Blog

March 22, 2010

Building a scaleable GoogleMaps-like picture viewer in one hour or less.

I wanted to show off my sketchnotes in a pannable and scaleable format, similar to Google Maps. It turns out that there aren’t many services out there that do this. So I rolled my own.

February 4, 2010

UX Tip: Banish Users Forever

Real people use your product, not users. If you can’t describe them like they are your next-door neighbor, then you can’t design for them. Get to know them intimately and banish the word user from design discussions.

January 10, 2010

How to migrate a Cisco VPN configuration into Snow Leopard

Could I migrate an old Cisco profile into Snow Leopard with borderline zero knowledge about my VPN connection? Yep–and here’s how I did it.

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.

December 19, 2008

Tagging is selfish

The requirement for having tagged content is one that comes up pretty often in my part of the web world. People want to have the community tagged content. That means that “The Crowd” helps organize content by entering keywords that describe it. This feature suggestion is nearly always flawed because people are selfish.

December 11, 2008

What you need to consider, if you’re considering rating widgets

You see ‘em everywhere. They’re on CitySearch; they’re on Yelp; they’re tucked away in the footers of knowledgebase articles. Content ratings. Those little 5-star widgets and their kin. For such an innocuous little widget, the decision to put them on your page brings up all kinds of philosophical questions.

July 27, 2008

Ipod 10 GB 3rd Gen is Dead at 5.

My old systems analysis teacher once said that, whenever you make a tech purchase, it should last at least 3 years. On Saturday, July 27th, my iPod failed to respond to resuscitation. It was 5.

May 22, 2008

Google Notebook vs Evernote

Both Google and Evernote offer an online tool for managing notes. This isn’t a review of each product’s capabilities, but an observation on their UIs.

May 20, 2008

Seen on the web: link dimensions as a function of popularity

I just came across this on www.dusteddesign.com. In their tag navigation, the length of the link tag is proportional to the number of articles it contains. I can’t say this works, or that I’d employ it, but it’s interesting and I applaud their thinking.

April 4, 2008

Hire Your Users: a brainstorming tactic

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business’ users without explicitly asking “who do you think your users are?” That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

March 21, 2008

Lazyweb Request: An RIA Wireframing Service

Something just struck me–something that I’d really like to have. Can someone create a RIA tool that allows me to quickly create a low-fidelity sketch of a site, along with a service that allows these to be published, annotated, and shared online? Off the cuff, my base requirements for this would be:

March 16, 2008

Who would ever click this?

An ad for Wendy’s Baconator radio station on Pandora.com. You know, ’cause all the kids are into subscribing to your hamburger ad radio grooves.

March 9, 2008

UX and the Art of Espresso Making

When people asked me what a “user experience” designer was, I usually gave them the following answer: “I try to make software easier to use.” Simple and approachable, and without the arm-waving, chest-puffing that we UXes use to justify what we do. After reevaluating that canned response, I realize I was wrong.

Does somebody have a towel? My face just melted over my keyboard.

PicLens, a Firefox plugin, just reaffirmed how much I love the web.

March 7, 2008

Pidgin: wireframes for designers and developers

A few days ago, I wrote a post on the Capstrat blog about this idea I’ve been working out. It’s called Pidgin, which is a diagramming tool to accomplish two goals in tandem. One, Pidgin is aimed at providing definition to what a UI needs to encompass. Second,…

March 1, 2008

The Stage: a shared, persistent space for persona development

At work, we’re always looking for ways to better bring personas to the creatives and the developers. One idea that we’ve been tossing around is a physical moodboard for personas. I’m calling this the Stage.