This is how Quora notifications look if you have a bunch. To me, this is borderline criminal UX design. Why in the world would you repeat the question so many times in a row? The information grid is pretty straight-forward: Who commented, edited or answered questions that I follow and who voted me up or…
I have never had an office with a door. At Koko (web development company I ran between 1995-2002) we all sat in an open space. At Remend, it was an open space. At Intuit, it was a life-sucking claustrophobic cubicle with 6 foot walls. At Marketo, I have always insisted on sitting out in the…
You can read the news everywhere. Yesterday Steve Jobs died. When I interview people for a job, one of my stock questions is: “Who are your influences? Who shaped the way you think about doing your job?” The answer I got back most often is “Steve Jobs”. Interestingly, people who worked with him called him…
After receiving a free Apple TV from a raffle, I immediately thought of a good use for it. This might sound convoluted, but here goes: My kid plays drums. He learned and practices on Rock Band 3 using the Ion Rocker and the xBox. He also plays in School of Rock. The next show he…
At Dreamforce, lots of booths ask you to drop in their business card to win a prize. Of course, I did this at plenty of places. Lucky me, I won an Apple TV from Akamai Technologies. One piece of oddness: In the letter to me, they completely got my title wrong. I dropped my card…
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…
<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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
I have been a huge fan of LinkedIn for many years. How could you not have an up to date LinkedIn profile? It seems to be a “must have” for working in today’s world. Recently LinkedIn went public. The first change I noticed was a new UI. It wasn’t pleasant for me at all. I…
Axiom: It is extremely difficult to read and listen at the same time. About 99% of all presentations make this mistake. They load up the screen with a ton of words and then the host proceeds to talk. The problem is that people must choose between reading what is on the text or listening to…
Aza Raskin has done some excellent work regarding Modal dialogs. Almost every single application in the world has modal dialogs. They are nearly ubiquitous. One of Aza’s points is that a modal with just an [OK] button is nearly useless. I usually try to think about modals as if they were a verbal conversation between…