You've found Burn The Fucking Manual, a blog about everything and anything, as long as it's to do with User Experience, Usability and how People interact with Things (systematically). It's a topic I think about a lot. I'm Eve, and I'll be the person ranting in your ear today. Or into your eyes, I guess, if it's via text? Odd image, that.
I say about everything and anything - what I really mean is 90% video games, tabletop, travel and food. My brain functions in HD - ADHD, that is - so usually these thoughts come from rabbit holes encountered while I'm doing other things, and my free time tends to get portioned solidly between exactly those things. And I tend to do a lot of my traveling for food, so there's also that.
What qualifies you to talk about this stuff?
Honestly? Nothing more than what qualifies you to talk about this stuff. That's not a Reverse Uno card and a middle finger; what I mean is, we are all experts in the experiences we fill our time with, and we all on some level understand the concept of usability. Ask your mother or father (assuming they aren't tech people) why they don't like using this or that new piece of tech and you'll get a phenomenal answer that outlines a UX issue - you just have to listen for it and translate it.
Having said that, I'm a Product Manager, partial UX Designer, and former Scrum Master by trade. I've helped build and design a bunch of applications, websites and work processes for people in many different contexts, so I've had the professional need to understand basic UX and behavioural nudge principles for the better part of the decade that this career's taken up. I'm also a Dungeon Master and a former World of Warcraft Guild Leader, and you'd be surprised at the parallels between my actual professional life and those roles.
But honestly, those things just help me structure and translate these things into something digestible - the beauty of UX is that it's fundamentally intuitive by nature.
That's a rude blog name
Is it? It's a play on the old term RTFM, which is geekspeak for Read the Fucking Manual. As in - Stop Asking Me and Read The Fucking Manual. And I disagree - we don't need manuals in the modern day world, we just need people who design experiences (and by that virtue, products, since they create experiences) to spend another 10% of their energy thinking through how people are going to interact with them, and nine times out of ten it'll be intuitive and easy to use
Also, can you imagine needing help and being told to "read the fucking manual"? Naw, burn the fucker. Preferably on Mx. RTFM's porch. Wonder if they have a manual to deal with that particular scenario. Checkmate.
There's a subscription fee but no benefits?
Yup, we'll get there. I'm not a huge fan of locking people out of content, it feels too much like keeping secrets and makes me feel like my card-carrying communist grandfather is frowning down at me from wherever he is, but I also want to buy myself a house someday and in this economy the way you do that is by monetizing everything you can, unfortunately.
So in the meantime, if you want to send some money my way to pay for my overpriced coffee, a few packs of Magic cards (cardboard crack, as we like to call it) or just to put in my "Gabe Newell Where Is The Steam Deck 2" fund, go ahead and subscribe - you'll get extra goodies when I get around to setting up tiers, and I use all of those things to motivate myself to write more articles here.
Can we see your bengals?
Maybe someday. They're basically my kids and I'm not a big fan of putting your kids on social media without being able to get true consent. But maybe I can bribe consent out of them with some dried fish or something. We'll see.
Anything else important?
Not really, go on and read some articles or go do something more useful.
Oh, no, one more thing, actually:
Welcome, I'm really glad to see you here and I hope you enjoy my only-slightly-unhinged ramblings as much as I enjoy writing them!