Cyd HarrellInterview
Civic technology consultant
Adapted from Cyd Harrell's interview on Uses This, published 14 January 2021. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
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I also have a Blue Snowball mic for podcasts or recording, but I mostly use the internal mic for day to day video chats.
Probably the most important piece of hardware I have is my Widex Evoke 440 hearing aids - I have early age-related hearing loss, and I couldn't do my job as a user researcher, listening to people, without that help.
Before the pandemic when I was only in headphones a few hours a day, I loved the UrbanEars Plattan headphones, but 6 or 7 hours a day of hearing aids, reading glasses, and headphones meant I needed a new model.
Noise canceling and hearing aids can interact oddly, so my choice is the Philips SHP9500 open-backed over-ear set.
Luckily, for actual phone calls, I can stream directly from my iPhone 8 (I like solid, last-gen phones) to the HAs.
Communication
I like to set up each project in its own Chrome tab-set, with email, Slack, calendar, and key docs or folders associated with that project.
Productivity
Then I have another side project with its own calendar, Slack, and set of Gdocs and Office 365 tabs (that one's a mixed, group project).