What are the worst management sins? Here is my short list. Micromanagment. I really hate it when a boss says, “I want you to be responsible for this, but I am going to dictate how you do it.” This is the thing that made me want to leave Intuit. If you delegate then, let the…
Yesterday, I was struggling to achieve a basic goal. I wanted to list out the sections of the application and specify all the different buttons and menus and features. It was basically a quick outline of the product to be used as a UI specification doc. There are lots of task managers, but none achieved…
The first company I worked as an interaction designer, Remend has officially closed it doors. Here are some lessons learned for dot-coms building a product: A dollar spent in architecture is 10 dollars saved in maintenance. Never hard code anything if you can help it. The lesson is that things change. Details change. You have…
In any non-trivial piece of software you have alot of features. Often, there is a bug in some of those features. In the rollout phase of software, there are usually ALOT of bugs. People use the word “beta” to mean buggy, but it carries a deadly payload. When a user encounters one bug, they will…
I love the Web. I have loved it since Netscape 1.0 in 1994. Here is why, in the form of two stories. Thanksgiving, 1996, there were not that many websites in general, but there were a bunch. My step-mother said, “The internet is a fad. Mark my words, it will be gone in a couple…
I haven’t used Listernine in years. I was in Rite-aid this morning, buying Claritin and I saw the Listerine. I was looking for one for the kids, but I thought it might be better to try it on my own first. It’s ADA certified so I felt confident. I took a swing and started swishing…
We had a nice Thanksgiving this year. Penny was happy. Katie was happy, but not taller than Darcie. The kids got to ride their bikes in an empty mall parking lot. Ethan got to cook a little. Ben and Darcie were happy with their new baby Henry. All the extended family was there. Everyone had…
A new updated Internet Explorer tool is on the scene called DebugBar. I was excited at first for this tool because I think IE has no decent tools. However, my hopes were soon dashed. I might be stupid and it was there and I couldn’t see it, however, I could not find out how to…
Mozilla has launched Firefox 3 into beta. I quickly downloaded and installed it. I realized this might be a mistake based on the fact that I need to use Firefox 2 for my development work. Turns out there are two major problems, which caused me to uninstall the program almost immediately. I couldn’t run both…
Avinash, analytics and web guru, was kind enough to invite me to GooglePlex for lunch. The food was good overall, the variety was outstanding, but it was the energy and the style that was most impressive. I really appreciated the energy of the people and the way everything was arranged. Everyone shared offices. Everyone had…
A couple of years ago, I was interviewing for an interaction design position as Opsware. At the time, my only interaction design experience was with Hotkoko. They took interaction design super-seriously. Their work products were top-notch with every conceivable detail spelled out. I was thoroughly impressed. The product also looked really good. The head of…
I wanted to gzip the javascript and css files on marketo.com. Again, this technology should be DEFAULT on every web host in the world. I have no idea why they don’t have this turned on. Anyway, after another couple of hours, I found this solution which seemed to work. Specifically, it only worked on MediaTemple.…
This is a major invention. It is a new kind of solar panel that can be printed on anything. Glass windows in your car or office building, roof shingles, parking lots, whatever. The cost per watt of solar is currently $3. This stuff is 30 cents. We need action. We need our government to buy…
The first operating system I remember being aware of was DOS. It came on a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks. Before that, I had computers, but I wasn’t aware of a particular OS. Windows 3.1 was my first OS that I could say had an actual Graphical User Interface (GUI). Of course, Apple had the…