Go into any high school and look at the Art and Music classes. In all of the art classes, they ask you to make original art. They ask you to paint, draw, sculpt and teach you how to use those mediums, but they do not ask you to copy existing art. They ask you to…
HR departments are supposed to do a bunch of good things. However, I think they don’t quite work out that way most of the time. Which kind of HR do you have? The “Avoid Lawsuit” Department From misconduct and harassment to injuries and workers comp, this kind of HR almost want people to wear helmets…
I’ve been listening to Freakonomics Radio and Planet Money on my car ride to work. Economics is a fascinating subject. It has just as much to do with human psychology as UX Design. One segment was by some guys who fixed Brazil’s hyper-inflation by inventing a new kind of money. They said, “People have lost confidence…
Choosing Icons is sometimes tricky business. I chose all of the icons in Marketo since 2007. Here are a couple of stories that help explain. Marketo Icon Glossary The Smart Campaign Light BulbThe most important icon in Marketo was the Lightbulb. When I first designed the system, I was trying to explain how it worked…
I just spent some time talking to a user about a design I made. I walked her through it and we started talking about the possibilities. The worst version of this exercise is when the user says, “I don’t know.” in response to questions. The best version of the exercise is when they get excited and…
I just updated my LinkedIn App. Previously, I had complained that it didn’t work in landscape mode. They “fixed” that. So now, if I rotate, this is what I get. Do you see what they did? They just took the layout and flipped it horizontally. In other apps, it redraws the screen and uses the…
I believe that you shouldn’t design in the chronological order the user will use the product. In other words, you don’t need to design the login screen first. You can pick a point in the middle. I call it an “anchor point”. This point serves as one of the important foundation interfaces. It shows a…
A colleague once asked me why Craigslist had become so successful with such bad design. Craigslist is a complicated company without a ton of information online. It doesn’t employee many people and has made a good deal of money. On the surface, it looks ugly. However, it has been very popular. Fascinating reading on Quora about why…
Yesterday, I was staring at my screen trying to figure out how a user would create and manage the object I conceived. I wasn’t even staring at a blank canvas. I was staring at a hole, a nothing, an absence of something. It was my job to get rid of this “nothing” and replace it…
When designing something new, you have to choose what it looks like and how it acts. One designer said to me, “It should be timeless and classic.” I disagreed. If you are designing something new, it should be noteworthy and contemporary. One example is the iPhone. Pick up an original version and it will not at…
For the better part of the last ten years, I have seen the world through the eyes of a demand generation marketer. Starting with Kelly Abner and working through thousands of others, my point of view was how to help them create more leads and nurture them through a funnel. Now that I have started…
Dear Mr./Mrs LinkedIn, You have the most potential and most fuckups of any site on the web. I love you and I hate you. The Good You are THE defacto social network for professionals. There are plenty of times that your user interface does the right thing. Discovery of new people is usually pretty accurate.…
One perk of a new job is getting a new computer and monitor. I made several terrible mistakes. Here we go… The Wrong Laptop I did some research and decided on the Dell XPS 13. It has crazy high 4k resolution (3200 x 1800) and a super fast processor. Plus a touch screen. In hindsight,…
I’m reading a biography on Jim Henson. He loved his work and described how work is a crucial part of our lives. Accomplishing something is a more fulfilling feeling than the money you earn for doing it. Of course, most of us wouldn’t work at our jobs without being paid. However, if you look at…