Meryl’s Notes Blog

Client Evaluations: Improve your work and client relationships

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Do you ask your client for feedback on your work? Some freelancers and contractors don’t have annual or formal reviews. Large contracts usually make reviews a part of the process, but that’s not always the case with individual freelancers. Sending a client a separate e-mail asking for a project check up signals a few things … Read more

Book Review: Sell Your Book on Amazon

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Despite a way too long subtitle and “salesy” claims, Sell Your Book on Amazon surprises. Its format simplifies finding the sections of interest – couple that with the ratings from five stars indicating “a must do” item to one star meaning “Don’t waste your time.” Authors who publish their books using a print-on-demand (POD) service … Read more

Usability Testing Cheap and Fast Part II

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Dennison asked excellent questions in response to How to Do Usability Testing Cheap and Fast:
Tell me if I follow correctly: Do you do the test only on users that have their own PC with them? So if you happen to be in a store where nobody has a machine or is willing to take the test, then, tough luck?
Why worry about having the users test in their own environment (PC)? The focus of the test is on usability. Testing to see if the site works properly across different systems should be part of QA work and can be done separately.
Bill Moore from RadioTime responded:

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Writing Tip: Ducking 'Is' and 'There'

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In reading articles and books — over time, I’ve learned to try to avoid beginning a sentence with “There” and using “is” or “are.” Doing this enriches your writing and encourages you to find more interesting verbs. Write and Drop or Substitute When I catch myself writing, “There are…” or “There is…” I complete the … Read more

Using Bulleted Lists in Web Content

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Bulleted lists on Web pages help readers scan and find what they want. Two situations that do well with bulleted lists are series and instructions. Also, beware of indenting, spacing, formatting, and whitespace. Series For situations where three or more items appear separated by commas, they might work better as a list. Instead of, “Bring … Read more

How to Do Usability Testing Cheap and Fast

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Bill Moore of RadioTime shared his experience of gathering feedback from users in a sandwich shop. It’s amazing how easy it is to get user feedback with zero overhead, that’s cheap, and leads to actionable results. I asked him why didn’t he go to the (in)famous coffee shop since their wi-fi usually works well (wi-fi … Read more

175+ Data Visualization and Infographics Examples and Resources

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Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action. It’s not just … Read more

When Good Newsletters Go Bad

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The wizard in The Wizard of Oz and the guy behind the curtain pretending to be him have different personalities. Which one would you rather listen to? The wizard who comes across as larger than life and unreachable, or the guy hiding behind the giant green face, a person like us? Companies that publish newsletters … Read more

Freelancing Tip: Dealing with "Want to Do" Projects

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It’s easy to overwhelm yourself with so many things and ideas that nothing materializes. For example, a writer might think about article ideas for different magazines, project ideas, and Web site / networking pages content ideas. Thinking about all of these will likely produce nothing except one overwhelmed freelancer. This became a problem when I … Read more