XKCD nailed it again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this and it’s always the same. I think the most guilty of this has to be LinkedIn. They constantly send emails and then load the “touch” version of their site (which I have to say, takes about 1 full minute to load) [...]
It’s important to record testing – it serves both as memory aid for the tester as well as a powerful tool (evidence) for clients and stakeholders. I can also serve as an empathy aid for dev and design teams. Handsets matter. Users want to test to test with their own phones. If that’s not possible, [...]
Games are deeply embedded into Chinese culture, so playful interaction is needed to entice more users. How do you tap into a culture of competition. Scale is Huge – How do you rethink your UI/UX to account for actions in the hundreds of thousands? Safety is of huge concern in China. Seatbelts, however, are rarely [...]
DIY has caused an influx of mass customization and rapid propogation of ideas wants massive customization (3-D printing technologies, open source software). Makers will start to own the interaction model through environmental changes. The old model is massive variation leading to a favorite construct, leading to slightly less variation, leading again to a favorite construct. [...]
I was having an interesting conversation with Alex Jones the other day, remarking about the usability studies by Peter Steen Høgenhaug around the ‘link’ iconography in CMS software. Alex touched on this in his blog with Usability of the Link Icon and earlier with Replacing the Save Icon. It’s interesting when we encounter patterns in [...]
I love this interview with Dieter Rams about his influence in product and industrial design. He speaks about how he developed his ‘ten principles’ and why he felt there was a need for products to be devoid of excess, yet still allow for customization on the part of the consumer. Rams also discusses how the [...]
I got my copy of A List Apart’s book on Responsive Web Design and it’s a great way to get into thinking about responsive Web techniques. Ethan Marcotte does a great job of guiding readers through a simple, clean example of manipulation starting at the flexible grid level, moving through flexible images, and finally rounding [...]
A conversation transpired the other day in which a colleague of mine remarked that he’d had it with “hacks” in our industry – that is, those who call themselves developers and designers but still use recycled code, un-secure scripts, and kludged together markup. He complained that there should be an education requirement (like that of [...]