After a circulation of about 549 e-mails were sent among the writers and editors trying to find a day and time that we could all have lunch together, we went ahead and made a reservation for 12 people at the Dunn Inn for Monday at 12:15. “And good thing we did,” I thought as we entered the restaurant that was completely devoid of afternoon customers except for the 12 of us.

The Dunn Inn turned out to be a very friendly place. When our food came out, the waiter sang out our orders as he placed them in front of us. I ordered a salad along with a few others, and everyone else’s food came out before ours. “The salads will be out soon, we’re just waiting on a cucumber!” the waiter said to us. (Sang to us, rather). About a minute later a cook emerged from the back and scurried through the restaurant and out the front door.  About ten seconds later, he returned—a cucumber in hand. (How this cucumber managed to materialize in so short a time span, the world may never know). When my salad came out it was enormous, and I made the obligatory remarks: “This is so big! I’ll never finish! It’s bigger than my head!” But of course I downed it in minutes flat, as I always do. It happened to be the birthday of one of our writer/editors, so we all sang Happy Birthday to her. When we finished, the cucumber cook from the kitchen ran out to us, grinning. “It’s my birthday, too!’ he exclaimed and we all started applauding.

Also this week we hosted our first ever intern fair for new interns for the summer and fall, and I got to talk to the aspiring writers/editors who will one day replace me. *tear*
The internship fair was a big success with an impressive turnout, but if we had to do it all over again I would suggest that we not serve cupcakes. They are awkward to eat in front of people you are trying to impress.

I wasn’t even particularly trying to impress anyone, and yet I became so self-conscious sloppily eating my cupcake with the thick layer of chocolate frosting that I momentarily considered hiding out in the bathroom to finish eating it, but then I remembered the scene from Mean Girls where Lindsay Lohan has to eat her lunch alone in the bathroom because she has no friends, and I decided to try not to be that pathetic. (Instead I regretfully threw away my half-eaten cupcake).

Working at the Office of Creative Services has definitely been a learning experience. I had to stretch to think of eight new and creative ways to describe lists of honors and awards for the Founder’s Day Teaching Awards book; write my first blog ever; and be more e-mail-savvy than I’ve ever been before (is ending with “sincerely” too outdated?). But I think the hardest, and best, thing I’m learning here is how to manage my time.

My time management skills have always been nonexistent. My excuse is that I “work best under pressure,” but in reality, I can’t work on papers or projects until the last minute because I have so many other things I’ve procrastinated on that need to be taken care of. Despite my terrible habit, my work has always been finished and I’ve earned good grades.

Working at OCS is forcing me to learn and practice time management skills. Everything we do at OCS has to be tracked on this program called the Infowit Job Tracking System. Editing proofs, writing profiles, and writing blogs—all are tracked and billed to clients or recorded as overhead through this software. The ability to see who is paying me for each hour of my time has been a nice incentive to stay on task.

If only our professors would track our work and pay us accordingly, I know I would be a more dedicated student. I can see the project names in Infowit now: “IUB Psychology 101, Read pages 72-120”—or “IUB SOJ 917 Communication Law Review, Write/Edit.” My apartment might even get cleaned once in a while if I could bill someone for my time.

But even though I’m not getting paid, I am trying to apply the concept of job tracking to my schoolwork. Lately, I’ve tried breaking projects down into a few hours every night. For an annotated bibliography that was due two weeks ago, I allocated three hours each night to work on it. However, change is coming slowly: the three hours were 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.—after I took a nap, ate dinner, and caught up with Facebook and Perez Hilton.

A holiday weekend would have been the best time to apply this new method, but I didn’t take advantage of it. Hunting for Easter eggs with my 4-year-old brother trumped research papers and I didn’t get anything done. Consequently, I was at the library until at least 6 a.m. Monday and Tuesday. But like I said, I do my best work under pressure.

On the Web today, it doesn’t take much to leave a bad impression on a user. However, awareness of a few common usability pitfalls can drastically improve your site.

• Straying from Web standards – This holds true for not only the style standards of the organization and department, but the Web in general as well. For example, light text on a dark background has been shown to slow reading speeds by up to 30%, so use it wisely. Also, no one wants to see your flashing, seizure-inducing banner or your tie-dyed horizontal row divider.
• Endless text – Overestimation of the interest of users in textual content is all too common. A recent study found that users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. Skimming has become the norm, and it should be accounted for in your writing and layout.
• Bad architecture – Some experts report a site’s information architecture encompasses 80% of usability problems. Investment in an architecture planning stage, including addressing features like logical content organization, link labeling, and consistent navigation, typically pays off several times over in usability.
• Mobile inaccessibility – The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. This means that your site must support mobile devices, load quickly, and allow for my stubby fingers to distinguish between tiny text on my phone while I am driving my flying car (they’re coming out any day now, right?).

These select oversights most commonly occur when designing for the Web in isolation from users. This facilitates forgetfulness that real people will be using your site, not merely the idea that you have of their behavior. Not having the resources or time for usability testing is no excuse for user interaction, when meaningful feedback can be generated by asking simple tasks of those around you. For example, you can get some sense of how a novice user would handle your architecture by asking a parent or grandparent to find something on your site without using “the Google.”