Month: September 2011

  • Don’t Move the Cheese

    There is an expression I use at work all the time.  Don’t move the cheese.  It comes from a book by Spencer Johnson.  Cheese was put in a corner of the maze.  The mice found the cheese, but one day the cheese was moved.  Watch the video below for the details. In UX Design, I…

  • Netflix – Open Mouth, Insert Foot

    <rant class=”entertainment cheese-move”> I just received this this email from the Netflix founder.  After receiving the previous message about the hikes in the prices, I lowered our subscription to the $10 a month level. After this email, I lowered it to the $5 a month level.  If they send me one more stupidly conceived email, I…

  • Quora and StackExchange = Their Founders

    In the past 2 months, I have had the pleasure of meet the leaders of StackExchange (Jeff Atwood) and Quora (Charlie Cheever).  I have also been using Quora and UX.StackExchange quite frequently over the last year.  They are very different services. At first, I thought about them as different web applications, specifically, different non-human things.…

  • The UX of Being ON

    For me, work and home have wildly different cadences. At work, I am in the zone. 20 places at once, solving problems for people, answering questions, counseling the grief stricken disgruntled, inspiring the new employees. Killing them softly with my song. 90% of my week is not at my desk. I am in flow most…

  • Its a Small World

    I spent a good part of last week at Dreamforce in San Francisco.  It’s a major tradeshow put on by Salesforce.com.  The pattern of my week was very different than normal.  Lots of people, parties, interactions.  Some of these people came directly out of my past.  People I trained on Marketo years ago.  People I…

  • Mental Defragmentation

    Remember the defragmentation tools in older versions of Windows, especially the 95-98 editions.  In those systems, when the disk was needed to store information, it would put it in somewhere in the middle like the picture below.  After a while, the disk would get kind of messy that way.  In fact, it would yield significant…