How does one USE a dream? I have alot of dreams and I think of it this way: A dream is your mind’s way of telling you something you don’t want to think about. I used to have a dream about being chased; always in a different place, like Yankee Stadium, the subway, an office…
I just did a quick search. I have never posted an April Fool’s Day message. Quite surprising, since I love the tradition. The internet is particularly good as a medium to deliver fake messages. I was fooled yesterday about the IE8 news. A great April Fool joke is believeable. It makes the listener say, “WOW,…
I can’t even believe I am letting my hopes get this high. Check out this SmashingMagazine article about Internet Explorer 8.1. The thing that pops out, and it pops out ALOT is shown in this picture: This is GIGANTIC. It is showing support for Firefox add-ins The biggest reason I had internet explorer is because…
What is the best way to watch Monsters vs. Aliens? (neat site by the way) My choices are numerous: Imax 3d at Emeryville. (Or the Metreon). This would probably be the most interesting way to watch it. It would be gigantic and THREE-DEE…unless that would be totally annoying. Is the 3D going to be annoying…
hip·po (hp)n. pl. hip·pos Def: Hippo is an acronym standing for HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion. This term was coined by Avinash Kaushik, analytics genius. When you are in a meeting and trying to get some decisions made, look around. Who is the person who gets to make the final call? They are your Hippo. It…
The other day, I was lamenting that I didn’t have visibility regarding the usage patterns in the application I work on. I wanted to know who was “at risk” and who was an emerging power user. (Being ‘At Risk’ means that you might not renew because you aren’t using the system much). We had subjective…
Go to google and search for “foo bar” You get some variety of this: http://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar Notice the q= part. It is describing the term you searched for. Now go to yahoo.com and do the exact same thing. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=foo+bar Notice the p= part. It’s p not q. Why is Yahoo using “p” when Google is using…
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday. (Funny, that link says IE7 all over it.) I have such conflicting feelings about Microsoft. They have provided a ton of my primary software for over 20 years. I started on DOS, then moved through every single version of their operating systems. I learned to install their servers and…
Many people I know develop personas for their applications and then pretend to be the user. It’s like method acting for application development. I think this is a bad idea. The reason is simple: Users are random and unpredictable. They will click everywhere and do every possible wrong thing. An engineer once argued with me…
Imagine your users are normal smart people who are using your application during Halloween. They are happily using your great product when all of the sudden, “ding Dong!”. Oh, it must be a cute little bunch of trick or treaters. Let’s stand up and walk over to the door. Oh, what a cute little princess!…
This Saturday, I skipped P-Camp and went into San Francisco to see the Interaction Design gathering at Adapative Path‘s offices. (Photos) I have to say, I was kind of disappointed. P-Camp, last year was pretty dynamic with alot of energy and interesting talks. The IxDA conference seemed really toned down and the presentations were mixed.…
I use the concept of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (love that name) to attempt to describe how you should position your product and your customers. In the picture, you can see the different positions one could be in. A1 is when you are doing something easy and you have enough skill to do it. Like riding…
Lately, I have been really frustrated with Antivirus programs. The user experience is usually painful. I manage dozens of machines from friends and family and at work. I install antivirus all the time and have used alot of them over the years. Here is my rundown of the bad and the ugly. Norton Antivirus Every…
The presentation last night went well. Very talkative bunch, but they asked good questions. I had a good time and hope they did too. My slides can be downloaded here as a PPTX or PDF versions. I don’t like putting them on Slideshare because they only support PPT, not PPTX. I do things to my…