December 20, 2009
When product segmentation goes to pot.
There’s a saying that an interface portrays the organization that created it. What’s going on at LogMeIn?
December 19, 2009
What if Pac Man was an alternative reality game?
This idea is rooted in the labyrinth of cities. Alleys and streets become the corridors. The players race through a neighborhood, collecting pellets and devouring their competitors. It’s a race-meets-scavenger hunt.
April 7, 2009
My Wordle
Wordle.net has been around for a while, and I finally decided to post what my personal Del.icio.us cloud would look like.
April 5, 2009
Tips for working outside on a Macbook
It’s beautiful outside and I’m reading and writing from a patio café in Raleigh. I’ve always preferred working outside, but squinting to read my Macbook’s screen in the sun always deterred me. I looked into those photographer’s shades, but those are bulky and weird for café culture. I found the winning strategy in OS X’s Universal Access.
April 2, 2009
Video Embed Test Code
I was trying to figure out the differences in dimensions among embedded video players. It struck me that others might be looking for the same thing. So, I created an html file with embeds of popular video players, along with their pixel dimensions.
March 28, 2009
Podcast on Online Marriages
A few weeks ago and prior to my core conversation at SXSW, Evan Carroll interviewed me about Love in the Cloud: Online-only marriages.
March 27, 2009
Progress bar alternatives in the UI
The progress bar is a bit cold. It unemotionally calculates the height of a bar based on elementary math. So I started thinking. People tend to have a unique attraction to faces. You see this in eye tracking studies. What if the progress bar was humanized a bit?
An improved Twitter UI?
Just for fun, I thought I’d see what Twitter might look like if it exposed some of the more commonly used features directly in the interface.
March 26, 2009
A modest proposal for marketing
What I’m about to say might be be considered treason. But I’m throwing it out there to open discussion. What would happen if companies simply took their marketing dollars and reinvested them in their business?
March 24, 2009
WAI-ARIA: a high level summary
Making sites accessible for disabled users has always been an afterthought. Right now, making sites usable for low-vision and blind users is a cobbled together assortment of best practices and hacks. Image alt tags, semantic markup, and “skip to content” links are a few of the techniques we use to address the problem. The problem is that these were added after the fact–and that they were designed for the static Web. It comes with it a number of problems.
What happens when you give employees 100% instead of 20% time?
Meetup.com was facing issues about two years ago. Their service, which enables people to discover other like-minded folks, was gaining traction. They started growing in response. Meetup went from a startup with a handful of employees to one that totaled around 60. In the process, they implemented procedures and structure that contributed to tanking morale and quality. What did they do?
March 17, 2009
Lies, Damned Lies and User Research
At the Funologists panel at SXSW, the speakers lightly touched on digital ethnography. One of the points they that came up was the “lying user” phenomenon. While they didn’t go into it too far, it sparked an idea I’ve been meaning to write about.
Let Your Users Bail: four usability testing ideas
At SXSW 09, I listened to a panel of UX game designers talk about the unique challenges around building games. Much of their discussion, however, applied to usability testing in other software. Here are the four big takeaways that I heard.
B = f (P, E) : Guiding the user experience
I’m usually not a big fan of pseudo-science when it tries to masquerade as the real thing. So, when I heard about the following formula, I was incredulous.
February 3, 2009
Love in the Cloud: Online Only Marriages
On March 16, 2009 I’ll be presenting this topic as a Core Conversation at SXSW ‘09. In it, I’ll be encouraging discussion on how online-only marriages could work. Come join us. You know you have a strong opinion.
January 23, 2009
Who needs a full redesign? Winning with usability testing and progressive improvement.
Here are three interesting case studies on how companies are making small, progressive improvements in their site based upon usability testing.
January 22, 2009
Stencil Kit: what are we, back in 1950?
The stencil kit makes things too precious, unnecessarily. It’s taking something as direct as a sketch–a rough, exploratory expression of an idea on paper–and making it concrete too quickly. You start to feel dirty if your drawings aren’t as precise as those the kit produces. And as we all know, there is a big difference between precision and accuracy.
January 18, 2009
MS Office vs. MS Surface
when these calisthenic interfaces take over, how are we going to do pedestrian things like entering data or writing a report?
January 17, 2009
How you left equity on the table by not doing user research
In user experience, it seems common that the terms “goal” and “task” get confused quite a bit. Tasks get cast as goals, when they really aren’t. It’s easy enough to do: goals can seem amorphous and hard to design for. Tasks are more observable and tactic-oriented. But that does not mean consideration of goals is [...]
January 13, 2009
How would you describe your favorite drink to a friend?
Right now, I’m running a user survey for GarnishBar to elicit ideas about the when, where and how people find cocktail recipes. One of the most interesting questions for me is “How would you describe your favorite drink to a friend?”The question seems innocuous at first: a simple request. However, this question has an agenda.
January 9, 2009
The Gray Lady Developer Network
That the Times has a developer network seems strange at first glance. But this is a natural extension of their reporting.