineapple in it, lol. The one with butter in it is awesome, they usually serve it warm, so the butter would melt in the bun.

And his recommendations didn't stop there. He taught me what Hong Kongers eat for breakfast (Satay Beef Noodle Soup), where to get mouth-watering Dim Sum and I learned never to skip on the hot milk tea, a drink, that originated during the British colonial rule.

Last but not least, Anthony helped me understand the difference between Cantonese and Chinese, a question I had never asked myself before my trip:

Cantonese is only spoken in Hong Kong, Macau and the east of Guangzhou (Guangdong).

While writing this, Anthony is on his way from Europe back to Hong Kong. Once he arrives in Asia, I will have already left for America. It's funny, for some reason we can't manage to be on the same continent at the same time.

When I'm in Europe, he's in Asia. When I'm in Asia, he's in Europe. When I'm in America, he's in Asia. I wonder where he'll be once I eventually make it back to Europe. Africa?

We will meet up, in the end. I'm sure of it, my friend. 🫶

The Philippines Joker

For people like David & Chad it was only natural to be our Philippine jokers. My girlfriend and I never asked them to take us around their home and show us the beauty of the Philippines.

They just did. And the reason is so very amazing: it's because during our visit, we became their friends. David was originally our Airbnb host (slash surf instructor) on Siargao. Chad was our surf instructor too, but in Baler.

Siargao Island (David)

How can I ever forget the search mission David initiated when one night on Siargao island, my shoe was nicked by a dog. It consisted of local children that he paid with chocolate and contrary to my expectations, I actually got my shoe back!

How can I ever forget the dinner he invited us to, in the best restaurant in Pacifico, called "LeBron". Yes, named after the famous NBA player LeBron James, due to the Filipino obsession with basketball.

Forever will I be grateful to David, for he was the person that introduced me to surfing. In less than an hour under his guidance, I was riding my first wave and the feeling doesn't compare to any sport I have tried before. It's absolute freedom. And David made it seem so simple. The smooth waves of Pacifico definitely helped, too.

Salamat, David!

Baler (Chad)

If you ever make it to the alleged birthplace of surfing in the Philippines, then of course you are going to continue your surf training.

Chad was my surf instructor. And while he is an excellent teacher that upgraded my surfing game from beginner to intermediate, there are so many more areas in life where he excels:

• Observing the sea and estimating the perfect surfing conditions.
• Cooking Filipino food.
• Snorkelling and free-diving. Comes in handy when you need support with your underwater video capturing but also when it comes to foraging edible shells.
• Cooking Sinigang (Filipino sour soup with fish and shells that have been foraged in an earlier free-diving effort).
• Baking Buko Pie (Filipino Coconut Pie). The definite best Buko Pie in the entire world!
• Gathering his Filipino friends to hang out, go surfing, go snorkelling, eat Buko pie or have Sinigang together.

I'll miss you, Chad!

The Korea Joker (Sani & Sophia)

When I made it to Seoul in July, I've suddenly turned so very old. On the night, when I reunited with my Korean friends Sani and Sophia, I was reminded that my Erasmus term to Northern Finland was 11 years ago.

I managed to meet them once after Erasmus. 8 years ago, on my first trip to Asia (the same trip on which I got to know Anthony), we reunited for the first time.

This second reunion felt surreal. Sophia picked us up from the metro station and invited us to her home. Her husband Dowan was the friendliest person ever, when he captured the moments of our gathering on camera, printed the photos and framed them. Then he packaged them and gave it to us as a gift. All of this, in the same night that we had our reunion, while taking care of their 2-year old son Yul!

When I gave the girls the hand-drawn cards my girlfriend and I designed for the occasion, Sani and Sophia started sobbing because they felt so touched. I was close to tears too. The moment was too powerful. Reuniting in remote Korea, in a place that is at least 12 hours of travelling away from my home in Vienna, 8 years after our last reunion, 11 years after we first met in Finland.

We told old stories of the student dormitory and our unforgettable time of that very special year. We even could remember all the names of the fellow exchange students that lived on our floor. We reminisced about the parties we had in my flat with the magical number "404", we recalled a bike trip to the beach Nallikari, where one member of our group, Gabriel from Brazil, had his clumsy accident (he wasn't injured), but reminded us for the rest of the trip that he needed proper care.

We remembered the cold of the Finnish winter, that reached depths where your fingers felt frozen even if you wore two sets of gloves, while warming your hands over an open fire. But then again, it didn't really matter since you just rode a husky sledge beyond the arctic cycle after having visited the real Santa Claus (yes, really) only days before.

By the way, it's super helpful to have a Korea joker in a country, whose culture is just so absolutely strange to the Central European mind.

Sani and Sophia, I can't wait for our next reunion.

Travel Joker

What's left to come? The USA (San Francisco) and Mexico (Cancún). At least, that's my September (oh boy, what a year).

And after that? Hopefully, Peru and more of South America, but it remains to be seen. If you want to be my travel joker for any of these countries, I will be glad to. So don't wait to hit that reply by email button.

Be safe out there. ✌️

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The idea is this: instead of going left on intersections, you are going slightly right and place yourself in areas on the street that are marked as white rectangular boxes. As you place yourself there, you let the traffic that you just emerged from pass by and wait in your box. You are now in front of the crossing traffic, that is waiting their turn for the green light.

You are now facing straight, which just seconds ago was to your left. The little box tends to fill up with motorcyclists that want to do a left turn as well. As the lights turn green, and you cross the intersection, you have successfully completed your hook turn, and it is absolutely beautiful. A clever way, increasing traffic safety, thanks to a simple idea: navigating from box to box and never really going left.

Navigating the streets of Taiwan

Another restriction that is forced upon smaller bikes is your ability to drive on motorways. As such, you'll be wise to avoid them or be fined instead. Legend has it, that if you do end up on a motorway, when actually not allowed to be there, all the Taiwanese will shout at you, shooing you off the expressway, when they notice that your licence plate's colour isn't motorway-compliant.

This is the point where technology comes into play: navigational apps that prevent you from making this severe mistake. And this time, as opposed to my adventures on the scooter in Vietnam, I'm equipped with a smartphone mount. The problem though, is that Apple Maps doesn't have an option for motorbike navigation, giving me no other alternative than actually using a Google product. Too bad. Well, just this time.

And thus, I'm ready to explore the beauty of this country. And I know, you've been dying to ask. The answer is no. There's no comparison between the absolute madness that is the Vietnamese traffic and the order that reigns on the streets of Taiwan.

And yet, to quote my motorbike rental shop person of confidence, Jeremy:

There's crazy in the heart of every Taiwanese.

Bring it on, then!

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This post is part of the series Driving a Scooter

In Windows 11, there's an easy way to have only the primary applications in your life on your taskbar, while hiding the secondary applications that you use less often.

The magic behind it is this:

1. Choose your primary applications, the ones that you use regularly. For me, it's Firefox, Windows Explorer, VS Code, Morgen and Signal.
2. Pin these to the taskbar.
3. Remove all the other applications from the taskbar.
4. Choose your secondary applications, the ones that you use less regularly. For me, it's Microsoft Store, Settings, Spotify, VPN Unlimited, Todoist and Netflix.
5. Pin them to "Start".

Congratulations, you have improved you work flow and got rid of brain clutter:

1. You have the primary applications always visible on your taskbar, just one mouse click away.
2. You have the secondary applications non-visible but as equally accessible, just one key tab (Windows key) away or, if you like, one mouse click on the start button and another on your desired application away, totalling to two clicks.

This reminds me of the beauty of the More Menu. Good old progressive disclosure, as my UX friends would agree.

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Yes! Faxing is still a relevant part of life in the 21st century. We need a fax emoji! 📠

To be fair: there's a CD emoji 💿 and I love it. And nothing less can be said about these:

• the VHS tape 📼,
• the camcorder 📹,
• the beeper 📟,
• the radio 📻 ,

...and of course the joystick. 🕹️

Show some love to retro emojis. 🖤

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This post is part of the series Retro Emojis

Soon, I realized that I spent too much of my precious time on locating my keys. It was time for a change.

The Organized Mind

There's one book that helped me never having to locate my keys again.

It described my problem precisely:

Few of us feel that our homes or work spaces are perfectly organized. We lose our car keys, an important piece of mail; we go shopping and forget something we needed to buy; we miss an appointment we thought we’d be sure to remember. In the best case, the house is neat and tidy, but our drawers and closets are cluttered.

— Organizing Our Homes from "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin

The solution was simple:

For keys, a bowl or hook near the door you usually use solves the problem [..] The system depends on being compulsive about it. Whenever you are home, that is where the keys should be. As soon as you walk in the door, you hang them there. No exceptions. If the phone is ringing, hang the keys up first. If your hands are full, put the packages down and hang up those keys! One of the big rules in not losing things is the rule of the designated place.

— Organizing Our Homes from "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin

It was about time I established habits to better organize my life. And I didn't stop at my home.

I went digital too. One place that definitely needed better organization was my contact book. While the hook next to my door was the designated place for my keys, could my contact book be the designated place for everything related to the people in my life?

Contact book

The beauty of the contact book is that it's a metaphor of long-gone days.

Days, when people used a paper book to note down all the contacts that mattered to them:

• Names.
• Birthdays.
• Addresses.
• Phone numbers.

As a kid born in 1990, I've never had a physical contact book. I think I was too young for that. But I'm sure my mom had one of those (I asked her, it's true).

Nevertheless, the metaphor works. You can add all of these details of your contacts to your digital contact book, an app on your phone modestly called "Contacts".

And as my digital organizing quest continued, so I did.

You'll lose your keys

You got everything under control, right?

But there might be some cases, where you don't:

• You book an Airbnb and want to forward the invite to your friend via email. What was their email address again?
• You visit your friend's party. You've been at their place so many times. But what door were you supposed to ring at again?
• You're travelling and want to write a post card to your friend. What was their address again?
• You forget your friend's birthday. How could this have happened?
• You forgot the name of your friend's newborn daughter. What kind of friend are you, really?

You might think that the answer to all of these questions is simple:

Duh, I'll just ask my friend for their email address/door number/address/birthday/daughter's name in case I need it.

Well, of course you could.

But:

• Haven't you asked your friend for their email address hundreds of times?
• Haven't you asked your friend for their door number hundreds of times?
• Haven't you asked your friend for their home address hundreds of times?
• Maybe you shouldn't ask for your friend's daughter's name more than once?
• And I hope you don't ask your friend for the date of their birthday every single year.

Every time you don't have these pieces of information you're wasting your precious time. You're losing your keys.

Aren't you fed up by now?

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After travelling for half a year by now, I've been staying in 43 places. Forty-three. That's forty-three homes. That's forty-three times of arriving in a new place.

Sometimes, when travelling is really demanding, I want to stop arriving and finally settle.

But not this year!

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This post is part of the series Arriving in a New Place

As cringe as it is that people working in software projects started to use military terminology, it gets even worse. Even after the war in Ukraine started, people kept on using it. No sensitivity for the people that are actually in a war a couple of hundred kilometres away.

Stop the corporate language wars!

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This post is part of the series Corporate Schmorporate

Today, I extend upon the idea of the /where page. In general, I like a /where page, that's straight to the point. A simple page, that shows your current location. Nothing fancy.

My own /where page lives up to this simplicity. It's plain and simple and still quite charming in its little box with the call to action button. But why not have a little fun?

My travel blog's /where page, on the other hand, was not fun enough!

So I had a revolutionary idea:

What about images?

Oh yeah, adding an image that acts as a summary of how I spend my time at my current location. That sounds like fun!

And yet, it's simple and to the point. You know, it's nothing special really, but I believe that's the beauty of it. For every country on this trip around the world, I want to feature one image.

Let's cut the crap and the high velocity of social media. The stories, the reels, the shorts, the fasts. Let's make the web slow again and reduce it to the basics. There is one place on the internet where that's still possible: The small web.

In 2024, introducing images on a website can still be a revolutionary idea.

Who would have thought?

If you want to introduce a /where page to your personal website, this guide helps you to get started. 📍

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This post is part of the series Where Are You?

You call the police. The police show up, but it was just a prank call. After they have gone, you call them again, but this time it's a real emergency. This time though, they won't show up, because they suspect another prank call.

This is what Korea feels to me right now.

The city of Seoul and the government of Korea are using emergency and government alerts to notify the population about basically anything:

• Heavy rain, thanks to the monsoon season.
• Traffic information, such as traffic control.
• Manhunt.
• Sometimes flying objects from North Korea.

Only today, I got 30 (!) of these notifications. Thirty! At some point, I just stopped putting in the effort of translating them.

Not taking you seriously anymore, Korea. If North Korea attacks, to me, it will just be another prank notification. 😖

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I can barely write messages without them. Sometimes, picking emojis takes more time than writing the actual message (that's of course when emoji names come in handy). I love emojis!

Therefore, when I launched my website a year ago, I already knew what this website needed. It was clear to me that emoji aesthetics would fit in perfectly with the design language I was aiming for. So, I decided that for every blog post I get to pick a fitting emoji.

If you read my blog in the browser instead of your feed reader or email interface, you may have noticed that every blog post comes with its own emoji (if you use a screen reader, they are hidden on purpose).

Nowadays, picking emojis is half the fun of writing this blog.

Happy World Emoji Day, everyone! 🎉

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Today, my friend Manu reminded me of the harsh reality of life back home. Just like my girlfriend and I, Manu had taken some time off work to travel around the world, only to come back to Germany a month ago.

I've been wondering for months what it will be like to return home. Mostly OKRs, meetings, deadlines and daily standups I suspect.

I know that all that is waiting for me back home, so I try not to think about it too much.

Because today, I travel. I've been to so many countries in the last five months. I can go anywhere I want. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, you name it.

Travelling is such a privilege. I already learned that when I set off, but I'm reminded of it every day. While it's a privilege even for the Austrian mind to be able to travel for one year without having to work a single day, imagine what kind of privilege it is for someone born in Vietnam or the Philippines.

Today, I don't have to worry about money or the places I could visit. I don't have to worry about OKRs, meetings, deadlines or daily standups.

Today, I travel. This might be the best year of my life. Will I ever be able to embrace a similar kind of freedom I found in this world out there? Will I just return to my past life and suddenly feel happier because I went on this trip around the world?

I don't have an answer yet.

All I know is this:

Today, I travel.

And this trip around the world is a nice way to escape the harsh reality of life back home.

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This post is part of the series Trip around the World

1. Write about a certain topic on your blog.
2. Let some time pass.
3. Revisit old ideas of yours and that certain topic you wrote about.
4. Write about it again with a new perspective.

I wrote sequel posts about Reply by email, Labelling the Web and my Trip around the World.

And I already know that I want to revisit About writing and Web Forms for Everyone soon.

Blog post sequels are neat.

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This post is part of the series Blog Post Series

Disclaimer: This post is not about the "web3". The title is a stupid coincidence. It's the third part of a series called Labelling the Web. Technically, there is no web3 anyways, there is only one web, and it definitely needs better labelling!

The pineapple bun

Don't get your hope's up just yet. There's actually no pineapple inside the pineapple bun. It's rather its texture that resembles a pineapple.

My Hong Kong friend Anthony was the first to tell me about the pineapple bun. It took me a couple of days in the city to actually find a place where I could get it. I suppose you would get it at almost any Hong Kong-style café, but if you're European like me, understanding the food culture in this country can be quite challenging at first.

So here I was, in a little place in Causeaway Bay, in which probably no foreigner ever set a step inside.

Ordering pineapple bun

I was really close to finally trying this signature dish.

In order to get what I wanted, I needed to use the café's fancy ordering system. I scanned a QR code and off I went. But then, I turned blind.

Everything was in Cantonese!

No problem!

Came out of my optimistic mouth. I challenge you to show me a language picker in any language, that I can't spot by looking at its iconography.

Sitting there in the top left of the screen it was. Just waiting for me to be used. I'll recognize this globe icon anywhere.

Give me my pineapple bun!

Turning blind again

I tapped but nothing happened. I tapped again, expecting a different result. My initial optimism started to fade.

Give me my pineapple bun!

"Ok, the website's buggy", I decided. So I tried my best to get what I wanted and use the little Cantonese I knew (which of course, was non-existent).

The approach

Luckily, the menu didn't only use text but showed pictures of the dishes too. But I'm not ignorant to just order without any labels. Why?

Because I've been travelling through Southeast Asia for 6 weeks at that point. I knew that my order could turn out really weird, if I just trusted my luck and the pictures shown. My pineapple bun just may be served with bones inside or something strange like that.

I grew especially doubtful with my approach after I selected what looked like the pineapple bun. It offered me some kind of add-ons. And there weren't any more pictures.

I think I looked lost enough that the guy from the table next to ours offered assistance.

Dependency

I was lucky. Of course the guy, knowing this fancy ordering system inside out, told me about the language picker first. "Come on, who do you think you're talking to?", I thought.

But when I explained that the website was buggy, he gladly assisted me. Pineapple bun and milk tea. Seems like a solid order. He confirmed, we had a good laugh about the situation and I got my pineapple bun.

But I had to rely on the courtesy of others to get me what I wanted. No one likes to be dependent on others.

Still, I'm glad this happened, because it allowed me to come up with a new metaphor for the Labelling the Web series.

Labelling the Web 3

In the Labelling the Web series, I'm talking about one of the web's biggest flaws: the fact that overall it isn't labelled very well. This becomes especially confusing for people who use screen readers.

I've had several attempts trying to explain how this problem influences the experience of users.

Labelling the Web is directed to a more tech-savvy audience using grandma's website as a metaphor. Labelling the Web 2 was an attempt to showcase the same ideas to a designer audience using the fusebox problem as a metaphor.

I've also held talks about this topic on several occasions. The pineapple bun problem will become my new story when I try to explain why you should never estimate the importance of labelling the web.

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This post is part of the series Labelling the Web

When I made my way there this March, I wasn't ready to be down under yet. It took me some time to adjust and mentally arrive in this place. I visited the Sydney Harbour, Bondi Beach, Manly and my secret gateway from it all, Woolwich.

25 minutes later, and I stop thinking about Australia.

My evening are all about the Philippines.

I was culture-shocked within hours after arriving here. Why? Because everyone speaks English! After five weeks of Vietnam, where language is an immense barrier for foreigners, it was a nice surprise. On a Philippine island called Siargao, I first tried surfing. Today, I'm still learning. I'm still here.

25 minutes later, and I stop thinking about the Philippines.

The Blogging Sandwich

If I had to pick one reason why travel blogging can be energy-draining, it would be this: I'm always lagging behind. Since blogging requires a lot of commitment and craftsmanship, I have to concern myself with the past, long after it was once the present.

Today, while living amongst Filipinos and Filipinas in the place where supposedly surfing was invented in the Philippines, I have to think about Australia. Every morning, I write about my travel reality from three months before. Instead, I would like to spend more time writing about the travel reality of today.

But, what are evenings for? Couldn't I use the evenings to write about the country and culture I'm currently exposed to?

A sandwich-like approach was born. Mornings are for the past. Evenings are for the present.

The blogging sandwich tastes like an awesome compromise. ✌️

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Travelling can be exhausting. But two months of resting in the Philippines allowed me to recharge my batteries. I'm rested. Ready to travel again.

I had doubts about this idea for a while: The idea of a literal trip around the world. The idea of literally circumnavigating Earth. Start in the middle of Europe. Head east. To Greece, then Singapore, then Oceania. Travel through Southeast Asia, then East Asia.

Head further east. Over the Pacific Ocean. Cross the International Date Line. Reset time. Travel to the USA, as a stopover for the ultimate destination: South America.

Head further east. Over the Atlantic Ocean. Head as far east as I can go, only to realize, I'm back where I started. Only, I returned from the west.

I had doubts about that idea? What the hell.

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This post is part of the series Trip around the World

But only at high tide. At low tide, the sea is drained and you can walk for hundreds of meters out onto the ocean floor.

The very first thing I do after I wake up is write.

I write for 25 minutes and see how far it gets me. It could come down to a solid foundation of a story. Sometimes, it only comes down to some loose ends. It doesn't really matter though. All that matters is that I write.

We make breakfast at home.

We cook rice and add fruits and nuts. Sometimes we have overnight oats sitting in the fridge. The cat from the premises is our constant companion. She meows all the time, which is why we call her "Drama".

After we return from our swim we seek refuge in the cold of our aircon.

Midday is too hot to go outdoors. Sometimes the dog of the house, "Brownie" joins our siesta. I like to read my book before I fall asleep. Sometimes I watch YouTube. My afternoon nap is precious.

As afternoon turns into evening, we make plans for dinner. Usually, we go to this Indian place, which is only 2 minutes of driving away. Sometimes we cook.

But before we leave, I write. I write for 25 minutes, just as I do in my mornings. I know myself too well that if I don't do it now, I will be too tired.

Life's good.

A New Place

I'm tired. Roosters woke me at 5 AM again.

It's so hot. It must be thirty degrees outside.

I'm so unfocused. I can't write.

Should we make breakfast at home? Should we go somewhere for breakfast? I don't know. All I know is that I'm tired.

What's wrong with me?

Life's a mess.

Arriving in a New Place

One day, I wake up and everything's changed.

Roosters wake me at 5 AM, but I'm not tired anymore.

It's thirty degrees outside, but I don't feel hot anymore.

I feel focused. And I can write!

Sometimes we make breakfast at home. Sometimes we go somewhere for breakfast. It doesn't really matter.

Suddenly, I realize:

I just arrived in a new place.

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This post is part of the series Arriving in a New Place

Why are you still writing about New Zealand? Wasn't that 3 months ago?

— A dear friend of mine, who's reading my travel blog.

The delay

After four months of travel, I've finally finished processing the first one in blog form. As you can tell, there is quite some delay between the now of the Philippines and the then of New Zealand. What's taking so long?

1. First of all, I want to tell the entire story of my trip around the world. It wouldn't feel right, if I left parts out.
2. Second of all, I want to tell the story chronologically. Yes, I'm in a whole other country by now. But how weird would it be if I just skipped to the Philippines without finishing New Zealand and writing about the countries I've visited in between?
3. Third of all, what's the rush? Even if I drag this out to 2025, when my trip will already be over, who cares? I can take my sweet time.

So there's a delay.

The notebook

In order to remind myself of the great adventures I have had so far, I took up writing a diary. By now, I've filled 4 notebooks with my travel logging.

I record my thoughts and feelings, my daily activities and curiosities I discover about all the different cultures I get to know on my trip.

The craft

Travel blogging is a great opportunity to work on my craft and become a better writer.

When I started, my blog posts were more concerned with travel logistics than they are today:

After landing, we start our search for public transport in order to head into the city. We know where we want to go (the Syntagma station), but our desired stop is nowhere to be found on the map. A young airport employee, who emanates competence in the area of public transportation, seems to have noticed our confusion.

— Der Winter ist vorbei / The end of winter, loosely translated to English.

Just reading this gives me a headache. Nobody likes to concern themselves with travel logistics. It's so annoying.

But I was just getting started with travel blogging, so I didn't know any better.

Over time, I elevated my style to better capture the here and now of the moment:

The water is salty and cold. It's early in the morning. "So nice, that Sophia is always up for a swim", I think. There's no one else around on the beach. We are lying in the surf, as the waves come crashing in over our heads. "Why does no one enjoy this as much as we do?", Sophia reckons.

— Kaikōura, loosely translated to English.

You see the difference?

The visual stimulation

I try my best to describe my travels with words. But of course, I want my readers to also see the pleasures this world has to offer in the form of pictures.

Recently though, I've tried to keep them to a minimum for the following reasons:

1. Selecting pictures and reducing file sizes takes extra effort.
2. Writing Alt Text is time-consuming too.
3. I have more respect for a well-written blog post that comes with only one picture opposed to a poorly written blog post that comes with 8 pictures.

Adding pictures is additional work, and I've fallen behind with my blogging as is.

The stories

Writing a travel blog allows me to work on my storytelling skills. When I write on this blog I typically try to do the same. Start with a story or an interesting fact to arouse the reader's curiosity and keep up a certain attention span throughout the post.

But I can go even wilder.

Start a post by writing about the ending first, only to confuse the reader and resolve it at the end of the post?

Now, that's storytelling, baby.

Travel blogging

To me, writing a travel blog is something special.

Of course, I could just concern myself with the daily routine of travelling the world, which would mean writing more about the boring travel logistics and jotting down the events exactly as they have happened in a chronological fashion.

But that's not what I want!

Instead, I want to tell stories. I want to capture individual moments of this epic adventure. I want to share my thoughts and feelings as I learn about new cultures, the wonders of nature and the people who live in this world.

The reason why I'm still writing about my adventures of New Zealand, that took place over 3 months ago, is because I want to do it right.

I want to tell the whole story, from start to finish. I want to grow as a writer. And I want you to understand, that if you ever have the chance to leave everything behind and travel the world then there's really nothing to think about.

Just fucking do it. 🌏

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This post is part of the series Travel Blogging

Not only that:

• I told one of our hosts in New Zealand how much I enjoyed staying in their place in the highlands of Canterbury.
• I told the product team of Buttondown how much I love using their newsletter tool.
• I told the Austrian embassy in Manila how much it sucked that they wouldn't forward my absentee ballot and I couldn't cast my vote for the European elections.

Providing feedback is my new drug. You might underestimate its value, as I did, before I was a writer.

• But how else would our Canterbury host feel appreciated? (Shout-out to the Forest Lodge!)
• How else would the product team of Buttondown gather testimonials?
• How else will the Austrian embassy in Manila know that they need to improve their services?

As a creator, getting feedback feels paramount.

That's why I write YouTube comments to engage with my favorite vloggers.

I introduced a reply by email button a while ago and I always love when people use it. 💌

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This post is part of the series Reply by email

Have you ever heard of onomatopoeia? It's a term for words that are named after the sound they produce.

In Austrian German, we call a tram „bim“ because it always goes:

Bim!

Other examples for onomatopoeia are "ping-pong", "flip-flop" and „tuktuk“.

Unlike language, I wouldn't say I love numbers. What I do love though, are numeronyms.

Just like acronyms, numeronyms are abbreviations. But they are a lot cooler because they abbreviate using numbers:

• 24/7 means open 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.
• Y2K describes the year 2000 problem.
• 187 is short for "homicide" thanks to the respective Californian Penal Code.
• 08/15 is common in German to describe something very boring and ordinary and goes back to the first world war, when soldiers had to use a certain machine gun every day to practice their shooting. It was called the MG 08/15.
• P2P could mean peer-to-peer or pay-to-play.

But there are even cooler ones, popular in software development. Long words are shortened by replacing the number of characters in between the first and last letters:

• i18n is short for "internationalization".
• l10n is short for "localization".
• a11y is short for "accessibility".

But I have learned my absolute favorite numeronym last week in the Philippines.

You know how Filipinos like to abbreviate the word "tuktuk" in messages?

Tuk2.

That's right. An onomatopoeia that is also a numeronym.

All linguists out there, I'm ready to receive kudos now. ✊

The featured illustration was drawn by lovely Sophia.

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Cake's on me.

The personal website

On June 9, 2023, I've launched my personal website, including my debut post about writing. Ever since I became a user and explored the early 2000 web, I've dreamt about this. I believe that having a personal website that represents you on the internet is something that a social media profile can never live up to.

I love my personal website. Working on it is my favorite hobby. I could spend hours building new features, making little design tweaks or updating my now page.

I actually had my first personal website as a teenager, until it was hacked by bad internet pirates. The thing is, back then I didn't know what to put on my personal website anyway.

Until blogging entered my life.

Blogging

If you wanted to add more personality to a personal website, you should probably start a blog. After all, it's your thoughts and feelings on the internet. What's more personal than that?

When I started this blog, however, I hadn't yet fully understood what a personal blog was all about. More than anything, I felt that I had to write about a certain niche only. A blog needs a theme, is what I thought.

That theme, in my case, was accessibility.

So, I wrote about accessible web forms, accessible doors and labelling the web.

But then I got frustrated. Do I really need to stick to my theme? Would it be so bad if I wrote about something more personal?

Forcing myself to write about my theme started to restrict me. I didn't look forward to writing anymore. Writing started to feel more like a chore.

It took me a couple of months of misery before I realized that it doesn't have to be this way. I wrote about my predicament and called it "how not to write", where I convinced myself:

You can write about anything.

And then, I did.

Freedom

After I turned one of my blog posts into a talk and turned that talk back into a blog post, my 2023 reflection was the most personal blog post I had written up to that point.

Slowly, my blog got more and more personal. Slowly, I embraced the freedom that I now allowed myself to have.

I can write about anything!

Blogging was fun now.

The world needs software that works for everyone

Of course, I'm still a user experience guy, so when I get furious with the software that I use, it's nice to blow off some steam. I dedicated blog posts to using watchOS 10 and the Morgen calendar to reflect on bad user experiences and let the World Wide Web be my audience.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I care about privacy, no matter if it comes to email privacy or phone number privacy.

I also regularly ask myself what kind of software we use and what kind of software we probably shouldn't use. But of course, no judgment here.

The personal web

After I had my personal website for a while, I had a better understanding of who I was on the internet. I introduced a now page to document what activities I spent my time on at any given moment.

If the /now page is about sharing what you are doing right now, why is there no /where page to share where you are right now?

My contribution to the personal web is called the where page movement and with it, I invite everyone who has a personal website to do just that.

Travel

Most recently, I started to write about the thoughts that I have, while I travel around the world.

I launched a travel blog (in German), but every once in a while, I think about meta topics around travelling such as what this world sounds like or what driving a scooter in Vietnam without Maps feels like.

One year of blogging

There's a thought that has been on my mind for a while now. There won't be a better moment to put this thought out there than on the day of my one-year-bloggoversary:

Writing a blog is the best thing I ever did on the internet. ✨✏️

If you want to celebrate this anniversary with me, I'm happy if you reply by email. We could have an emoji cake or something.

To so many more years of blogging! 🍾

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This post is part of the series Years of Blogging

Just like watchOS did a while ago, recently, my new calendar app has been annoying the shit out of me.

Letting go of my anger by writing about it feels very soothing. You should try it too.

Goodbye, Apple Calendar

For over a decade, I've been a happy user of Apple's native calendar app. On macOS, on iOS, heck sometimes even on watchOS! But then, something changed. In the beginning of this year, I returned to Windows. As a consequence, I had to change old habits.

No more Apple Calendar.

I could have used the web UI of Fastmail's calendar. But I'm a desktop calendar app guy, so that never really worked for me. I could have used Thunderbird, which does have a desktop app on Windows. But apart from taking forever to sync it's also cumbersome to use.

And so, Morgen entered my life.

The promise

Morgen is a calendar app. But not just any calendar app! It integrates with my favorite to-do list app, Todoist. There's more! It allows me to sync my Fastmail calendar. Aaaaaand it's cross-platform.

It runs on iOS, macOS, even on Linux! Most important for me: it runs on Windows. Last but not least, it has a German name (Morgen means "morning"). And that is very cool, of course.

So obviously, I had to get Morgen. I didn't hesitate to sign up for the 80 euro yearly subscription.

All I thought was:

What can go wrong?

Little did I know that so much can go wrong.

Dealing with events

A lot of my frustrations with Morgen revolve around displaying, rescheduling and creating events.

Declined events

One of the first things I noticed when I started using Morgen was that it displayed declined events in my calendar. In my case, a weekly repeating event, that I declined 4 months before. I checked my settings. The option to "show declined events" was unselected. So I declined the event again. It felt weird that I had to go this far. But after that, the world seemed okay.

But of course the world wasn't okay. Soon after, the event just reappeared. This only seemed to happen on iOS, so in an attempt to fix this, I logged out of the app and logged back in and suddenly, the event didn't show up again.

Until it did. But only in the widget on my home screen.

Then one day I woke up and thought to myself:

If Morgen tries so hard to show this declined event, let it.

I'm not gonna get annoyed by it anymore.

Rescheduling an event

Again, I was working with a repeating event. In particular the monthly date night with my girlfriend that had her as an attendee. When we couldn't make the date night for the Wednesday in question because we got ill, I rescheduled it for the following week. And again, the world seemed okay.

But what did Morgen do? It created a copy of the original event. So now, it displayed the original event of that Wednesday and the new event on the following Wednesday. I thought I was going nuts.

To be sure, I checked in Fastmail if it was duplicated there too. It wasn't. Only in Morgen's iOS and Windows apps. So I deleted the original event, but I had to do that 2 or 3 times before it eventually disappeared. Or so I thought because the next day it just returned.

Around this time, a thought crept into my mind:

Maybe I should have tested the app more thoroughly before committing to the Pro plan.

Oh yes, I should have.

Network error when creating an event

To be fair, I'm currently on a Philippine island (Siargao) that famously has problems with internet connectivity. Still, something was really odd about this:

1. I tried to create a multi-day event.
2. It gave me a network error.
3. I checked whether my internet was working by opening a random website.
4. It loaded without problems.
5. So I tried creating the event again.
6. Same result.
7. So I closed all apps and restarted my phone.
8. Internet connectivity seemed to work, so I tried for the third time to create the event.
9. It failed again.
10. I switched over to Fastmail and tried to create the event there.
11. It worked immediately.

Morgen, Morgen, Morgen.

Speed

Morgen is slow on so many levels and that is annoying for so many reasons.

Sync

There are 2 arrows to manually sync your calendar in the top right of the UI. They also spin whenever they sync my calendar. And it feels like these arrows are constantly spinning. Is there really so much data flow required of a basic calendar app?

Unresponsive

Every time I open up the desktop app, I can't interact with the UI immediately.

I need to wait a couple of seconds before any input from my end is accepted (such as pressing „M“ to switch to the month view). And yes, seconds is quite a long time frame in 2024.

Offline

Last but not least, Morgen doesn't work offline. Is every user always online when they plan their life's events? I gotta tell you: I'm not.

Event details

This concerns the event details view, where Morgen is making it very hard for me to edit specific details of an event on iOS.

Change time zone for event

This doesn’t work or I haven't figured it out. I'm travelling and sometimes need to change the timezone of upcoming events. It's displaying a control for the timezone, but I can't seem to change this setting.

Why Morgen?

Make event repeatable

Unlike with the timezone there isn't even an option for me to create a repeatable event.

What a life.

Add attendee

I can add attendees when I create an event. But somehow I can't add attendees to an event I had already created prior.

Touch target size

I noticed when creating an event that sometimes my finger input wouldn't be accepted:

• I just tapped on that starting date, didn't I?
• I just selected a different calendar, right?
• Didn't I just tap on that time zone control?

The touch target size of many controls is very small, or it's not clear to me, what I can and what I can't tap.

In Apple Calendar, it's obvious that the controls are clickable on the right side. The start and end time controls for instance have a clear gray background, indicating that they are clickable.

Moreover, you don't even have to directly click on the specific controls. I could also just tap the label "Starts" for the date picker to open. The touch target size is quite generous.

In Morgen, I have to directly tap on the day when I want to set a start or end date.

I might have grown quite accustomed to how Apple handles touch target sizes.

In any case, I'm convinced that Apple Calendar's design is superior.

I actually missed an event thanks to Morgen

I was very close to not publishing this post, because I felt like there was a lot of negative energy. But then this happened. I actually missed an event thanks to a UX problem.

Here's what happened:

1. I opened the Calendar view settings.
2. I hid my main calendar to show only events from a specific calendar.
3. I returned to my regular life.
4. The widget on my home screen now also hid my main calendar (obviously without me noticing).
5. All day I have been looking at my home screen and Morgen just kept on happily announcing "No more events 🙌".
6. I missed my event that evening.

That was the last straw. I had to publish this blog post.

The Morgen Calendar

The thing with Morgen is that I want to like it. I really, really, really do.

And many times I tried to convince myself, that it's not Morgen, it's me. It probably had a bad day. But after everything that has happened, I lost my patience.

See, for me a calendar app just has to work. I need to work efficiently and life is so much about managing your time.

Sometimes when Morgen fails me I just think:

Oh, come on Morgen, stop fooling around and finally send me the link to the working version of your app.

But then I remember that this is no beta release, no April fool's release, no demo. This is the real thing. They ask money for this! And it's not little.

I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed. 😔

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Its graphic design was meant to be very "road sign simple", functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. With so few pixels to work with, it had to be very distinct, yet simple. I think we only had 16×16 pixels to render the image. (or possibly 13×13... can't remember exactly).

— Norm Cox, original designer of the hamburger menu icon

Its design resembles a hamburger, hence the name (however, some also think it rather resembles an Oreo and should be called the Oreo Menu).

What the hamburger menu essentially does is hide content in exchange for screen real estate. This is of course useful on mobile devices, where every pixel counts.

You know where you can be more generous with your pixels? Exactly, on desktop.

The desktop is a place, where hamburger menus have no right to exist.

That extra click

While I'm absolutely fine with hamburger menus on mobile, all the beautiful UX designers out there need to keep one thing in mind: hiding content behind a button requires users to click on that button, every time they want to navigate. Yes. Every time. If your website or app requires a lot of navigation, introducing a hamburger menu might not be your best choice.

Hype Machine's iOS app is a prime example for a poor menu choice. They could have made their users' lives so much simpler, had they chosen a traditional tab menu (Beyond that I only have positive feelings towards Hype Machine).

Out of sight, out of mind

Apart from that extra click, there is another thing troubling me when I think of hamburgers. No, not literal hamburgers. I love hamburgers. I mean hamburger menus.

And it's again their original purpose: hiding content. Hidden content on user interfaces always attracts less attention. Users might not know about this link they have been wanting to click on for their entire lives, hiding behind these three horizontal lines.

Also, users are aware of that extra click. That's effort. As a consequence, users might not feel motivated to open up that menu.

So if possible, it's best to show content directly. Your links are important. Don't be so humble. They don't need to hide anywhere.

The More Menu

So, I want screen real estate, but I also want to make my menu's content as accessible as possible. The good news is, that you can have both. Enter the "more menu".

The more menu does exactly what the hamburger menu does. It's hiding content. But only part of it. On my website, I show the links that I consider most important in my main menu (in my case about, blog and where).

I hide the rest of my fine content behind another link in my main menu. It's called "more". Plain and simple. Here you can find more links. I consider them less important, so I'm okay with hiding them (in my case book of books, now, projects and talks).

I love this solution. At first, I thought about using an icon for the more menu. But wouldn't it be confusing to use a hamburger icon for a menu that only shows part of the entire menu? The label "more" does the trick.

Thanks to my blogger friend Kev Quirk, whose beautiful (and recently redesigned) website inspired me to go with this approach.

Finally, I have good news for all the accessibility nerds out there. You'll be happy to learn that I marked up the links on my more page using a <nav> element. Just like the accessibility gods intended. 👼

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I got my fancy Japanese-built scooter. I got my tank half-filled. I got my sweet red and white helmet. I'm ready to go!

But wait. How do I go where I want to go? Little hint: this is 2024. Obviously, I use Maps to navigate.

But does my scooter have a smartphone mount? Of course not!

So what do I do? It's gonna be though, to say the least.

The co-pilot strategy

Here's an idea: I get my girlfriend to sit in the back. I have her navigate with Maps and shout out directions to me. What can go wrong?

Well, a lot. Because this is Vietnam and traffic in Vietnam is crazy. This is one of the first realizations I had when I arrived in this country on my trip around the world.

Also, my girlfriend might want to hold on tight, making it hard for her to look at her phone, which complicates the co-pilot strategy.

And if this wasn't bad enough, what do I do if my co-pilot's absent?

There has to be another way.

The Apple Watch strategy

There is another way and this is a clever one. Using my Apple Watch.

I remember this feature called turn alerts. And it's so very clever!

Using vibrations on my wrist, the Apple Watch will announce turns while I'm driving. A low vibration followed by a high vibration tells me to turn right (tock tick). A high vibration followed by a low vibration tell me to turn left (tick tock). It's super intuitive!

Theoretically. Because it doesn't work!

I remember that it used to work when I was driving a car in New Zealand. At a time, when I had CarPlay to help me navigate visually and audibly, all the vibrations on my wrist did was annoy the shit out of me.

Today on the other hand (pun intended), I would be more than happy if my watch had the courtesy to inform me when to turn. But for reasons beyond my comprehension, it just doesn't work. I spent way too much time in Apple's support forums, on Reddit and the settings of my Apple Watch to know one thing: it simply doesn't work.

Let's try something else.

The stop-and-go strategy

Here comes the obvious one. This isn't very pleasant, but what alternative do I have by this point?

The idea is to just check where I need to go on Maps on my phone, before I start driving. I try to memorize the route as much as I can. At some point, I have to stop and double check if I'm still en route.

Then I thought, that the Apple Watch could help me after all. Instead of having to stop all the time to pull out my phone, why not just raise my wrist and look at the Apple Watch's display to see how far I had proceeded?

The problem, again, is that Maps isn't supportive at all. Either it takes a couple of seconds to update my location on the small map, while I, distracted, might hit a friendly scooter friend. Or the map just doesn't follow along my current location and I would have to drag the user interface to where I currently was.

Apple Watch, what did I ever do to you to treat me this way? Maybe it's my watch's way of payback, since I wrote this Apple Watch frustration post?

I feel so stupid having to stop over all the time. This disrupts the natural driving flow that is so unique in Vietnam, and it takes a lot of effort to re-enter traffic.

Is there another way?

The immersion strategy

There is one more strategy to face Vietnam's traffic in my predicament. It's immersion.

This means getting lost in the traffic and trusting my gut. By now, I've been driving in Đà Nẵng for an entire week. I'm still lost most of the time. Everything looks the same! Also, it's hard to concentrate with these crazy scooter riders driving carelessly and transporting meter-long metal sticks, ladders, huge canisters of water, bird cages, dogs on their laps, entire families, huge cardboard boxes, six huge shopping bags, carpets, suitcases, or other scooters (okay, the last one was a joke).

What can I really do, other than get lost in this madness, trust the little orientation I have and just go with the flow?

Driving without Navigation Assistance

In the end, I get around by combining these strategies.

Most importantly though, immersing myself in the traffic of Vietnam is essential. Feeling part of this system called traffic, part of the stream of scooters, part of the Vietnamese. It all comes down to flow and trust.

Or you know... I could just get a smartphone mount. 📱

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This post is part of the series Driving a Scooter

"So, Signal has usernames now."

I thought, when actually not thinking at all. I chose a cool username and immediately forgot this ever happened.

Until I read the Internet Review's post about Signal usernames, and it became oh so obvious.

Signal has usernames now!

My phone number is a sacred piece of personal information that is supposed to stay a secret. With the power of usernames, I can have people contact me and don't give up this precious secret.

How cool is that? My username is niqwithq.15 (I know, it's very cool), and for the convenience of my visitors, I also added it to my connect section and the footer of my website.

Thank you, Signal, for this awesome privacy feature! And thank you, Jared, for reminding me why this is awesome. 🫰

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I walk closer to one of the bigger statues. The wind keeps on blowing. A soft "gong" sound in the distance. And now the chanting starts.

There's music playing next to the statue. It's a duet of a male and female voice that keeps repeating some kind of chanting. As I recede, the birds keep on chirping, the wind keeps on blowing. And the music starts to fade.

My recording ends with the sound of a loud scooter. This is Vietnam after all.

Taking sounds

Ever since we were introduced to smartphones, all of a sudden every one of us had a camera in their pockets.

A picture says a thousand words. At least, if you believe every tourist ever. Because no matter where you go on this planet, people are taking pictures.

They might post them on social media. They might look at them when they browse through their photo libraries. They might just forget about them. Still, they gotta take that picture.

I believe this world has more to offer than visual stimulation.

At some point on this trip around the world I realized: We don't just carry around a camera in our pockets, but also a microphone.

I recorded the birds in the rain forests of New Zealand, I recorded the waves of the Gulf of Thailand in Vietnam. I recorded the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City.

Why just take a picture if you could also take a sound? 🔊

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This post is part of the series Taking Sounds

I read in a way. But I did that kind of reading, where I read in bed, just before going to sleep. In general, there's nothing wrong with that. In my case though, this meant that I would read a maximum of 2 pages until my eyes would get too heavy, and I dozed off.

With that kind of speed, you're not really making progress with your reading. Trust me on that.

Making reading a priority

It all changed this year. What changed? I introduced the now page into my life.

Ever since I did it, it helped me to focus more. Publicly declaring priorities seems to have an immense influence on my motivation.

No matter if it's finishing a show on Netflix, learning a language or writing my side blog.

It also helps me to read more. My reminder to make reading a priority.

The Book of Books

Just like many other personal websites, I've now introduced a Book of Books page. It's showing all the books I've read.

I'm not ready to write book reviews, but I can imagine adding my favorite quotes for each book, just like I do on my now page for the book I'm reading right now.

So have a look in my book of books (sweet rhyming, I know).

It's yet another reminder to make reading a priority. 🙏

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Probably the jet lag. After all, it's a 3-hour time difference compared to Sydney, my previous stop.

But it could also be the culture shock. I'm in Asia again. Some time has passed after visiting Singapore in February. My Asia game has grown weak.

There are scooters everywhere. I'm understating this. There are thousands of scooters everywhere. And they don't seem to adhere to any specific rules when it comes to traffic. They are cutting into our taxi's lane, they are driving towards us in our taxi's lane, they are driving diagonally across the intersection.

They are suicidal! But traffic still works somehow. Ho Chi Minh City is crazy. Vietnam is crazy!

So yeah, probably a combination of the two. I'm jet-lagged, I'm culture shocked, what else? Oh yeah, I'm nervous. Tomorrow, I'll rent a scooter myself. Tomorrow, I'll join the Vietnamese.

Yes! In this crazy country. With all the suicidal riders! And you know what else? It's my first time on a scooter ever.

So it's probably that. Also, I'm still processing New Zealand. It's been 2 weeks that I've left this beautiful country. And yet, I'm still in the middle of documenting everything that's happened there.

A few days ago, I've left Ho Chi Minh City for Phu Quoc, the so-called "Hawaii of Southeast Asia".

I finally have time to blog again. My travel blog "Niqs Reisen" (in German) finally gets some attention again!

So yeah.

I can't sleep.

Trip around the world

In February, my girlfriend and I started a trip around the world. We set off from Austria towards New Zealand.

On our way there, we passed by Athens, Singapore and Melbourne. We spent 5 amazing weeks on a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand. Then we spent a week in Sydney and now we will be in Vietnam for 5 weeks.

From there, we'll head onwards to Hong Kong.

And after that? I'm not sure. But definitely more Asia. Gotta work on that Asia game, right?

We will travel until the end of 2024. If you want to know where in this world I am, you can.

Just visit my where page. I always update it with my current location. And if you are in the area, hit that "Let's meet up" button.

Life is good.

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This post is part of the series Trip around the World

Instead, the internet calls it "X (formerly known as Twitter)".

I really, really, really hope it will forever be called that. Why? Because I love the irony.

A multi-billionaire buys a platform that is beloved by the internet. Aforementioned multi-billionaire starts playing god. He disrupts the internet that we know and renames a thing that we have known and loved for decades.

He might believe that people will just accept this and start calling it by its new name. X. Instead, the internet keeps on calling it Twitter.

Or to be exact:

X (formerly known as Twitter).

Dear internet: please never change. 😂

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The idea is simple. While /about pages show you what a website is about, /now pages show you what people are focused on, right now.

I introduced my own now page a couple of months ago during a very exciting phase of my life. Because at that time, I started my one-year trip around the world.

When I did, I didn't just want to blog about it. I also wanted to remind my readers where in the world I was at any given moment.

And so, I created the /where page. Similarly to a now page, a where page isn't static information. It needs an update whenever you move to another place.

In my case, I will travel to a lot of countries in this year. With my where page, I can let visitors of my websites know where I am.

Say, if I wanted to meet friends around the world, who are also travelling, they will know where to find me.

The /where page movement

Just like Derek did, I want to start a movement.

I call it the /where page movement:

1. Introduce a where page showing the city or country you are currently in.
2. Update the location whenever you travel to another place.
3. Share your where page link with others so that they can hit you up.

If you like the idea or decide to introduce your own /where page, reply to this post by email.

For your convenience, I included my /where page at the top of my /now page.

Enjoy travelling! 🌏

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This post is part of the series Where Are You?

My takeaway was this: Without looking back, we sometimes forget how beautiful life can be.

However, there was another takeaway. Beautiful as my end of the year reflection was, I was not entirely happy. It didn't give me a full picture of my year.

Something was missing.

What was missing?

Browse through the photos you took in the past month. You will probably see a lot of cool things that you did. But does it really show you what you preoccupied your mind with?

That's the thing I was missing.

Of course, my photos helped me remember the hikes I went on, the stand-up paddling I did and the stars I gazed upon.

But they didn't remind me of:

• My mission to watch all Tom Hanks movies.
• The time I immersed myself into Judaism, when I realized I knew so little about it.
• The weeks when I have watched "Gordon Ramsay Uncharted", where the renowned cook travels around the world and does his hilarious Gordon Ramsay thing.
• The phase when I played "No Man's Sky" on my Nintendo Switch and explored uninhabited planets in space.

These were once priorities in my life. Priorities I had left undocumented. As such, they had disappeared from my memory.

The now page

The idea of the now page is to have a dedicated page on your website that shows what you're doing at this time of your life.

Or to say it in Derek Siver's words:

My /now page is a public declaration of priorities. So it's a nice reminder for myself.

— Derek Sivers, The /now page movement

Derek came up with the concept of the now page. Today, many personal websites have one. Just like there's an /about page or a /contact page, /now pages became very common.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

— nownownow.com

When I learned this, I knew what time it was. It was time to document priorities.

When is "now"?

Before I started, I reached out to Derek.

I asked him, how often he updated his now page. Was it something he did once a month? Once a week?

When does one now end and another now begin?

I update it whenever my priorities change. So it can be weekly or even monthly.

— Derek

It took me a while to understand this completely.

Documenting nows

When I started with my now page, I felt energized.

For weeks, it said this (among other things):

Watching The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki's comeback movie from retirement, inspired me to watch all Studio Ghibli movies.

— My now page in the beginning of February

And so, for weeks, I immersed myself into Ghibli movies. For weeks, I felt focused. I was really motivated to stick to it. The public declaration helped.

When I was halfway through, something happened. Suddenly I lost my focus. For days, I couldn't find the time to continue with the movies. Still, I felt too proud to give in.

But slowly, I realized: my priorities were changing. And it hurt for a moment. But why would I lie to myself? That's when I updated my /now page.

And that's when all of a sudden, Derek's words made sense. Priorities change. Now pages change.

What are you doing now?

I love the idea of the now page:

• It allows me to be more focused on my priorities.
• It lets me reflect on what I preoccupy my mind with.
• It's a moment in time I can share with my friends.
• It adds more personality to my personal website.
• It shows where I am right now (more on that in an upcoming post).

And last but not least: It will give me a fuller picture in the next end of the year reflection.

There's no time like now. 🍦

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As you can imagine, writing an about page is not that easy. I procrastinated writing my own for quite some time. It took me six blog posts before this website had an about page (and for that matter, a menu).

But at some point I couldn't procrastinate any longer. How would my readers know who I was, if I never introduced myself?

That's when I used the power of Kev Quirk's blog. His post The Importance Of An About Page helped me create my first attempt. I have to admit though, that it didn't represent who I really was. Yet!

I explained why I write my name the way I write it (with the coolest letter of the alphabet), I talked about my job, I explained why I started this blog and listed some of my hobbies.

Basically, the ingredients of any good about page where present:

• What's your name?
• What do you do?
• Oh, you have a blog?
• What do you do other than blogging?
• What do you look like because people want to see pictures?

Still, it wasn't really me. I can't say what was missing. But it wasn't really me.

Really me

I've had my personal website for a while now. In the last months, I began shaping it to really represent who I am:

• I write about personal matters, such as my painful journey as a writer, how I turned one of my blog posts into a talk or my end of the year reflection.
• I write about topics that I care about, instead of writing about topics that others care about.
• I document my priorities on my now page (what's a now page?).

Now that everything else about my website is representing the real me: why not write an about page that does the same?

An about page that represents who I really am

I think what my first about page attempt did for me, was lay a foundation. In the beginning of this website's journey, I didn't really know who I was on my personal website. I didn't have much that represented me.

But now, that I've been blogging for almost a year, I'm able to tell my story. Each one of my posts represents one part of this story. And I reference to these parts of my story on my about page.

And so, eventually, I tweaked my foundation. I shortened the part why my name contains the letter Q (Niq with Q). I reflected on why I became a UX designer (work). I thought about why I started this blog (blog). I asked myself what other thing really represents me (travelling).

And there you have it: an about page, that communicates: this is me, this is what I do, this is what I'm all about. ✨

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This post is part of the series Online Identity

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

— Gen 11:1-9 (New King James Version)

Now, I'm not the kind of guy that would quote the bible. Well, at least I thought I was, up to this point. But no other story better outlines how the way we communicate on the internet has changed over the decades.

This posts marks a premiere for my blog. This month, for the first time ever, I participate in the IndieWeb Carnival, where people in the blogosphere are invited to write about a specific topic. Every month, someone else hosts the Carnival and thinks of a topic for everyone else to write about.

So here are my thoughts about this month's topic: "Digital Relationships", hosted by Manuel Moreale.

Languages are protocols for communication

The fundament for human relationships, no matter if digital or analog, is communication. In order to communicate, there are agreed upon protocols.

Languages, of course, are the protocols that we use to talk to each other.

The challenge of using language as a protocol is the diversity of languages in the world. While there used to be a single, unified language spoken by all the people, today we have a multitude of languages.

Well, at least according to the story of the Tower of Babel.

Communication protocols on the internet

In the digital world, protocols allow data transmission between computers. Just like with languages, they enable communication.

Open protocols vs. proprietary protocols

In the early days of the internet, these protocols were established. Email or the web itself were created upon open protocols for everyone to make use of. A shared language on the internet was born.

Already in the 90ies, when chat protocols emerged, a lot of this shared and open ideology got into turmoil.

Years before an open chat protocol called XMPP was formalized, big tech dominated the market. Chat clients such as ICQ, AIM and MSN used proprietary protocols, that were designed to only allow communication amongst each other.

In the mid-200s, when social media became a thing this trend was only amplified.

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram never operated amongst each other.

Today, I can write an email from my email provider Fastmail to my friend who's using Gmail (open protocol), but I can't follow an Instagram account from my LinkedIn (proprietary protocols).

The problem with proprietary protocols

Proprietary protocols create two problems:

1. They create a communication barrier.
2. They are controlled by a single instance.

The communication barrier

One day in 2021, when WhatsApp updated their privacy policy, I decided to switch all my communication over to Signal. Since the majority of my friends used WhatsApp though, there was no way for me to talk to them.

It's as if I spoke German and they spoke Portuguese.

The single instance

There used to be a time when Twitter was cool. This was the same time, when people still called it "Twitter" and not "X (formerly known as Twitter)". But then a rich millionaire came along and ruined it for everyone.

All of a sudden, many people on the platform realized, that they trusted their data with a single instance that possessed too much power.

Digital Markets Acts

With the Digital Markets Act, the European Union aims to break down the communication silos that have been built up in the last decades.

The Digital Markets Act is the EU’s law to make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable.

˗ Digital Markets Act

Meta, among others, has been identified as a "gate keeper". For WhatsApp, one of its services, Meta must now provide interfaces that enable communication with smaller messaging services. With that, the EU is trying to solve problem #1 "communication barrier" from above.

It feels like the EU is assuming a role as a parent, telling its children to stop arguing and to finally make peace.

However, Signal and Threema do not agree with WhatsApp's privacy practices and therefore refuse to break down the walls.

Why? Well, because there is still problem #2 "the single instance". Meta simply possess too much power and smaller messaging services don't trust that Meta will protect users' privacy, when it opens up its doors.

Nice try though, EU.

The savior of the internet

There is one potential savior out there (to stay in biblical terms). The Fediverse.

It works with, and you guessed it, an open protocol called ActivityPub, that enables communication among other platforms that also work with ActivityPub.

The Fediverse is solving both problems that proprietary protocols can't:

1. The communication barrier problem is solved by using a protocol that allows interoperability.
2. The single instance problem is solved by federation.

Interoperability

There are open source tools on the Fediverse, similar to the tools we know from big tech.

Some examples:

• Pixelfed is the Fediverse's Instagram.
• PeerTube is the Fediverse's YouTube.
• Mastodon is the Fediverse's X (formerly known as Twitter).

Since all the tools use ActivityPub, they interoperate. I could follow a Pixelfed account from Mastodon.

Federation

The biggest burden for people trying to join the Fediverse is when they have to choose an instance after sign up.

Just let me use Mastodon, I don't want to deal with selecting an "instance".

˗ Random person on the internet

But guess what, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Unlike with big tech platforms, where you are trusting your data with one (evil) corporation, thanks to federation, anyone could host their own instance on the Fediverse.

I could join the biggest instance on Mastodon, mastodon.social, but then one day decide to move to a smaller instance. I'm able to communicate with other instance nonetheless, since they all use ActivityPub.

Big tech joins the Fediverse

When Threads, Meta's answer to Elon Musk ruining Twitter, joined the Fediverse, it was a big step in the right direction. When at first, the reactions on the Fediverse were similar to those of small messaging services, there is a huge difference, outlined in "What to know about Threads", on the Mastodon blog:

• Meta can neither get any private data from users on other instances, nor track users on other instances.
• Meta can't insert ads onto other instances.
• Meta won't be able to collect any data about users from other instances.

ActivityPub, by design, doesn't allow privacy implication for users on the Fediverse.

In the last months, Threads has started to open up. It's testing federation. I was able to follow the Threads account of Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram from my Mastodon account.

Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon sums up what this all means for the Fediverse:

The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

˗ Eugen Rochko

The Internet's Tower of Babel

When people tried to build the Tower of Babel, they were arrogant enough to challenge God's sovereignty.

Similarly, it might have been an arrogant notion that we could build an internet in which we have one shared language.

But is the idea of an open internet, that cares about its users and communicates with open protocols really so arrogant?

I believe the Fediverse will let us all remember that we once shared the same language. And it's finally time to talk. 💬

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A recent event made me think about email privacy again. An event, that caused a very emotional response in me. I was just browsing through my inbox. In have a folder there, where I collect all personal email. All of a sudden, a clearly impersonal email ended up in said folder. You know what kind of email I'm talking about. A marketing email.

At that moment, I got upset. Why would anyone have the impudence to send a marketing email to my personal email address? How could anyone in the depths of the internet know my personal email address in the first place? Careful that I am, I had never entered it into a web form. Another curious thing about that email was that I had never heard of the service that was being advertised.

So I sent their privacy team a nasty email. I explained how I had no earthly idea how their email landed in my inbox, I mentioned the GDPR and my rights as a European citizen and wondered how they got my data. I was surprised to receive a very friendly response from someone named "Julie" that asked for my apologies. She said that apparently I registered for their product's waiting list a few years ago. And yet, I did not find any proof of that.

How could this have happened?

Your email address is your online identity

It's fair to say that everyone online has an email address. It's part of this game called "the internet". And when we play this particular game, our email address acts as a way to identify ourselves. No matter if we shop online, create online accounts or respond to customer feedback forms, we all need one.

You might use it to log in to your favorite social media platform. You might also use it to log in to your favorite streaming service. And how about your favorite productivity app? Don't you use the same email address there too?

Long ago, the only purpose of an email address was to communicate on the internet. Today, online services use it as an identifier so that you can log in. That would be fine, if the internet was only used by good-natured people.

You leave a trail on the internet. There are services where entering your email address gives a list of all online accounts associated with it. With just this piece of information, people with bad intentions could find out so much about you. They could come up with a whole online profile of you and discover other personal information like your name, your address or what you look like.

It's also possible that your email address has been involved in a data breach. In this case, it would be bad if you used the same address for other services. Even worse, if you used the same password for these other services.

Your email address is sensitive personal information that needs to be protected.

Personal versus transactional & marketing emails

Since an email address is nowadays required to gain access to a multitude of services, its role as a tool changed over the past decades.

These days, a lot of emails in the private area tend to be transactional (account sign-ups, password resets, newsletter subscriptions) or marketing emails. A lot of email communication is not between you and people, but rather between you and software.

For that reason, humanity invented email aliases. I used to have one email address for practically anything. Today, I use a personal email address for personal matters and created email aliases for my several online accounts.

This way, I can clearly separate between personal email and transactional or marketing emails.

Double opt-in

At this point of my story you might understand the anger I felt when I received the marketing email in question. I told the nice lady, that I don't remember a double opt-in happening. A double opt-in, to say the least, is pure privacy bliss.

Without the magic of the double opt-in, if I had your email address, I could just run around the internet and sign you up for all kinds of newsletter services, online accounts, etc. To better protect user privacy, the GDPR defined in its article 7 that online services are required to obtain consent before they can process personal data. In practice, this means that you have to confirm your email address after you used it in a web form.

I get very emotional when my email address ends up in a marketing campaign I have never consented to. Especially when it is so unclear how they got my consent in the first place. If the internet respected double opt-ins in order to sign up for anything, it would be a better place.

"I don't care if they have my data"

I'm sorry, but I'm sick of people saying that and yet it appears to be such a common theme. If you are among these people, please think again.

Do you care if companies can tell your age, your ethnicity, where you live, what you are interested in, your political ideology, what you do online and so much more for the sole intent of maximum profit? For god's sake, if that isn't surveillance then what is? This isn't even an exaggeration. There actually is such as a thing as surveillance capitalism, and it's fucking scary.

Personal privacy is a choice. There are tons of things you can do in order to protect it.

Today, you could start with taking email privacy into your hands:

• You could unsubscribe from marketing emails that annoy you.
• You could delete online accounts you have no more use for.
• You could google your name and see if you found your email address in that way.
• You could even start all over and create email aliases: one for personal mail, another for account-related mail.
• You could write nasty emails to companies when you feel like they hurt your privacy rights. 😡

If you're crazy enough you could even categorize online accounts and use one account-related alias for social media, another for shopping, yet another for travelling and so on. If that sounds too fancy for you, tools like Firefox Relay or Apple's Hide My Email can help you get started.

Don't just accept that this is the way things are these days. Don't just succumb to the "I don't care if they have my data" attitude. You do have a choice. All it takes is you giving a shit. ✌️

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But not on niqwithq.com. And here's why.

Writing in German

When I decided to document my trip in blog form, I thought of a selected group of people that would be happy to become my readers. I call this group friends & family, with a focus on my family (hi mom).

That's when I wanted to try something new and write in my first language, which is German.

German doesn't go well with my personal blog, which is entirely in English. This is my first argument for an entirely new blog.

Travel blog

The theme of my new blog is clear: travel, travel, travel. In theory, this theme mixes well with the theme of this blog: personal, personal, personal.

Travelling is of course personal and I would write about it here, but I don't want my personal blog to become a travel blog. This is my second argument for an entirely new blog.

Trying out 11ty

I built this blog with NextJS, just because it was the framework everyone at work seemed to talk about a year ago. But, once I delved deeper and deeper into the blogosphere, I discovered the go-to static site generator that I've always wanted to try: Eleventy.

What I like especially is the Eleventy Base Blog Repo. It's a blog template that provides convenience features out of the box I would otherwise need to spend time on building:

• Tags for blog posts
• Previous / next navigation on blog post level
• An RSS feed

This is the third argument for the entirely new blog.

An entirely new blog

Thanks to these three arguments I built an entirely new blog.

If you consider yourself a friend or a family member, speak German, want to read an awesome travel blog and are curious to see what the Eleventy Base Blog template looks like, reply to this post via email and I will send you my secret URL for my new blog. It's so secret that not even Google knows about it.

I'll see you on the other side (of the world) / (web)site. I'm not sorry for this dad joke. ✌️

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Updates, of course, are part of modern life. There's no way around them. On the one hand, I want updates to just happen in the background. Since they are indispensable and happen all the time, I want to use my precious brain power on more significant matters. On the other hand, I want control. I don't want my devices making their own decisions. I don't want to wake up to a world where the operating system (OS) of my watch looks entirely different, and I wasn't involved in making this decision.

But in the end, do I really have a choice?

The update

Then, my watch has annoyed me one too many times and eventually, I did the update. Since I haven't been keeping up with developments in the Apple universe, I wasn't aware that this was a major one. An update, in which not only the version number after the dot increased, but the number before the dot. You know, the more important number. The part of the version number non-tech people sometimes talk about.

So, within a couple of minutes, watchOS 9 morphed into watchOS 10. Being the OS nerd that I am, I felt excited.

The new normal

You might have an idea what's coming next. After the update, I woke up to a world where the OS of my watch looked entirely different. And even though I was involved in making this decision, I didn't like this new world. They changed so many features that were never supposed to be changed. They took ideas of how we use watchOS and changed them completely, leaving us to relearn what we had once already learned.

An update that was supposed to make users' lives better actually made users' lives worse.

But since I'm aware of how the feedback burger works, I will start with the positive.

Smart Stack

So, they made a new thing. If you're on the watch face and turn the Digital Crown, you can see widgets now, that are not only helpful, but also context-dependent. You might see an airplane ticket from your wallet, if you are travelling.

In my case, I can see that I have a barbershop appointment with Sami from my calendar.

I like this new feature, and believe it's something that has been missing from watchOS up to that point. So far so good.

Control Center

There's nothing that they changed about the design of the Control Center itself. But they did change on how to open it.

Before the update, if I swiped up from the watch face, the Control Center would appear showing me things like connection status, battery power or find my phone (an underrated feature that I use way too frequently).

After the update though, if I swipe up from the watch face, the Smart Stack appears. What happened? They changed a well-known interaction among watchOS users. Ever since I got my Apple Watch 2 years ago, I've been swiping up to view Control Center. And now this.

The day of the update, I was about to go to my workout and wanted to check the battery status of my watch. So I swiped up, as I've always done: but Control Center wouldn't show.

I actually had to look this up online to figure this out, because Apple's design decision confused me so much.

They could have stuck to the known and learned interaction of swiping up from the watch face. Why not have the Smart Stack accessible by turning the Digital Crown only?

App Switcher

In the past, I used the side button to switch between apps. But now, that the side button is reserved for the Control Center, how do you launch the App Switcher? You are not gonna like this.

If you want to switch between apps in watchOS 10 you now have to double tap the Digital Crown. This frustrates me for 2 reasons:

1. As you can guess, I don't want to relearn how to switch between apps.
2. Double tapping the Digital Crown feels clumsy to me. When I do the interaction, sometimes I'm not tapping fast enough, and I have to try again.

I use the App Switcher frequently and have to say that this design decision made interaction a lot less intuitive.

Locking the watch during workouts

Only recently, I've discovered how smart the "Water Lock" function is. I've always believed it's just there to remove water from the speaker, after taking a swim. But there's a side effect: Once you activate Water Lock, your Apple Watch is locked (hence the name), making it unresponsive to user input. So if I accidentally tapped the screen, my watch wouldn't react.

This, of course, is especially useful during workouts. It has happened to me a couple of times during boxing workouts that I finished my workout too early because I wear my boxing gloves over my watch. If I lock my watch during the workout, I can prevent this from happening. But guess what, they removed the Water Lock feature during workouts.

Why did they do it? It made so much sense for it to be there. Now I have to lock my watch from Control Center, and you can imagine how many tries I need to get there in the first place (see above).

Other side effects of the update

Another side effect I have witnessed: my home screen layout was reset. I use grid view and spent some time arranging all my apps by color. Ever since I did that, I've learned which app to find where. With the update, they reset the home screen layout and I have to realign everything.

My favorite complication on the watch face also doesn't seem to work anymore: The time of sunset/sunrise, but I have no proof that this is related to the update.

Learning vs. Relearning

The reason why I'm so annoyed with this update is as simple as this: Users hate change.

I'll have Jakob Nielsen, aka "Mr. Usability" himself explain what he thinks about redesigns:

So, you know that this design is actually more efficient for users, and it's easier to learn. Well, user testing show us it's easier to learn for new users, but for the old, existing users, the old design is what they know. So, for them, any change is something new they have to learn. People just don't like to spend time learning. They want to spend their time doing. So that's why they're going to be complaining.

Oh yes, I'm complaining. And in the case of watchOS, I even doubt that Apple concerned themselves with the first part of what Jakob Nielsen said. How did they decide that these changes are more efficient for users? I think having to double tap the Digital Crown at all or removing the Water Lock feature are plain and simple bad design decisions.

Jakob goes on:

The best way to actually reduce the problems with change is to reduce change, and not having so many changes by shipping a really great design in the first place. So do a lot of UX work to really polish and redefine a really, really wonderful, best possible design that you launch in the first place.

Amen.

Here's the breakdown:

• For at least 5 generations (or since 2018) users have been swiping up to access Control Center.
• For at least 5 generations (or since 2018) users have been switching between apps using the side button.
• I don't know for how long locking your workout has been part of the Workout app, but I can see that other users are complaining about this change too.

I love my Apple Watch. I love watchOS. But this update really annoyed me, and I'm not sure how this could have happened. Of course, I will get used to this new normal. But was it really necessary to upset me in the first place?

Shame on you, watchOS.

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I usually browse through my photo gallery, when I reflect on my past year. This year, I also reflected on the music I've been listening to.

As an avid last.fm user, I can time travel to any period of my life and check out long forgotten favorites from my music library.

When I reflected on 2023, I created a Spotify playlist of my favorite music for every month of the year.

January

I celebrated New Year's Eve of 2022 in Bologna, Italy. Since I dropped a glass of water just before Christmas of 2022 and seemingly stepped into its remains, I walked through what feels like the entire Emiliga-Romagna with a fucking glass shard in my foot. You can imagine the relief I felt when I got it removed, after it had been in there for almost 3 weeks.

Just a day after that, Covid hit me. The first time ever. I managed to survive the whole pandemic virus-free, only to be infected when Covid went out of fashion.

Following my Covid days, I laid the foundations for my personal website. At the end of the month I made my first commit to GitHub. Oh, the bliss ✨.

My favorite artists in January were The Lagoons, Nas and Miami Horror.

February

February reminded me how awesome snowboarding is. Thanks, February! Also in this month, I started physiotherapy following a 150 km (93 miles) hike from Graz to Mariazell in 2022. My knees were more than grateful!

Lastly, I held an Accessibility Testing workshop in my company with the optimistic plan to do it once a month. Eventually, I did it once.

I ended the month with a grand decision.

My favorite artists of February were DRAMA, Nas (again) and LEISURE.

March

My grand decision of February manifested itself with the beginning of March: The 4-day work week. It allowed me to get more out of life. I would have never been able to build my personal website if it weren't for FREEDAY, the day of the week that was once known as "Friday". This was the best decision of 2023.

My favorite artists in March were DRAMA (again), Augustine and ARAI.

April

April introduced me to two game changers: an electric toothbrush and a Thermos © bottle. How could I ever live without these tools? They were almost as groundbreaking as the game changers of 2022: I stopped tying my shoes and instead started slipping in or out of them using one great invention for lazy people like me: a so-called shoehorn.

I also got the first massage in my life, renewed my passport and lost one glove (that really bugged me, why not at least lose both?).

My favorite artists in April were the Knocks, HONNE and ARAI (again).

May

I took 3 weeks off in May. I hiked through the magnificent Wachau region from Krems to Melk with Sophia. We hiked 71 km (44 miles) for 6 days along the Danube and spent every night in a different place. I have never seen so many vineyards in my life. After the trip, Sophia and I decided to take the plunge... into 15 °C (59 °F) cold Danube. Oh, and we took the figurative plunge and became a couple.

It was a very social month altogether in which I managed to meet friends for brunch, hiking, dinner or stand-up paddling. I took my first writing retreat at Neusiedler See where I finished my first blog post, About writing. I hope there will be more writing retreats in 2024. May was without a doubt the best month of 2023.

My favorite artists in May were Monster Rally, NEIL FRANCES and Paco Versailles.

June

At the beginning of June, I already felt like I had lived summer to the fullest, when it hadn't even officially started. My brother came to visit for more stand-up paddling, swimming and a Hans Zimmer concert. I spent a week of workation in Berlin with Sophia.

My friend J-P from Finland visited me in Vienna and introduced me to Couchsurfing. In Salzburg, we met Clelia who had her cousins Efraïm, Ester and Frida from Cologne over. We swam in the cold stream of Almkanal, checked out the city center and played Laser tag. In Innsbruck we met Much, who was generous enough to leave us his entire house when he went to play a DJ gig for the night. We took a fantastic hike up Höttinger Alm and J-P was mindblown to see the amazing mountains of Tyrol. More Couchsurfing to come in 2024!

My favorite artists in June were Ben Böhmer, The Knocks and AMTRAC.

July

In July, which was already hot in Vienna, I decided to go a place even hotter than that: Greece. The food in Thessaloniki was spectacular. The beaches of Skopelos island were breathtaking. Still, life in Greece was too damn hot. It turned out to be the worst decision of 2023.

We also went to Graz and spent a weekend in Fuschl am See with co-workers for stand-up paddling and hiking. In a desperate late night mood, I ended the month by cutting off all my hair. Buzz cut season had officially started.

My favorite artists in July were Classix, ARIZONA and Amy Winehouse.

August

While my 2023 had already been super busy up to that point, August was finally a calm month. Sophia and I went to Prague to see a concert of AMTRAC and Ben Böhmer. It was also the month when my neighbors went on vacation and didn't turn their terrace light off for a week, which polluted the view from my balcony with light. Not so nice for an aspiring star-gazer like me.

My favorite artists in August were AMTRAC (again), Miami Horror (again) and NEIL FRANCES (again).

September

In September Sophia and I took a trip to Northern Italy were my lovely friend Alessandra got married. I wouldn't recommend using the night train to travel to Italy, especially if you're 1,92 m (6,3 ft) tall and have a guy like Nikita in your compartment, who either plans to get drunk or snore all night (he did both).

My favorite artists in September were Gorillaz, The Knocks (again) and ford.

October

In October, I saw Saturn through the third-largest Great refractor telescope in Austria. That's right, I saw the second-largest planet in our solar system through the third-largest telescope. It was a mind-blowing experience. This was the highlight of the star-gazing course Sophia and I had been visiting since fall of 2022.

Around Austria's national day we went to Innsbruck, which is one of my favorite cities in Austria since it's surrounded by mountains and hiking is so very accessible.

My favorite artists in October were ConcernedApe, Thomas Newman and Paco Versailles. I played a lot of Stardew Valley and watched a lot of Tom Hanks movies, which explains this selection.

November

In November, I participated in a study, where I shared my mobility behavior in diary form. I would like to conduct a diary study myself some time. I also turned one of my blog posts into a talk and held it at Liechteneckers, a Viennese design agency.

My favorite artists in November were NEIL FRANCES (again), Roosevelt and Foster The People.

December

My December had the typical symptoms of every December: work stress, spare time stress and family stress. Apart from the stress, it was nice to see many of my friends in Vienna and Graz and visit my family.

I launched my newsletter and went to see a show about southern stars at Vienna's Planetarium. Why did I want to learn about the stars in the Southern Hemisphere you ask? Well, because I made another grand decision.

My favorite artists in December were Oli Julian, ford. and Gillian Hills. Listening to the Sex Education soundtrack explains at least 2 of them.

In summary

My 2023 was fantastic. I made two of my biggest dreams come true: I built my personal website and decided to travel the world in 2024, starting with New Zealand in February.

I wrote more blog posts, saw more stars and stood on more stand-up paddle boards than ever before! I fell in love again. And I listened to a lot of damn good music. This 2023 in Music playlist sums up what it all sounded like.

I'm so ready to hear the soundtrack of 2024 🌏🎵.

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This post is part of the series Year in Review

Only weeks after I moved in, I discovered the problem. The problem with my bathroom ventilation.

My bathroom ventilation is supposed to be smart. So smart, that it turns on automatically, once the humidity reaches a certain level. It could be while I'm in the shower, that my ventilation all of a sudden decides to turn itself on. But once it's on, there is no way for me to turn it off. Even if — at least in my perception — the humidity is on an acceptable level again. Even if I use the switch, it just won't turn off. So actually, it's not very smart.

Whenever this happens, it's up to the great bathroom ventilation gods to decide whether enough humid air has been sucked out of my bathroom.

The fuse box problem

Of course, I cannot accept my household devices patronizing me like that. When this happens, and I badly need to go to sleep without that annoying sound rushing in the distance, I take matters into my own hands.

And since I haven't found a proper solution, taking matters into my own hands means walking to my fuse box and turning the power in my bathroom off. It's a brutalist approach, I know.

But when I stand in front of my fuse box, another problem presents itself. The switches of my fuse box panel aren't labelled, leaving me to guess what switch connects to what room.

This is confusing. What the hell am I supposed to do here? Trial and error? Turn all switches off? Bear through the sound and wait until it turns itself off again?

If I wanted to break down the fuse box problem, it's this:

There are no labels.

Welcome to the sequel of Labelling the Web.

Unlabelled user interfaces

You might ask yourself if the problem of unlabelled user interfaces (UIs) is only related to fuse boxes. And the answer won't surprise you. It's widespread across the web.

To demonstrate what this means, I want to use the header of a particular website as an example. There is an Austrian film festival that I have disguised enough so that no one will recognize it. Except (most) people from Austria probably will.

Let us call this Austrian film festival "Finale".

Next, let us take a peek at the header. If you have used the web before, this header will confuse you. The header of my semi-fictional film festival's website consists of a word mark, 2 elements on the left side called "button", 6 elements on the right side called "link" and another element called "German".

This is confusing. What the hell am I supposed to do here? Again, I'm reminded of the fuse box problem:

There are no labels.

What's this about?

It's all about perception

I admit it, this was an attempt to confuse you, yet again. The example doesn't actually show Finale's visual perception, but it shows Finale's screen reader perception.

If you aren't a user of a screen reader you will witness a different header. This different header consists of a word mark, 2 icons on the left side represented by three horizontal lines and a magnifying glass, a navigation area in the middle with various labelled elements, and 6 icons on the right side, represented by icons of social media platforms, a key and a shopping cart.

In the end, since it's the same website, it's also the same header. But it doesn't work for all users.

If you compare the two screenshots, you will witness two things:

1. The designer did not label the icons for screen readers. Since screen readers can only work with text, they will only perceive loose containers and their respective roles, such as button or link.
2. The designer managed to hide the entire navigation menu for screen readers. As a consequence, you can't navigate this website's content if you use a screen reader. What the actual fuck?

I decided to use Finale's example because it demonstrates the impact unlabelled UIs have on the user experience of the web. But the issue is bigger than that.

That is why I split it up into 4 individual problems:

1. Designers don't label non-text elements.
2. Designers use placeholder text to label form elements.
3. Designers don't remove redundant labels from non-text elements.
4. Designers don't test their user interfaces with assistive technology.

When I talk about "designers" in this blog post, I refer to teams that build software. We are all designers, no matter if we work as project managers, product owners, developers, testers or UI/UX designers.

Designers don't label non-text elements

We have established that icons can cause problems with perception if they are not labelled. But there's more. Icons and images are pixel- or vector-based. While we can process these elements visually, there is no way for a screen reader to do the same. Text is the most important currency on the web. All users can work with it.

Apart from graphics, other UI elements benefit from labelling such as dialogs, tables, toolbars or page titles. In this context, we need to talk about the concept of accessible names.

Accessible names

If you remember the first part of this article, you are familiar with accessible names. This time though, I want to use a different definition.

The MDN Web Docs defines accessible names as follows:

An accessible name is the name of a user interface element [...] They convey the purpose or intent of the element. This helps users understand what the element is for and how they can interact with it.

Accessible names aim to make UI elements perceivable for assistive technology by giving them respective names. Some elements that are purely text-based have an accessible name built-in.

Let's take a look at a few examples.

Links

Links usually have a visible label provided in text form.

In the following example of Herman's blog we look at the accessible name of one of their blog posts. Of course, I picked "Motherfucking Blog" to illustrate my example, because the post is hilarious.

The accessible name of the link "Motherfucking Blog" is "Motherfucking Blog". In a screen reader's menu, showing all links, the accessible name will be shown as is. Of course, the same is true for other links on Herman's site. Home, Projects, Podcast, Blog, and so on.

If links only contain text, you get accessible names for them out of the box.

Buttons

Buttons, like links, usually have a visible label provided in text too.

In this example of Netlify we look at the accessible name of one of the buttons on its landing page.

The accessible name of the button "Request demo" is "Request demo". Similar to the link example, if you opened up a screen reader's menu and listed all form elements, the accessible name will be shown as is.

Same as with links, when buttons are purely text-based you get accessible names for buttons out of the box.

Icons

Icons are graphical elements that are present in non-text form.

We stick to the Netlify example, where we can see a magnifying glass icon (supposedly for search) and three horizontal lines (supposedly for menu) in its header.

If we don't provide accessible names here, these icons will be left unlabelled. Depending on the designer's technological preference, screen readers will then output a file name, a CSS class name or a weird set of characters.

You don't get accessible names for icons out of the box.

Images

Images, like icons, are graphical elements that are present in non-text form. Alternative text (or Alt text) is the most popular example for accessible names that many creators on the web are aware of.

By default, images don't have alternative text. It's something designers intentionally have to add. Since images are technically similar to icons, you will face the same consequences, if you don't provide accessible names.

As such, you don't get accessible names for images out of the box.

Dialogs and beyond

There are even more UI elements that can be labelled. Dialogs should have names too. They act as a summary for visual and screen reader perception alike. Cookie banners sometimes pop up as full-sized modal dialogs, asking the full attention of users. Filled with several paragraphs of legalese, you can make users' lives easier, if you sum up the dialog with a visual title that can also be used as a neat accessible name.

Labelling dialogs is similar to labelling page titles. Page titles act as a summary of what users can expect to find on a page. This way, you can also label tables, form controls, figures, frames, toolbars or landmarks. There are so many UI elements you can label.

Design tip

If you want to make your non-text content accessible, do the following:

Always provide accessible names for non-text elements.

Because you don't want to confuse your users and have them guess what a UI control does.

Designers use placeholder text to label form elements

Forms offer yet another opportunity for designers to mess up their labelling. A particular bad design pattern is widespread across the web. Designers sometimes can't resist the temptation of using placeholder text to label form elements.

The attentive reader of my blog remembers Web Forms for Everyone, where I talk about avoiding placeholder text altogether. This is me paraphrasing my past self (feels great):

Placeholder text isn't a proper label. It disappears as soon as users start filling an input field. At that moment, users might forget what they were supposed to enter. This becomes especially frustrating, when placeholder text is used to show the expected format of an input such as a date format (e.g. DD.MM.YYYY). In order to reveal the placeholder text again, users have to delete their typed input. How annoying!

Design tip

If you want to make labels and input hints in forms visible at all times, it's clear what you need to do:

Always use visible labels for form elements.

Don't rely on placeholder text.

Designers don't remove redundant labels from non-text elements

Sometimes designers decide to come up with a combination of icons and text. An example of this are buttons that have a visible label but use an icon too. This can support users in identifying a button's purpose. Also, it can confuse screen reader users, if the icon is weirdly labelled. Unlike our first problem, where designers don't label icons at all, now we focus on the opposite.

If you want to book a show at Graz Opera, you will have to deal with this great design invention.

While it's controversial whether this particular icon in our example actually helps to understand the function of the button, it has a much worse problem. For reasons unknown, the icon has an accessible name that reads "Oper Graz Logo". Combined with the already present label of "Tickets", the accessible name of the button reads "Tickets Oper Graz Logo".

If you opened up the screen reader menu to show all links, two links with this confusing label will turn up.

The designer decided to provide an accessible name for the icon, when instead they should have hidden the icon for screen readers. What appears to be a careful design decision, since this is the official website of such a fine establishment, turns out to be yet another labelling problem. It's particularly confusing, because the icon has such a weird name. I mean, that's not even the logo of Graz Opera, why would they call it that?

Design tip

If you want to avoid confusing your users with redundant information, it's clear what you need to do:

Always hide redundant visual information for screen readers.

Similarly, images or emojis are sometimes only used as decorative elements that should be hidden from screen reader users as well.

Designers don't test their user interfaces with assistive technology

Last but not least, the biggest of all the labelling problems is this one.

There are 2 methods to check for accessible names on the web. Using the Accessibility inspector or using screen readers.

Accessibility inspector

Every browser offers some kind of Accessibility inspector.

In Firefox, right click any element, and select "Inspect Accessibility Properties." The Web Developer Tools will open up and show the Accessibility Tree, a hierarchical representation of the page's content and structure. You can check the accessible name inside the tree or inside the "Properties" panel.

If you check Finale's Accessibility Tree, you will find that its navigation area is properly labelled, but there's nothing inside, except for a heading with a redundant label. The designer chose to hide the entire navigation area from screen reader users.

Chrome users can check for accessible names by selecting an element, choosing "Inspect" and then switching to the "Accessibility" panel inside the "Elements" panel.

Screen readers

Using a screen reader is the most reliable method to check websites for accessible names. With screen readers, you can experience for yourself if assistive technology is able to perceive your content exactly the way you imagined.

If you used a screen reader on Finale's website and put the focus on the navigation area, you will come to the same result as with the Accessibility inspector. A heading labelled "main navigation" is all you get.

Screen readers usually have a visual output, so you are able to see what the screen reader would read out to users.

Design tip

Screen readers are part of modern operating systems. macOS uses VoiceOver, Windows uses Narrator, Linux distributions with GNOME use Orca.

So what are you waiting for:

Always test your user interfaces with screen readers.

If designers regularly tested their UIs with screen readers, the web would be a better place.

Label your shit

If you follow the design tips I've shared in this post, I'm hopeful, that the web can be a better place for so many users.

Here are my tips if you want to join the cause:

1. Always provide accessible names for non-text elements.
2. Always use visible labels for form elements.
3. Always hide redundant visual information for screen readers.
4. Always test your user interfaces with screen readers.

My ventilation problem of course wouldn't be solved. But at least we can solve the fuse box problem and give me the satisfaction of turning off my bathroom power with self-sufficiency. Together.

Let's pull out our label makers and label the web. 😎

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This post is part of the series Labelling the Web

Everyone likes listening to great storytellers, because we all like great stories.

What other way for me to tell great stories but by giving talks?

Blogging as a gateway

This summer, I have launched my blog. Now, that I'm starting to get the gist of blogging, I really value using this medium to tell a story. Writing is a fantastic way to put your mind in order. A fantastic way to reflect on something you have learned. A fantastic way to let others partake in your thoughts.

After I wrote a couple of blog posts, I was invited as a speaker at Liechtenecker's UX Snacks, a local event in Vienna.

From the moment I accepted the invite, it was clear what I wanted to do. I wanted to recycle one of my blog posts and turn it into a talk. Instead of coming up with a new idea, why not talk about a problem I have already spent time thinking about?

Picking a blog posts to turn into a talk

Since the event's name had the letters "U" and "X" in it (UX), I limited the potential candidates.

This was my shortlist:

• 📄 Web Forms for Everyone
• 🚪 The Accessible Door
• 👹 Do Hackers care about Accessibility?
• 🏷 Labelling The Web

In order to make this decision, I had to keep two things in mind:

1. Crowd: is the blog post's content suitable for the crowd at the event – in this case, mostly designers?
2. Story: does the blog post already feature a story line, that I can reuse to deliver the message?

The pick

For a long time, I wanted to make a talk out of Web Forms for Everyone. However, I found that most of the examples I had used were more directed to a developer crowd. I could have gone the extra mile to extract the UX bits of this post, but I suppose I wasn't sure on how to do it properly, just yet.

I could have picked The Accessible Door, since the story was already there. In it, I used doors as a metaphor for design. People get excluded from using them if their circumstances aren't considered in the design process. The topic itself was also suitable for my audience. However, the post addresses a general design problem of today's world, when I wanted a story closer to the digital user experience.

Do Hackers care about Accessibility? obviously has a nice story line to it. Not only does it talk about a 16-year-old me whose heart got crushed once he realized his website had been hacked. Also, a 33-year-old me could have shown the audience how to fix a crappy website, designed by a soulless hacker. But this one felt too technical.

In the end, I picked Labelling The Web. While it has one or two code snippets in it, I felt that the topic needed to be heard by a lot of people. On top of that, I have a charming story line going there as well. The story of my grandma creating a website about her awesome food would definitely work for the audience, I told myself.

Story-friendly

It all made sense after I made the pick. I planned to start the talk off with my famous spice mix-up metaphor: paprika powder and cinnamon look very similar. If you don't happen to label the containers, you might get more than what you bargained for next time you spice up your oatmeal.

Next, I wanted to introduce the main act of the story: my grandma. My grandma, with her collection of old lady fur caps. My grandma, with her religious beliefs that were so strong that she once took a picture of her TV set because the holy pope himself appeared in it. My grandma, with her amazing cooking recipes, that she wanted to share with the world by building an (accessible) website (that part is fictional).

I'm sure, this could have worked somehow, but something was missing. The spice mix-up intro didn't go so well with my grandma's endeavor. Too many storylines. Also, there was no real problem that the audience could identify with. As a consequence, I changed the story.

Instead of the spice mix-up opener, I came up with another idea. How about showing the fuse box in my apartment that has 8 switches but no apparent labels? If you wanted to turn off the power in my apartment, you can only guess which switch connects to which room.

After introducing the audience to the problem, I planned on showing its digital counterpart: an actual website with no apparent labels. At first, I wanted to make the audience believe that there's actually a website that has a header filled with unlabeled controls, making it unperceivable to anyone. Later, I reveal that what they have actually seen was the screen reader perception of the site that uses unlabeled icons.

Crowd-friendly

If you plan to talk about HTML code snippets for 30 minutes with an audience of UX designers, you will not make a lot of friends. Why not talk about the design of icons, forms and images instead? Know your audience.

I avoided code snippets altogether and planned to convey the message with a lot of visual examples. I planned on showing screenshots of user interfaces that failed to be used with screen readers. I decided to provide design tips on how to make everyone's life a little less confusing.

Another thing that I cared about when creating my talk was not to require previous knowledge for my audience to follow along. I aim to make my presentations as accessible as possible.

Labelling The Web: The Sequel

After I created the talk, I realized that the end result had a similar message to my original blog post but brought up new aspects of the same problem. I used a different story, different examples and came up with design tips for my audience to keep in mind.

Back in August, when I wrote Labelling The Web, I spent a lot of time thinking about a problem and wrote about it. Then, I created a talk out of it that was more audience-friendly and generated new ideas. In the end, I want to translate that back into a new blog post called "Labelling The Web 2".

How cool is that? A blog post, which turned into a talk, about to be turned back into a blog post again.

Turning your blog posts into talks

I like to tell stories, no matter if I write them on my blog or talk about them at an event. I'm a great storyteller.

And it's time to tell great stories.

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Instead, you read this blog post on how not to become a writer. But maybe you don't want to become a writer. Either way, it's best if you read on.

Content

You could write about so much. You could write about the time you got lost in Hachiōji, in the middle of Japan and desperately needed a place to sleep. You could write about growing up in the suburbs of Graz, playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters on the Super Nintendo with your friends. You could write about your enlightenment that sleeping naked makes you feel liberated from the weight of the world and how you got so used to it that you're not able to sleep with clothes on ever again. There are endless opportunities of things you could write about.

Instead, limit your content to a certain topic. After all, you should stick to your niche.

Routine

You could write every day. You could do it first thing in the morning. Without regards to the topic, you could just write and learn the craft. You might hate your work in the beginning, but some morning you could wake up a brilliant writer.

Instead, write only once, every 2 weeks. And since you haven't written a single line in the past 2 weeks, you feel stressed. After all, you decided on a schedule, so force yourself into keeping it. Most importantly though, feel bad about yourself if you don't deliver on time. Because the world will end if you don't stick to your schedule.

Audience

You could write just for yourself. You could use writing as a tool to reflect. Reflect on Hachiōji and the insatiable kindness of Japanese people. Reflect on watching your best childhood friend Flo play Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Super Nintendo. Why are you not friends anymore? What happened? Reflect and tell your story. Tell it just to yourself.

Instead, write for everyone else. Everyone else but you. Think of all the potential readers out there. The people on social media. After all, aren't they the ones you are writing for? Also, they help keep the pressure up.

Writing process

You could start with a rough draft. You could just dump everything that's on your mind, with no regards to a perfect writing style. As soon as you have a first draft, you could read over it and make changes. Improve your writing, cut out paragraphs, use different words, get rid of previous ideas. You could simplify your writing. You could even sleep over it and read it again the following day. Does it still make sense with a fresh mind?

Instead, only write your next paragraph once the one before sounds flawless. Spend as much time as possible on writing perfect sentences before you move on.

How not to write

You could ignore everything you have just read and do the following:

• Write about anything that comes to your mind. Why limit yourself?
• Write every day just for the sake of writing. Master the craft.
• Write only for yourself. Let others merely partake in your story.
• Write a draft and work on the foundation. All the details follow later.

If you want to become a writer, just write. Don't limit yourself to a topic, a schedule, an audience or a process. Get rid of all the insteads and just write.

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"Marsupial" is a class of mammals that carry their young in a pouch. Exactly, animals that carry their joey in a pouch! As a German native speaker I found this term funny. I wonder if English native speakers feel the same way. It might be funny for anyone born outside of Australia, a continent known to be the homeland of a wide variety of marsupials.

I learned about this curious fact during my research on emoji names. It began when I asked myself a fundamental question. How is my phone able to suggest emojis to me, based on specific words I type?

I'm sure you have noticed this too. When you write words on your phone's keyboard, suggestions show up. These suggestions usually offer to complete your typed word. When you start off with the word "well" for instance, suggestions such as "we'll" or "wellness" appear.

This works for emojis too. Say, If you type the word "moon" emojis will be shown that you can use in your message.

I have been using this feature for years instead of the emoji keyboard. Only recently I started to wonder how this worked.

Emojis have names too

For this to work, there needs to be a look-up table for emojis. Let me introduce the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). It defines data conventions for languages, currencies, time and dates, units of measure and so much more.

This data is provided in XML format and can be parsed by software applications. To give you an example, here is a little snippet.

<currency type="ATS">
    <displayName>Austrian Schilling</displayName>
	<displayName count="one">Austrian schilling</displayName>
	<displayName count="other">Austrian schillings</displayName>
</currency>

The CLDR provides information about currencies such as the good old Austrian Schilling. There exists a mapping between the currency code "ATS" and its English name "Austrian Schilling". It also defines pluralization rules. One schilling, two schillings. This data is available in different languages. The German dataset provides the same information in German ("Österreichischer Schilling").

The CLDR is the key to emoji names. My phone makes use of this data (yours too).

<annotation cp="🌙" type="tts">crescent moon</annotation>
<annotation cp="🌚" type="tts">new moon face</annotation>
<annotation cp="🌝" type="tts">full moon face</annotation>

Every emoji, no matter if moon or not, has a unique name.

What's that emoji?

Emojis names are not just relevant for text suggestions. Text to Speech (TTS) systems make use of them as well. If you ever wondered about the meaning of a weird emoji, you can select it and use TTS to have its name read out.

The first time I laid eyes on the mousetrap emoji, I used this trick.

This way, I learned the meaning of a lot of emojis, which is another purpose of the CLDR.

Emoji discovery

For every emoji there are two entries. While an entry with type="tts" defines its unique name, another entry suggest more terms that you can use when you search for emojis.

<annotation cp="🦘">joey | jump | kangaroo | marsupial</annotation>
<annotation cp="🦘" type="tts">kangaroo</annotation>

My experiments have shown however, that the iOS keyboard doesn't seem to use the full power of the CLDR. Emoji suggestions only show up if you search for an emoji's unique name, the additional terms are not considered. However, if you switch to the emoji keyboard and search there, you can use the additional terms. But not all of them!

"Marsupial" and obviously "kangaroo" make the kangaroo emoji appear. Luckily, also the newest word of my English vocabulary, "joey" works. For reasons unknown to me "jump" does not work, even though suggested by the CLDR. Instead, "jump" shows 6 emojis which have no alternative definitions in the CLDR: 🤬 face with symbols on mouth, 👩‍🔧 woman mechanic, 👨‍🔧 man mechanic, 😬 grimacing face and 😳 flushed face.

Signal's emoji reaction feature seems to use its own implementation of the CLDR. When I search for "jump" there I find my kangaroo/joey friend as expected.

I guess I haven't yet figured this out in its entirety.

Emoji power user

If you want to become an emoji power user, all you need to do is learn the emoji names of your favorite emojis. While a little practice on your phone goes a long way, it also helps to pay Emojipedia a regular visit. It's literally the emoji encyclopedia. You will not only learn emojis names but also the meaning of individual emojis, their platform-specific designs and a bit of history.

Many apps and websites have adopted the renowned colon notation for emoji autocomplete, first introduced by GitHub in 2012. Typing ":" followed by emoji names will offer up a list of emojis in Slack, Discord, Figma, Notion, Mastodon and many more. Microsoft Teams sticks to the Skype notation of using parenthesis, so typing an opening parenthesis "(" will have the same effect.

If you want "emoji autocomplete" in any app (and use macOS) you can give Rocket a try.

It is beyond me, that Rocket doesn't seem to follow the official names of the CLDR though.

Do emoji names improve accessibility?

Emoji names definitely increase discovery, improving their accessibility as a consequence.

Emojis are Unicode symbols and their CLDR names are how they are referred to by any software, including screen readers. At first glance, this appears to be an accessibility feature out of the box, but don't get your hopes up.

I have learned that blind users aren't especially fond of reading emoji names and the following example helps to demonstrate this.

This is how my website introduces screen reader users on my home page:

Hi, I'm Niq (Victory Hand). I'm a Vienna-based User Experience Designer with a burning passion for Accessibility. (Sparkles)

It gets worse if you navigate to my privacy page.

Privacy. No tracking, no selling of data, no bullshit (pile of poo)

That's why I decided to hide emojis for screen readers on my website using aria-hidden="true". Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to introduce MDX on my website, so in blog posts emojis will still be read out to screen readers (coming soon).

Getting started with emoji names

If you want to get started with emoji names, here are the top 10 emojis from 2021 according to Unicode with their respective names:

1. 😂 Face with tears of joy
2. ❤️ Red heart
3. 🤣 Rolling on the floor laughing
4. 👍 Thumbs up
5. 😭 Loudly crying face
6. 🙏 Folded hands
7. 😘 Face blowing a kiss
8. 🥰 Smiling face with hearts
9. 😍 Smiling face with heart eyes
10. 😊 Smiling face with smiling eyes

If you are curious about exploring the CLDR yourself, you can download the most recent CLDR Release. There is also an explanation of how the repository is organized.

Emoji data can be found in the "annotations" folder.

You might as well learn a new word by browsing through the depths of the emojiverse 🦘.

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Two years ago, I developed a habit of working out in the morning. Three times a week, I got up from bed, drank a cup of coffee and went outside for a 30 minute work-out in the park. The same year, I developed another habit of playing basketball in my lunch breaks. At 12 o'clock sharp, I closed my laptop, put on my sports wear and went outside to play 30 minutes of basketball.

This year, I developed yet another habit. Every other Friday, I publish a new blog post. When I started this blog I set one thing straight from the get-go: I need a regular publishing interval. I know myself too well that otherwise I would kick my newly acquired habit.

With this blog post, I'm late. I'm late because I've been lazy. Ouch.

Laziness can be one of the greatest things in life. Lying around on the sofa. Watching stupid sitcoms. Playing video games. Doing nothing. That's the stuff.

It's not so great however, if there are things you should do instead. I should work out. I should write that darn blog post. There are so many things I should do!

But what's the use? We are all lazy from time to time. It's part of life and there are two ways to deal with it: Feel bad about it or feel great about it. Next time you're lazy, make the right decision.

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We've had our family computer as long as I can think. I remember an egg-white computer screen with a keyboard and mouse in matching color. I remember generations of Windows in our living room. Windows 95 followed by Windows 98. Eventually came Windows XP, my very own debut in terms of personal computing.

I remember games. The Incredible Machine, Aladdin, Pinball. My dad loved pinball. Starball was pure magic. My dad, brother and I took turns, playing that wonderful game for hours. Another gem was Tony & Friends in Kellogg's Land. A neat platform game that finally allowed the world to play with our favorite Kellogg's characters. You know, the ones from the breakfast cereal boxes. What truly amazed me as a kid was that it came packaged as a goodie in my cornflakes. On a red floppy disk. Yes, red! I will never forget that.

I remember the internet. That dial-up sound when you made the connection. The waiting. And whenever my dad and I were "surfin' the web" the phone line was blocked and my mum couldn't use it. "Is it gonna take much longer?" I can remember my mum shouting. You really had to enjoy the early internet.

And I remember aforementioned monumental decision of my dad. That one day, he sat me down in front of the PC. He created a folder and called it "Nicolas". Yes, my very own folder. Then, he made a welcoming gesture and happily proclaimed "Go crazy."

The wait is over. The world is yours.

Intro to personal computing

When my dad handed the torch over to me, it gave me a feeling of maturity. It was a first glance at adolescence.

When it came to actually using the PC, I just did what felt right. I tried everything. What does this system setting do? What happens when I click on that button? How about activating that control?

Every day, when I returned from school, I turned on the PC. Every day, I explored. Within the first month I managed to try out every single program that came pre-installed with Windows XP. Windows Audio Recorder, Notepad, File Explorer, Windows Movie Maker, CMD, you name it. Within the second month I checked out every single setting in the Control Panel.

I had to try everything.

Tools

If you are 12 years old, Microsoft Office is really lame. These were tools for people working in an office.

Nevertheless, I became quite fond of Microsoft PowerPoint. As you can imagine, I didn't use it to build presentations for business executives though. I used it to create comics. Stories of characters I've made up that go on little adventures. At some point I even tried using PowerPoint to create little computer games. Of course, that didn't work so well.

The beginning of the 2000s also marked the time when I developed a taste for music. After my Euro dance phase that was inescapable as a kid growing up in the 90s, I became obsessed with hip hop music.

So obsessed, that I became a collector. As these were the times of the MP3 and I was a digital native, my collection was mostly digital. I ripped every single CD I bought and complemented my library using file sharing applications such as Kazaa.

I created mix tapes for my friends using Nero Burning ROM and spent hours on online forums, blocking the phone line so that I could inform myself about my favorite artists.

On the weekends, I spent even more time on the PC, caring for my music library. I had to tag all the ripped MP3s so that artist names, track titles and album titles were correctly identified by media players. Somehow this activity gave me a lot of comfort.

When Windows Media Player didn't live up to my user needs anymore, I tried Winamp for a while, but soon realized, it wasn't for me. At some point I discovered Media Monkey, my favorite media player of the time.

If you are curious about the Windows XP experience, you should check out Reborn XP, a Windows XP simulator in your web browser.

Call IT Support

Dealing with a computer also meant playing admin. Installing software, uninstalling software, getting rid of computer viruses and malware, reinstalling Windows. You wouldn't want to know how many times I have reinstalled Windows in my life.

By the mid-2000s I had become so proficient with the PC, that I fixed all of my dad's IT trouble. He must have been very happy that he had created that folder for me.

Word got around and I became the official IT support for my aunts, neighbors, friends, friends of friends.

To this day, I love fixing IT problems. What is the issue? What are you trying to achieve? What error message do you get? It's like playing detective.

I can let you in on a little secret: 90% of the world's IT problems can be fixed by turning the computer off and on again. At least that's always a good start.

User Story

A while ago my dad had yet another IT problem and asked for my help. When I came to help him, I followed my usual routine: I did whatever felt right to fix the problem. It's the same strategy that I developed back in the very beginning of my user story. My dad watched me do my thing and looked at me in awe. "You are playing the computer keyboard like a jazz musician playing their piano" he said.

I think my dad is really jealous of my gift. And yet, I owe it all to him.

Thank you dad.

Reply by email

Well, technically, it's a link that looks like a button (and does buttony things). But let's not get carried away with semantics.

Engagement

After running this blog for 4 months, I have realized it is missing one thing. Engagement.

Shout-out to all the great people who responded in any way to my blog so far. I appreciate all the LinkedIn comments, Mastodon replies or in person feedback. Keep it coming. But there has to be a more direct way for readers to reach out.

For a brief moment I have considered that my blog needs comments. For another brief moment I have considered that it requires something even more sophisticated: webmentions. But in both of these brief moments I tried to remind myself of my minimal viable product (MVP) mindset. Eventually I might get around to implement the most sophisticated way for my readers to reach out. But the time is not ripe.

Most of the feedback I've received was from co-workers in the offline world and I wanted to introduce an accessible way to increase engagement with my readers. Then I reminded myself of possibly the most thoughtful way of online communication: email.

Email? Really?

Yes, really.

You might have the following associations with email:

• These annoying messages that live in Outlook, which you usually check at the beginning of your work day and which usually mean (more) work for you.
• These other annoying messages you get by automated systems whenever you sign up for an online account or when you forget your password.
• These different annoying messages you get by Nigerian princes that announce to you that they have a huge fortune to share with you, since you are their only heir. Wait, is that still a thing?

While all of these associations with email are valid, there are also benefits that come with it.

Non-instant

Nowadays, thanks to our short-attention society, we expect everything that's digital to happen without interruption. Instant messaging is a prime example (hence its name). Apps like WhatsApp or MS Teams are designed to convey this immediacy. We see typing indicators when others are writing a message. We see indicators when others have opened our messages. The whole point of instant messaging is to have a real-time conversation with someone.

Email on the other hand is non-instant. Delays are expected. There's no pressure to respond right away. As a consequence I get the feeling that emails tend to be written with a more thoughtful and dedicated mindset.

Self-contained

Conversations with instant messengers also seem to have no definite beginning or ending. Sometimes conversations appear to be going on forever.

Email messages are so much closer to its analog counterpart, the letter. They are self-contained messages that come closer to a letter-like structure of greeting, main content and closing.

Universal

You can't send a message from WhatsApp to your friend who's using Signal. With so many instant messengers nowadays, you might end up with a shitload of messaging apps on your phone.

Not so with email. The protocols used by email allow for interoperability. Gmail users can communicate with Fastmail users or any other email provider. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a universal protocol used by all email providers and which makes the magic happen.

Personal

Oh yeah, and did I mention personal? Back when I built my about page, I found inspiration in the task by reading The Importance of an About Page by Kev Quirk, a fellow blogger. I responded to his blog post to let him know how much it helped me. We ended up having an email conversation about accessibility, fonts, and you guessed it: a reply by email button. Kev told me, how introducing the feature increased engagement with his blog.

After our pleasant, personal conversation I finally took his advice. He also wrote a post about Online conversations & website engagement that actually convinced me even more that my killer feature is indeed killer. Thanks, Kev.

A reply by email button

Two weeks ago, I have received my first email from a reader. Unprompted! There wasn't a reply by email button yet. I haven't written this blog post about reader engagement yet.

Still, someone was thoughtful and dedicated enough to reach out to me. And that felt really nice.

I will now leave you with this great new feature that I have conveniently placed at the end of all of my blog posts.

Do as you please!

Reply by email

This post is part of the series Reply by email

Still, I loved it. Every day, when I returned home from school, I turned on my computer to check my website. Did anyone leave a guest book entry? What about them visitor numbers? Like I said, this was all you could do.

Blissful

I don’t even know why anyone would have left a guest book entry. The only people that knew about the site in the first place were my friends. They could have just written me on MSN, ICQ or any of the other hip messaging tools of the day (SMS was also big). But these were the early 2000s, so writing an online guest book entry was probably the coolest way to send a message!

Obviously, my visitor numbers kept rising. Mostly of course, because I myself was visiting my own site several times a day. But that was beyond the point. They were rising.

No matter how useless it was. It was my own personal website. I had my own domain! I built it myself with a Content Management System that was the shit back then (Joomla!). At least I thought it was the shit.

Nothing compares to looking at what you've built and thinking to yourself "I made this". Pure bliss.

The darkest day of my first website (literally)

One day I returned from school to follow my usual routine of checking my guestbook and visitor numbers. I turned on my computer. I opened my browser. I entered my domain name into my browser’s address bar. I expected to see my beautiful, very retro web design but saw something else. The background color of my website had been changed to the darkest black imaginable. The link to my guest book was gone. The visitor statistics were removed. An ominous music started playing in the background.

This might sound like I'm narrating a movie plot when all of a sudden this music sets in and I realize that my dreams have been shattered. But I mean this literally. When I opened my website, this weird music started playing.

I got hacked

In the center of the website was an image of a little devil in cartoon style. It had a horrible smirk on its face that seemed to say “I got you”. The little devil was sitting on a headline that simply said “Hacked”, followed by a text saying “L3oN Was HerE” in mixed casing. Below that was a paragraph of a language I couldn’t identify, again in mixed casing.

After the paragraph was a small icon of a crown, followed by what seemed to be the name of my hacker. They were even polite enough to leave their email address. Maybe they were thinking I could reach out, in case I wasn’t happy with their services of hacking my precious website. All the text that the hacker left, was in mixed casing. What’s up with that? I remember it was a common theme among conspiracy theorists in the days of COVID-19.

Seems like hackers of the 2000s were into it too.

Accessibility audit of my hacker’s web design

Ok, I figured why not make a little accessibility audit of the website that this hacker designed for me and replaced my personal website with? If you want to follow along my observations, feel free to visit the only snapshot of my website on The Wayback Machine.

Unfortunately there’s no way to find out what my website looked like in the good days, before it was hacked. No way to glance one last time into my lovely little guestbook.

In case you believe that such a plain and simple website with an image and a bit of text should be accessible out of the box, you’re wrong. So very wrong.

Page Language

Judging from the page’s title “OwnZ By L3oN”, the text of the image and the paragraphs I would believe that the default language of the website should be in English.

They could have set the language properly which helps screen readers pick the correct language setting.

<html lang=”en”>

There’s one paragraph that is written in another language. I figured out it’s Turkish. This part needs to be marked up accordingly so that screen readers can switch their language settings.

<b lang=”tr”> MilleTin DERdi BEN BEn OLMUşUM DEmekkİ ZAmaNıNDA İYi KOYmuŞUm</b>

Text readability

In general the white text on the black background has a high contrast and is very readable. Nice.

Text readability really suffers though because of the mixed casing. That could be further improved.

<b>Milletin derdi ben ben olmuşum demekki̇ zamanında i̇yi koymuşum</b>

Image alt texts

The website used 2 images, none of which had alternative text present. Depending on screen reader, the image would either be announced as "image" without further information or its filename would be read out.

Let's start with the little devil sitting comfortably on the "Hacked" headline. When I focus the image with my screen reader it just reads "unssstitled1cn1.jpg". Not very descriptive.

Here is my improved version:

<img src="media/unssstitled1cn1.jpg" alt="The word hacked in upper case letters with a little red cartoon-style devil sitting on the letter C">

Another image has been used. It appears next to what seems to be the signature of the hacker. It's a little crown icon. My screen reader just reads "tacgt3.png". This icon is only decorative and doesn't really convey any meaning. Using an empty alt tag on the image, this icon will just be ignored for screen readers.

<img src="media/tacgt3.png" alt="">

Title

Let's now look at the title of the page. What is it about? Right now it only says "OwnZ By L3oN". I think I could have better identified what has happened to my website if the title had been clearer.

After all, this is the name of the browser tab.

<title>Your domain was owned by L3oN</title>

Landmarks

Apart from that, the website doesn't really have any landmarks. There isn't a lot of content, but still I believe that landmarks could make the whole experience a bit more charming. If we added at least a main landmark that wraps around the entire content, screen reader users would be able to skip to the beginning of the content, in case they want to read it again.

<main>
    <img ...>
    <p>L3oN was here</p>
    ...
</main>

We can add even more landmarks. The signature of the hacker could easily be put into a <footer> element, and the music controls could also be its own thing. As they don't relate to the main content, I would put them into an <aside>.

Horizontal line

Following the first text "L3oN was here" is a horizontal line in green that is supposed to be a stylistic element. They actually implemented this line by inserting several underscore elements. My screen reader actually reads them as "underscore, underscore, underscore". Using the <hr> element seems tempting. This element has been historically used to insert a horizontal line, these days it actually has semantic meaning.

According to the MDN Web Docs on hr it can be used as a "thematic break". Let's face it, the hacker wasn't really creative when it comes to content. They only meant to say "I was here, hacking your website", added some drama to the scene using this spooky piece of music, added a quote and left with their email address.

So theoretically, the horizontal line is a thematic break. They wanted to compliment their message with a nice quote. It doesn't relate to the actual content, so I think it's quite suitable here.

Table-based layout

I noticed that the whole content was wrapped in a table. Tables were a quite popular layout technique of the early web. Semantically though this hurts.

So get rid of all the tables when it comes to layout!

Audio

What really annoyed me when I first witnessed the hack was the music that started playing without my consent. That's definitely a bad practice! There is no way to stop the music. Audio controls can really improve the experience.

<audio> elements can be wrapped within <figure> elements to represent "self-contained content". A fallback for browser that don't support the <audio> element is also quite convenient. Thanks again, MDN Web Docs on audio.

<figure>
    <figcaption>Play ominous music</figcaption>
        <audio controls="" src="media/ghost-town-dark-melody-loop.wav">
            <a href="media/ghost-town-dark-melody-loop.wav">Download ominous music</a>
        </audio>
</figure>

Accessible hacking

I really regret that I haven't reached out to the hacker back then. Today I would ask them "why?". Why did you have to do that? I loved that website. Sometimes I like to tell myself that this traumatic experience is the reason why it took me almost two decades to build another personal website.

Unfortunately, the email address doesn't work anymore, so I can't reach out to interview them.

If you want to check out the accessible version of the hack I have built while writing this blog post, feel free. If you want to make it even more accessible you can contribute on Github. Especially, since I'm a real CSS noob.

Someone hacking your website could at least have the decency of making their hack as accessible as possible. But hackers probably have more important things to do...

Reply by email

With the declining light of day it slowly crept into my life. Unannounced, it appeared on my living room wall: a strip of bright light.

This is not normal. What is this? Why is it here? I started to investigate. It came from outside and I noticed that the mirror in my room absorbed some source of bright light. It reflected that light and projected it onto my living room wall. I stepped out of my balcony door to investigate further.

My flat is situated on the fifth floor and it connects to a huge inner yard that is shared with several neighboring houses. One side of my modest 5 square feet balcony is protected by a wall. Once I stepped out onto the balcony I noticed that the whole wall was illuminated by some incredibly bright light.

I looked towards the source of that light. One of the other balconies (or you might even call it a terrace) had their lighting on.

The brightest light of the night

Imagine what it must feel like to look directly into the sun after spending a week in a cave. I'm not complaining about someone putting their terrace light on at night. I'm complaining about someone turning a flood light on, that could potentially illuminate a soccer stadium. Except it was illuminating my flat.

The brightness of this light was swallowing the beautiful sparkle of the night sky. It wasn't just built to illuminate a terrace, it was built to glare anyone looking towards it. I had high hopes though that the good people from across the yard would go to bed and turn off their blinding light eventually.

I haven't been so wrong in a while.

The next night

As you might have guessed, they didn't turn their light off that night. When I came home from work the following night I was faced with the same strip of light on my living room wall. The same light illuminating my balcony.

I felt frustrated and I didn't know how to deal with the situation. So at first I tried to ignore it. At least the light didn't reach my bedroom. Soon they will notice, I told myself.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed

When the third night came and the light was still shining bright, I started asking myself why. Why would someone keep their terrace light on. Why would someone pollute the night sky with light like that? It wasn't disturbing me directly, it was rather a matter of principle.

That night I realized that the situation wouldn't change without my interference. I decided to do something about it. I used Apple Maps to locate the potential entrance to my neighboring building. I went over to the house and started ringing door bells. Someone buzzed me in and I was ready to face my neighbor that has been annoying me for the past nights. Only, they didn't open their door after I rang.

It took another four nights before the light was eventually turned off. I figure they must have gone on vacation and forgot to turn their lovely terrace light off. What a week it was.

What this means for the web

Obviously, this isn't just a story about bright terrace lights and annoying neighbors. It turned out to be a perfect metaphor for how we like to view our user interfaces at nightfall.

Dark mode to the rescue

Ever since I started writing my blog in June of this year, my website has had a light theme. This week of eternal brightness made me realize how glaring my website must have looked to anyone reading my blog in low light. Let's change to a dark theme, right?

A dark theme is great, it doesn't necessarily improve accessibility though.

Light theme

In several studies outlined in this Nielsen-Norman article about dark mode vs. light mode we learn about the positive impact of a light theme in several areas as opposed to a dark theme.

A light theme for people with normal vision or corrected-to-normal vision performs better when it comes to:

• Visual acuity. Small details are recognized with more precision.
• Proofreading ability. The ability to detect errors in a text.
• Text readability. Text remains readable even when font size decreases.
• Glanceable reading. The quick reading of a couple of words and extracting relevant information.

Dark theme

A dark theme on the other hand has positive impacts for the following people:

• People with low vision such as cataract because dark themes emit less light.
• People with sensitivity to light (photophobia), caused by neurological problems (such as migraine) or eye diseases.
• People viewing screens in low light.
• People who like to save their device's battery life (Yes! It does that too!).

User preferences

Observant readers of my blog might have noticed that I did change my website's design to a dark theme. As we have learnt, forcing a theme, no matter if it's dark or light isn't gonna satisfy all users and won't provide the most accessible experience.

The most accessible experience will allow users to pick a theme that suits their individual needs. I'm not quite there yet but I plan to have a proper dark mode in the near future, so that users can choose between a light or a dark mode, depending on their preferences.

I wanted to try out a dark theme anyways, to see what it might look like, but this isn't the final solution. Going even further, it is possible to determine what mode users prefer, depending on the settings in their operating system. CSS offers a media feature called prefers-color-scheme that can be used to do just that.

There are other CSS media features out there that can consider even more user preferences. The prefers-reduced-motion feature can detect operating system settings that relate to any form of motion in user interfaces. CSS can detect preferences with regards to contrast, colors or even data usage but some of these features are still very experimental and aren't yet supported by many browsers.

Good night

Dear annoying neighbors from across the yard. I dedicate this article to you and I hope you understand that not everyone enjoys the glaring light theme you have going on over there during nighttime. Let's turn the lights off for now. 🌝

Reply by email

Everything you copy ends up in your clipboard. It doesn't just stay there until you paste it somewhere again. It stays there until you copy again. But that's too bad. Personally, I consider the stuff I copy quite important. I might need it later.

I might copy a video of video game Harry Potter getting slapped across the face and send it to a co-worker. Next, I copy a highly official, work-related text™, replacing my clipboard content. But then there's this other co-worker that needs to see Harry Potter getting slapped by Dolores Umbridge. Let's return to that video and copy again. What a life!

That's life without a clipboard manager. By the way, I'm 0% sorry about featuring that Harry Potter video in this blog post. It's hilarious!

What's a clipboard manager?

Clipboard managers offer you the convenience of saving a history of so called "clippings". Clippings are elements you have copied using ctrl + C (⌘ + C on a Mac) or the context menu. This includes text and even images and files, depending on the tool you use. Clipboard managers run in the background of your operating system and are usually summoned using a specific keyboard shortcut. The goal of clipboard managers is to extend you clipboard volume from just one item to many items and paste content you have copied in the past. They aim to increase your efficiency when working on your computer and avoid having to copy elements several times.

All major operating systems offer clipboard managers. This blog post could be the beginning of your personal clipboard manager history (pun intended).

macOS

My default work station is a Macbook and I'm using Pastebot. I defined a global shortcut to access my clipboard at all times. In my case it's ⌘ + Ö so it doesn't get in the way of App-specific shortcuts.

It's pretty powerful:

• Sequential pasting offers me to paste clippings in an order I define. When I work on designs in Figma for example, I might copy a couple of text elements and paste them in a specific order afterwards.
• Custom pasteboards allow me to define clippings that I always want to have handy. Maybe I would like to have that Harry Potter video sitting in my clipboard, ready to be used. Just in case.
• With iCloud sync I can copy content from my iPhone and paste it on my Mac and the other way around.

I have also used Maccy, which has similar features, but I have been stuck with Pastebot, ever since I discovered it.

Windows

Windows has a native clipboard manager, no extra software required. Just press the Windows Key + V to open your clipboard.

It's quite basic, but it does the job:

• History of the last 25 clippings
• Pin clippings that you want to keep in your clipboard
• Sync your clipboard history with other Windows devices (maybe this feature makes sense if you use Windows on your work & private laptop and use the same Microsoft Account?)

My favorite clipboard manager on Windows is Ditto. It's a minimalistic application that runs in your systray and works flawlessly.

Linux

My Linux desktop days are long gone 🥲. I wouldn't feel right recommending a clipboard manager I haven't tried, but if I get the chance to do so I will update this blog post with a recommendation.

Life without a clipboard manager

Living such a life is possible, but it's not very efficient. It's up to you, but I can promise you that once you understand the true magic of using a clipboard manager, you'll never look back.

Reply by email

This was the old me. I have learnt from my mistakes. Today, I label my spices and groceries. Life has taught me one too many times that cooking can go terribly wrong if you don't.

You know what else goes terrible wrong if you refrain from using labels? Exactly, using the web (this sounds like a joke but I'm actually serious).

What's a label?

Regular readers of my blog know how much I love breaking things down by starting with definitions. Dear Cambridge Dictionary, what's the definition of a label?

A piece of paper or other material that gives you information about the object it is attached to.

I'm sure you remember that my blog is not about cooking (at least not yet). Since we are talking about a web context here, we can easily use this definition and apply it to user interface (UI) design.

Labels are used as captions for elements in a UI. In general, everyone will have a better understanding of a UI if elements have names.

What are things that we can label in a UI you might ask?

• Pages of a website
• Links
• Buttons
• Form controls
• Tables
• Landmarks
• etc.

Let us start labelling.

Accessible names

When we consider the design of any website, we will find that labelling UI elements usually benefits all of us.

• Wikipedia shows a table of contents for any page and labels them as "Contents"
• Spotify's web app has a menu with 3 items, each with an icon and a label for "Home", "Search" and "Your Library"
• BBC's website shows a "Sign In" label next to an icon showing the popular avatar icon for their login area

Sometimes UX designers use icons to communicate meaning. Popular examples are icons such as a hamburger (3 horizontal lines on top of each other) for menus, a magnifying glass for search buttons or a funnel for filter buttons.

All of the above is fine, if elements have accessible names. Allow me to quote from W3C's documentation:

The accessible name is the name of a user interface element. Each platform accessibility API provides the accessible name property. The value of the accessible name may be derived from a visible (e.g., the visible text on a button) or invisible (e.g., the text alternative that describes an icon) property of the user interface element.

Let us keep that in mind and look at individual parts of a UI.

Pages of a website

Page titles act as a summary of what users can expect to find on a page. What is the content about? What can users do here? Is it a product detail page? Is it the shopping cart? A common pattern is to use the summary of the current page, combined with a delimiter (such as a slash or vertical line) and the name of the website.

If my grandma was still alive today, she would probably share her secret cooking recipes with the world on her blog "Grandma Maria's secret recipes".

<title>Best mashed potatoes ever | Grandma Maria's secret recipes</title>

Proper page titles are essential for accessibility. They support navigation for screen reader users (and tab hoarders) and make content more understandable.

Links

Hyperlinks are good examples for UI elements that usually always have a visible label.

<a href="mashed-potato.html">Recipe for best mashed potatoes ever</a>

In this example, the accessible name of the Hyperlink is "Recipe for best mashed potatoes ever". Screen reader users and Non-screen users alike will be able to perceive the link and will be happy to finally taste Grandma's best dish.

Buttons

Buttons are similar to hyperlinks. In many cases their label is visible, but sometimes an icon is used to communicate a button's function.

Visible labels

A traditional button uses a visible label and the same logic applies as with Hyperlinks.

<button type="button">Sign up for Grandma's newsletter</button>

The accessible name in this example is "Sign up for Grandma's newsletter". Hooray!

Invisible labels

Now imagine that my hypothetical grandma decides to use an email icon for her hypothetical newsletter sign up. And she's using a cool SVG for that.

<button type="button">
    <svg>...</svg>
</button>

Listen, grandma. That's cool, but what is the accessible name of our button? It's empty. In this scenario, screen reader users will not be able to perceive what the button does because it doesn't have a label.

Don't you worry, ARIA comes to the rescue. Using the aria-label attribute, we can provide an accessible name for the button.

<button type="button" aria-label="Sign up for Grandma's newsletter">
    <svg>...</svg>
</button>

Now, we are back to our accessible name "Sign up for Grandma's newsletter", that will now be exposed to assistive technology like screen readers.

Form controls

If form controls are not associated with labels, they don't have accessible names. As a consequence, screen readers will fail to identify their purpose. Luckily, grandma is aware of this and includes this in her newsletter sign up.

<label for="email">Email address</label>
<input type="email" id="email" name="email">

The accessible name for the text field will be "Email address". All screen readers offer a menu, that conveniently shows the name of all form controls. By the way, I dedicated a whole blog post to web forms, in case you want to learn more about accessible web forms.

Tables

Tables offer different ways to label them. A common method is to use the <caption> element, that has been designed specifically for this purpose.

<table>
    <caption>Grandma's best recipes</caption>
...
</table>

The accessible name of the table is "Grandma's best recipes". With this method, an actual text element gets rendered that gets associated with the table.

Another option is to use an aria-label instead of the <caption> element. But grandma might even already have a heading in place that shows a visible label what her table is about.

<h2 id="heading">Grandma's best recipes</h2>
<table aria-labelledby="heading">
...
</table>

In this example, we can simply reuse the name of an already existing element on the website. The table is referring to an HTML ID, that was used before and as a consequence, the table's accessible name is yet again "Grandma's best recipes".

Table names are also shown in screen reader menus, just like form controls.

Landmarks

Last but not least, let's consider landmarks. Landmarks tremendously improve the semantics of any website, by exposing their function to assistive technology. They enable screen reader users to quickly jump between individual parts of a website.

The most common landmarks are the following:

• <header> typically for the logo and navigational menu
• <main> for the main content
• <footer> for general information such as privacy or copyright information
• <nav> for site navigation

Since almost every website out there uses these parts, in many cases it suffices to use the above landmarks without labelling them. However, there are exceptions. It is very common for instance, that both the header and the footer of a website use links for navigation.

Guess what, grandma's website is a prime example for a header & footer navigation, so she is advised to label both of them.

<header>
    <nav aria-label="main">
        <ul>
            <li>Recipes</li>
            ...
        </ul>
    </nav>
</header>

If grandma also labels her footer navigation in the same way (e.g. with the label "footer"), screen reader users will be able to distinguish between the two navigational landmarks. Keep up the good work, granny!

Pull out your label makers

After my initial culinary excursion you will understand that my cooking fiascos wouldn't have happened if I had done proper labelling.

Also, the web would be a better place if we all acknowledged that assistive technology and screen reader users are relying on labels. If we don't use them, users will be excluded as they won't be able to perceive the content they are supposed to interact with.

Let's pull out our label makers and label the web. 😎

This post is dedicated to my grandma. She passed away in 2003 and I loved her dearly. She made the best mashed potatoes in the world, but I'm sure you already know that. 👵🏻❤️

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This post is part of the series Labelling the Web

Defining doors

This blog post is very fundamental and serves as a metaphor for accessible design. So before we begin, I would like to take a step back and talk about definitions.

Let's use Merriam Websters' definition of a door to get started.

a usually swinging or sliding barrier by which an entry is closed and opened

Ok, let us keep in mind that doors are defined as "barriers" and look at another definition. I found a Quora thread about the importance of doors and Quora's AI bot, "Sage" came up with a nice explanation about why we need doors in human life:

Doors are an important aspect of human architecture, as they provide security, privacy, and protection from the elements. They are also used to control the flow of people and air in and out of a space. They are still necessary in modern times, as they continue to serve these functions. Additionally, doors also play a role in energy efficiency, as they can help to keep a building insulated. Overall, doors are an essential part of human architecture and continue to be necessary in modern times.

Awesome. None of this might be a surprise to you. I just wanted to get a few things out of the way before we dig into the design part.

Designing doors

Doors are objects that are so universal to human life that we hardly ever consider that there are actually people who design them. Everyone of us is using doors and everyone of us has been in situations where a door didn't work the way we expected. Some doors need to be pushed open, other doors need to be pulled open, sometimes doors even need to be slid open. Some doors need to be opened on the right side, others on the left. Doors can be very confusing.

Now why should you care? What's all this talk about doors? Wasn't this blog supposed to be about UX Design & Web Accessibility? We'll get there 🙂

Every aspiring UX Design student will at one point or another learn about Don Norman, an absolute legend in the field. After all, he is the person who established the term "user experience" because he wanted "to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual". In his book, "The Design of Everyday Things" he talks about the foundation of product design as well as his personal experience with using doors.

Norman doors

Don Norman's stories about unusable doors became so popular that a new term about problematic doors came to be: "Norman doors". His stories about confusing doors were relatable enough that he used them to teach us about design.

He states two fundamental principles about good product design:

1. Discoverability: is it possible to figure out which actions are possible and how to use them?
2. Understanding: what is the product all about? what do all the different controls mean?

Doors often fail to accomplish the principle of discoverability. Relevant components that are required to use doors need to be evident and communicate the appropriate message. Which actions are possible?

What could be the suitable message that communicates a door needs to be pushed open? A vertical plate on the side of the door could signal to the user that pushing is required. No other actions seem possible, so pushing on the plate would be the logical thing to do.

Accessible doors

Generations of product designers, interaction designers, industrial designers and UX designers have shaped their craft by studying Don Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things". The principles of discoverability & understanding apply to everything we design, no matter if it's doors, coffee mugs, microwaves or checkboxes in a web form.

But we haven't talked about the elephant in the room yet, the reason you probably started to read this blog post in the first place: accessibility. You might wonder, don't all doors need to be accessible for them to be classified as doors? It is true, the primary purpose of doors is to enable access. But what I am referring to here is accessible design. Design that works for everyone of us, no matter the abilities, no matter the circumstances.

Think about how all the badly designed doors of today affect our lives. We might bump into doors that need to be pulled when we expect them to be pushed. We might get trapped in revolving doors. We might take a while to figure out how to use a certain door and slightly embarrass ourselves, even though we should never take the blame, we should blame bad design. But overall: we will be fine, right?

The truth is, bad design affects all of us. Able-bodied people will usually figure out one way or another how to cope with bad design. It might take them longer than if they were exposed to good design. But they will manage. Disabled people however, usually won't.

At this point, I would like to quote my fellow co-worker, Tomas Caspers who likes to say the following (linked article only available in German):

"Disability is the inability to deal with bad design."

Now, imagine if all the door designers in the world got together at the world door design conference (I would love if that was actually a thing). Imagine that they would all agree on Norman's principles of product design and redesign all the doors in the world and as a consequence dispose of all Norman doors. That would make the world a better place, right?

It would, if they included as many people as possible with diverse abilities in the design process. If we manage to create accessible doors, we can create a world that doesn't just work for able-bodied people. We can create a world that also works for people with permanent disabilities, people with temporary disabilities and people with situational disabilities.

Here is a list of door users who would benefit e.g. from automatic doors that are equipped with motion detectors:

• a person in a wheelchair
• a person pushing a baby stroller
• a person with a lot of luggage
• a delivery person who has their hands full
• a person with crutches
• a person with a bike
• a blind person
• ...

It's obvious that designing accessible doors improve's everyone's experience.

Allow me to provide similar examples for accessible design in the web context:

• subtitles support auditory-impaired people but also people trying to watch a video in the subway with a lot of background noise
• tables of contents support blind people or people with cognitive disabilities with navigation but also help others who want to get a quick overview of a long article
• keyboard accessibility supports people who have troubles using a mouse but also help users who have one arm in a cast
• easy language supports people with cognitive disabilities but also people who aren't native speakers and overall the general audience, because everyone loves easy language
• ...

If you want equal access for everyone, it's high time to design accessible doors. I hope the message comes across: I don't plan to change professions and become a door designer.

This amazing metaphor of using doors to explain accessible design can help shift people's mindsets. Norman doors helped us to better understand the essentials of product design and learn about usability. I hope to achieve similar results by complementing his concept and teach people about accessibility.

Let's build accessible doors for everyone! 💖

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Everyone loves web forms

As a UX Designer, I love designing web forms. I love to create clever designs that are not just easy to use but can be accessed by everyone. What I love particulary about designing web forms is that they offer so much room for accessibility & usability tweaks.

People with disabilities rely on designs that consider their unique circumstances. Users with visual impairments such as blindness or cataract can use screen readers to fill in forms. If forms are not accessible, they might not be able to properly perceive input controls and labels. But also people who have a type of color blindness are negatively affected by bad form design that only uses color to communicate errors. People affected by the most common form of color blindness (red-green) are not able to distinguish between reds, oranges and greens. Now guess which color is mostly used to indicate errors in forms?

While I love forms and I can acknowledge that I diverge from the norm, the average population of the internet tends to hate web forms. A personal history of bad form design have done its part for users to avoid forms at all costs.

Are you familiar with forms such as this?

• forms that are excruciatingly long
• forms that ask you to open a dropdown list to answer a yes/no question
• forms with input fields that use placeholder text instead of labels, so you might forget the data you have to enter in the second you start typing
• forms that show validation errors while you are in the middle of entering data, e.g. input fields that ask you to enter an email address
• forms that crash, respond with a generic error ("an error occured") and ask you to enter all your input AGAIN

I understand the frustration that people have with web forms. I have them too. But my job allows me to fix everything that's wrong with forms.

I'm sure I can make you love web forms too (especially if you are a designer or developer). Just read on if you want me to try.

Use expressive labels & easy language

To begin with, using expressive labels for input fields increases the form's readability. This way, users are able to quickly scan and understand the form. Users shouldn‘t have to think about what is being asked of them. Instead, use labels that are brief and to the point, written in the user's language, not in officialese.

In forms, the <label> element is used to label input elements.

<label>First name</label>

Connect labels and inputs

Next, it is essential that labels are programmatically connected to their corresponding input fields. Input elements need accessible names so that assistive technologies can make sense of them.

The label element can be connected to an input element by referencing on its HTML ID. If there is no connection between these elements, screen readers will not announce the name of the input, but only the type of input (e.g. "edit text" for a text field in the case of macOS's native screen reader VoiceOver).

Use the "for" attribute to connect labels and inputs.

<label for="firstname">First name</label>
<input type="text" id="firstname" name="firstname">

A nice side effect of this connection is an extension of the input’s touch target size. As soon as label and input are connected, a click on the label itself will focus the input. No need to click directly into the input field.

Make input hints accessible

Some inputs require additional information, such as descriptions of the data users need to enter or expected input formats. This information is usually shown below or next to input fields. If you properly associate this description with the respective inputs, screen readers will be informed about this as soon as the input element receives focus. This beaufiul behaviour can be achieved using aria-describedby.

<label for="birthday">Date of birth</label>
<input type="text" id="birthday" name="birthday" aria-describedby="birthday-format">
<p id="birthday-format">DD.MM.YYYY</p>

Avoid placeholder text

We often come across forms that show no labels for input fields but use placeholder text for this purpose.

The problem with placeholder text is that it isn‘t a proper label. It disappears as soon as the user starts typing. In that moment the user might forget what they were supposed to enter. This becomes especially frustrating, when placeholder text is used to show the expected format of an input such as a date format (e.g. DD.MM.YYYY). In order to reveal the placeholder text again, users have to delete their typed input, which is very annoying.

Always show labels for input fields. Don't rely on placeholder text.

Indicate required input fields

In order to distinguish required from optional fields, required fields are often indicated using asterisks. This lets users quickly scan forms for input fields that have to be filled in. In the sense of transparency, it is recommended to display an explanation of this pattern as part of your form (such as "* marks required fields").

Another approach would be to put the word "required” at the end of the label. Optional fields need no such indication.

In order to programmatically convey this information to assistive technology, use the required attribute on the input element. Screenreaders will announce required input fields when they receive focus.

<label for="firstname">First name</label>
<input type="text" id="firstname" name="firstname" required>

Use semantic input types

Did you know that HTML supports 22 different input types? While the most common and most flexible input type is "text”, you should consider the other types for your use case.

Using these specific types can improve the semantics of your form. If you use "number” for example, browsers will display a stepper next to the input. This allows users to easily adjust their numeric input.

<label for="age">Age</label>
<input type="number" id="age" name="age">

Chromium-browsers go as far as restricting user input to numeric values in case that input type is used.

Other types, such as "tel”, automatically show a special keyboard on mobile devices for easier input of numeric values. The same works for type "email”, which shows a keyboard that includes the "@" symbol.

Think about how you can best support users when choosing input types. Using "text" for first and last name is quite obvious. But does entering a birthdate require a date picker?

For dates that users know by heart it might even be frustrating if they have to use a date picker. It is much faster if you allow users to simply put in their birthdates using a regular text input. Of course this will result in more programming logic to validate the entered data.

Is a dropdown list the right input type for a quantity in an ecommerce scenario? I would argue against it, since the user is required to open the control first before selecting a value (one extra click) and the allowed values are hidden behind a control. Type "number" definitely is a better fit.

Make your form keyboard accessible

Talking about semantics: semantic HTML is key to keyboard accessibility (dad joke alert). Users expect that every interactive element in your form can be accessed using the keyboard.

If you refrain from using <div>s you get this behaviour out of the box. Native HTML elements, like <input>, <a> or <button> all have an implicit tabindex attribute. If you really, really, really have to use a <div> then make sure to add it to the tab sequence.

<label for="my-custom-checkbox">Check this out</label>
<div id="my-custom-checkbox" role="checkbox" aria-checked="false" tabindex="0"/>

But of course, this should only be a last resort.

Forms tremendously benefit from keyboard accessibility. Isn‘t tabbing through a form with your keyboard much faster than using a cursor? For me personally, this is the default.

Enforce autocomplete

Just think about how many forms you have filled in in your life. Browsers save previously entered form data for the user’s convenience. If you mark up your form fields with the autocomplete attribute, you can make use of this data.

This can be achieved by indicating the purpose of your input fields to the browser using the autocomplete attribute. If you do, browsers will be able to match your field‘s purpose with the data entered into previous forms.

<form>
    <label for="firstname">First name</label>
    <input type="text" id="firstname" name="firstname" autocomplete="given-name">
</form>

Here are some examples of possible values for the autocomplete attribute:

• given-name
• family-name
• email
• street-address
• country
• bday
• tel
• ...

This will allow users to fill in your form much quicker, since all the user data might have previously been entered in a different form.

Accessible forms for everyone

Now that we have learnt so much, let‘s take another look at the benefits of building accessible web forms:

• Expressive labels
• Increased touch target size of inputs
• Visible labels and input hints at all times
• Quickly distinguish required from optional input fields
• Support users‘ data entry with fitting input types
• Support users‘ data entry with the keyboard
• Support users‘ data entry by using previously filled form data

These are all accessibility features (and there is so much more where that came from!). But I think we can all agree that they not only increase support for assistive technologies.

These feature essentially increase usability and improve everyone’s user experience. And they are the reason why I love web forms. And so should you! ✌️

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This post is part of the series Web Forms for Everyone

Music discovery in the early 2010s

The Hype Machine is a website that collects music by indexing hundreds of music blogs. The platform allows users to discover new and emerging music and follow up on artists. Every track shows a blog posts it was featured in and lets users learn more about the artist. When I joined the Hype Machine in 2013, it was my favorite service to discover new music.

The same year, I signed up for a Spotify account. Back then their music discovery features were in no relation to what we are used to today. Spotify's feature set and user interface was as basic as it gets. As this neat Evolution of the Spotify Apps blog posts demonstrates, the 2012 Spotify App had a "What's New" section, a "People" section to check out what your Facebook friends were listening to and the "Radio" feature which let you play music similar to individual tracks, artists or albums of your choosing. In 2012, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek admitted that "Spotify is great when you know what you want to listen to, but not so good when you don't". A year later they released more features that supported discovery. The "Discover" section showed recommendations based on your listening history and artists you followed. It may come as no surprise that Spotify acquired Tuningo around the same time, a Swedish music recommendation service. It seemed to fit right into the company's "overall strategy around music discovery".

The Hype Machine took a different approach. Ever since its launch in 2005, they offered a "Latest" page, showing the most recent tracks from their indexed blogs and a "Popular" page, showing the most popular tracks amongst its users. Apart from that, a personalized feed offers music from blogs or artists you follow.

Music treasure hunt

I remember that browsing through my feed in the Hype Machine was like finding hidden treasure of a long lost civilization. It created a sense of true discovery, a sense of "I, myself discovered this, before anyone else did". In the bygone days of the tropical house genre that was dominated by artists like Kygo, Sam Feldt or Felix Jaehn I discovered Deep Chills, an underground artist from Italy. He remixed You Got The Love from The Source & Candi Staton with such a charming and relaxing energy that I immediately fell in love with his style. I probably would have never heard of Deep Chills, if it wasn't for the Hype Machine.

The tracks I found on the platform felt like real gems, like this mashup of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories by Vanderway. Apparently it was created with only a 15 second promotional clip of their upcoming album, and its energetic vibes never fails to put a smile on my face. This true sense of discovery was so strong because most of the music wasn't mainstream. It was unreleased, underground music by upcoming artists. Music you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. Music that people wrote about in their blogs, because they cared about the artists.

I discovered other artists on the platform, including The Chainsmokers, an American DJ duo who made a notable impact on the music industry through their remixes. They famously remixed tracks like ASTR's Operate, Smallpool's Dreaming or Two Door Cinema's Sleep Alone, long before their mainstream success with tracks such as #Selfie or Kanye. Artists often undergo changes in their identity after achieving mainstream success, and The Chainsmokers serve as a prime example of this phenomenon. At a certain point, they shifted their focus towards catering to the masses, which is when they lost my support. However, I was once a devoted fan during their underground days in 2013.

It felt like it was me alone who discovered all of this awesome music. And the flow of great music didn't seem to stop. Hype Machine gave me this gold digger feeling unmatched by any other music service.

Spotify's kickass UX

Over the past few years, I have gotten very used to all the convenience features that Spotify offers when it comes to music discovery and on top of that, playlist creation. Sometimes I start to play a single track that represents a certain mood I'm in and add it to a new playlist. If I really like the track, I let the song radio play and add song after song. At some point, I turn on the Enhance feature that adds similar songs which could fit into my playlist. Creating a Spotify playlist in 2023 is a breeze (while discovering new music in the process).

Thanks to the steady improvement of the Spotify experience, I have neglected Hype Machine as my primary source of new emerging music. Very early on, I have noticed how much I love the UX of Spotify and how delightful and easy it became to just lean back and listen to music. From curated playlists such as the "This is..." series that spotlight individual artists, to personalized playlists such as "Discover Weekly", "Release Radar" or Daily Mixes all the way to Wrapped, your personal end of year summary in music. Spotify got you covered. It feels personal, it feels seamless, it feels superior to Hype Machine. At some point in the past, I chose kickass UX over musical treasure hunt.

How Hype Machine let me down

In addition to Spotify's superior user experience, there are several reasons why Hype Machine has become less interesting to me over the years. If I had to pinpoint it to one reason though, then it would be their poorly designed iPhone app. Mobile apps are obviously a big part of any music platform experience these days. I rely on my bike as my primary means of transportation, and listening to music or podcasts while on the move has become second nature to me. As a consequence, I have high expectations when it comes to an uninterrupted mobile experience.

Navigating the app

The app's using a hamburger menu as the primary navigational pattern, which makes it rather cumbersome to use. Navigating between core functionality requires you to open the menu repeatedly, creating a constant need for interaction. Once you play a track, you end up in a fullscreen view of the player. Instead, the track could just start to play in the background and the user flow wouldn't be disrupted.

Features of the app

There is no queue and no actual way to create playlists. At some point in 2014, they introduced a basic playlist feature. However, that feature came with its limitations. Users are limited to a maximum of three playlists, with the restriction of not being able to add a single song to multiple playlists. Also, the playlist labels don't show on mobile. Playlists are only represented by individual colors, which you have to remember. So apart from being hard to use, a reliance on color isn't the most accessible way to design an app.

Streaming issues

If these issues weren't enough, the app is affected by constant troubles with streaming of songs. Sometimes when I skip a song I'm met with silence. Being on my bike I wonder what caused the music to stop. When I pull out my phone to investigate the issue (which is very hard and dangerous while riding a bike) I notice that the song seems to be buffering. That buffering could go on for several seconds (which feels like eternity) or it could mean that the song was removed and can't be played at all.

You might understand my frustration and why I ditched Hype Machine in favor of Spotify.

Business vs. UX

Now, is it a big surprise that Spotify beats Hype Machine in terms of UX? Is it a big surprise that Spotify stands out in music discovery features? According to Billie, Spotify's friendly personal job assistant chatbot (yes, they even have that!) the company has over 6500 employees that build their product. Wanna know how many people work on Hype Machine? Three. Yes, you read that right. Three people: Dave, Zoya and Anthony.

Spotify is a business that has always done its utmost to evolve its user experience but also to maximize its profits. Very recently, Spotify received a fine of 5 million euros for not properly disclosing how they process user data. On the other end of the spectrum Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin says that they "prioritize user experience over agressive ads" when asked whether selling user data ever crossed their minds. This gives a pretty good impression about where Hype Machine's priorities lie. To be exact, that is actually one distinguishing feature that sets them apart from competing streaming services.

Reconnecting with artists

Even if Spotify tries really hard to improve their listener's user experience, I cannot help but to express a feeling of disconnection with the music I have been consuming there lately. The discovery engine just keeps on recommending new music that match my taste profile. Of course, everything revolves around personalization, to make my listening experience as individual as possible.

But I didn't do anything to discover these artists, the whole beauty of the treasure hunt was outsourced to an algorithm. Apart from that, I don't learn anything about the artists and their background, which is something that I have always cherished in the past. These feelings of detachment eventually made me return to Hype Machine.

Anthony Volodkin perfectly summarized what I love about the Hype Machine:

"Hype Machine focuses on surfacing music you don’t know you like yet and presents it with context so you can actively explore more. We index hundreds of sources to create an eclectic stream of new tracks, with links to posts so you can read about what you’re listening to."

He goes on:

"Many services recommend music based on your listening history or similar listening patterns, which limits what you can encounter. There is a place for lean-back discovery too, but we think both listeners and artists benefit from a variety of approaches."

Hype Machine is truly dedicated to a user experience that revolves around getting out of your filter bubble to discover something genuinely new. The service is dedicated to establishing a real connection between their users and the music they consume.

The feeling I get of "true discovery" I described earlier, still holds true, even after a decade of using Hype Machine. Fund the Hype Machine today.

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Why do I want to write?

Are you very knowledgable about a specific topic? Do you have a certain expertise that defines you in your work place? Then you have built a Circle of Competence, a thought pattern used by Warren Buffet in a shareholder letter in 1996. Each of us develops knowledge throughout our lives. There are areas we feel comfortable and knowledgable about and other areas where we admit that we just don't have all the answers yet.

In the last couple of years I have developed a Circle of Competence in the area of web accessibility. Accessible websites can be used by people with diverse abilities. They are optimized for assistive technologies such as screenreaders, screen magnification software or people who rely on keyboard interaction.

Accessibility is a broad subject and it's impossible to know everything about it. Through my work, I have noticed that I have gathered a lot of knowledge in different areas in this broad sphere. I have been able to raise awareness for the importance of the topic and advise co-workers on how to make websites more accessible. Software teams need to be mindful about the challenges people with disabilities face when browsing the web and develop a mindset to make everything they build accessible.

From my experience, my co-workers really love to learn about accessibility. They love to become better at what they do and include more users in the process. I predict that they will also really love my blog (shout-out to my co-workers ✌️).

After reflecting on the why in "why do I want to write", it's quite obvious to me that I am meant to be doing this. Writing a blog allows me to do 3 things:

1. Share my knowledge of accessibility by raising awareness and allowing others to make their websites more accessible
2. Extending my Circle of Competence by teaching myself on a sub-area in the broad accessibility spectrum (e.g. building websites for color-blind people or building accessible web forms)
3. Write about other areas in the spectrum of User Experience Design that I'm enthusiastic about and how software in general has a significant impact on our lives, behaviours, habits and ways of thinking

I'm writing this blog to make others understand user experience design, accessibility and the role design plays in our lives better. As a user experience designer with a decade of experience in the software sphere, these are the topics that move me. These are the topics I'm most passionate about. I'm writing this blog to tell stories and finally: I'm writing this blog to make the world a little better.

I strive to remind myself by coming back to these reasons whenever I feel a lack of motivation.

What's stopping me?

It took me quite a lot of energy to get to this point. How come there have been four blog post attempts before I ended up with this one?

First and foremost: I'm my own worst critic. My high personal standards for my work have stopped me from doing what I always wanted to do. The first time I meant to start my blog was in 2016 on Medium. Back then I wrote a blog post about user feedback that I never ended up publishing. The reason being that I didn't even work as a UX Designer then. In my mind I was in no place to write about the topic with the lack of work experience or proper education in the field. I put off fulfilling my dreams by 7 years, just because I was so hard on myself.

These days, I feel definitely experienced and knowledge enough but find different reasons to procrastinate and put off my writing. Here is my best-of list:

• I don't like doing the research
• My writing is not good enough
• The blog post grows larger than expected

Since you are reading this blog post right now, it proves that I did eventually find strategies to tackle every one of those issues. Let's dig in.

I don't like doing the research

A decent blog posts needs proper research. Why is the topic relevant? Who has been involved in the topic before me and can contribute to my writing? Research is the necessary fuel for many blog posts.

While I believe all of that, I'm really struggling with this part of the writing process. I want to get into the execution part of writing as soon as possible. Sitting down to do boring old research really appears to slow me down. Same goes for my vacation planning by the way. I like the execution part (you know the part where you get to travel, lie on the beach and drink fancy cocktails) but hate the planning part. What to see, what to do, what to eat, how to get around. I hate it.

I think the main reason why I'm not very fond of the research is because it is usually right at the beginning of the process. And we all know how hard it is to start something new.

What has been helping me is just to grin and bear it. Getting rid of all distractions, setting a 25 minute timer and just digging into the topic. That's how I roll. As soon as the timer goes off, I take a short 5 minute break before I indulge in another 25 minute session. After a total of 3-4 sessions I take a longer break. This is what's called the Pomodoro Technique invented by Francesco Cirillo. It has been part of my work flow ever since I discovered it when I was working on my bachelor thesis in 2013. In order to track my sessions, I have been using a little producitivty app called Forest. It lets you plant in-game trees by being productive and working without distractions. After a while, you have created your very own productivity forest.

I've realized that once I'm finally in my work flow, it's hard to stop me.

My writing is not good enough

Another thing I'm very perfectionistic about is my writing style. In my everyday communication I try to be very clear about the messages I send into this world. Naturally, I expect the same from my writing.

Practice makes perfect. So it's asking quite much to expect perfectionism right from the get-go. I have gained some writing expericence over the years. Back in 2018, I started writing a Gratitude Journal. I developed a routine of writing down 3 things that I liked about my day. It might sound tough at first but once I got started, I realized how easy it is to think of just 3 things. Usually my diary entries have up to 5 or 6 things. Small things make the list such as "a warm evening stroll" or "being productive at the library". These entries are a summary of my day and writing them down helps me process what is happening in my life. They help me be more mindful and more connected to myself. Reading these entries even years later allows me to remember individual days and reflect on who I used to be.

A nice way to train your resilience and optimism in life, I can't recommend starting one enough.

Another factor that is giving me a sense of not-good-enough is social media. I feel measured by the high standards that this social media world asks of us. Over the years, I have noticed a tendency on Medium to optimize blog posts to the liking of social media. I'm not arguing that blogs benefit from catchy, shiny names for blog posts or optimizing for readablility. But I'm not writing this blog with the sole purpose to compete in this social media machinery or to promote click bait. I'm creating this blog first and foremost for me.

The blog post grows larger than expected

In my previous four first-blog-post-attempts, I have very soon reached the point where my blog post became larger than planned.

Originally, I really just wanted to announce to the world that I'm writing a blog by writing a blog post about writing a blog post (as one does). But very soon the whole thing escalated. Writing about writing turned into writing about how today's web is flawed and how social media but mostly advertising is responsible for it. And that turned into the whole question of whether blogging can save the web. It would have turned out to be an interesting blog post indeed, but you can imagine how crushed I felt to put all of this into a single blog post.

I have noticed that this concern (does this have a name? it probably should have) affects other writers too. In his blog, Thi clearly distinguishes between a blog post and a note. I can see that Thi asks himself similar questions such as who is his writing for and whether he's fine with providing content that is less polished. He even would accept errors in notes wheras blog posts would potentially contain fewer errors.

I haven't made up my mind entirely, yet I don't see any reasons not to write shorter blog posts every once in a while. What's so bad about it?

How to actually write a blog

Now, that I can clearly see the motivation behind my blog and have also found ways to overcome my obstacles I can simply sit down and write my blog, right? Well, no. Of course not. As soon as I sit down to actually write my blog, I fade out. It's hard to concentrate. It's hard to get started. Starring on a blank white page is killing me. How to overcome this last obstacle?

Cal Newport, associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University might have the solution to this problem. Deep work allows us to create the conditions necessary to commit to our work with sharpened focus and free of distractions. He explains that we need to change our habits of how we address work.

1. Work deeply: Block time in your day, in which you want to work deeply. Hide your phone in a drawer, turn off email and your instant messaging clients (or put them to Do not Disturb). I try to work in focused 25 minute sessions using the Pomodoro Technique.
2. Embrace Boredom: The smartphone era has drastically reduced our attention span. We forgot what it means to be bored and have lost our ability to concentrate as a consequence. Regain this ability by embracing boredom and resisting the temptation to pull out your smartphone at every occasion: at the bus stop, while waiting for your lunch date or while sitting on the toilet.
3. Quit Social Media: Often we fill these "boring" occasions with brief and mindless interactions on social media. If we find ways to reduce social media altogether, we will regain precious time and brain capacity that can be used in different areas of our lives. I personally have quit Instagram half a year ago because I decided it had too much control over me and I found little value in it anymore.
4. Drain the Shallows: Develop rituals in which you do what you set out to do. I'm trying to cultivate a habit of writing in my mornings before going to work. I started going on short walks in the morning, right afer I wake up (yes, even before having a cup of coffee!). After that, I'm digging into a 30 to 60 minute writing session.

It's incredible how much you can get done once you are in the deep work setting. It allowed me to finally do what I set out to do for such a long time. No more procrastination!

Follow your dreams

So this could be it. Your potential strategy to finally start something new that you have put off for way too long. For me, I have dreamt about being a blogger and launching a personal website for years. Even before I worked as a UX designer I tried myself out as a blogger on Medium but I allowed my high standards to get the better of me. These days are now over.

Here is my personal step-to-step guide that allowed me to follow my dreams (free to use on your own):

1. Think about the motivation behind your pursuit. What is so great about it? How is it evolving you? How could it be benefitting others, if that's something you want?
2. What are things you keep telling yourself that are stopping you to get started? Write them down and face them head on.
3. Once you've convinced yourself that there is no good reason to continue putting off your dreams, do it. Get rid of distractions, set your timer to 25 minutes and dive into deep work mode. Pomodoro style. 🍅

I can recommend a book to my German readers out there that has introduced me to many of these productivity techniques: A little blue book called "Machen" (to do / to make / to create) (nomen est omen).

You can do it too! ✨

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