Product Design (when done correctly) requires alot of thinking. Thinking about the past, present and future of your product, customers and roadmap. Thinking about the Past Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense The most common form of this thinking is related to patterns. You…
There has been an explosion of different form factors on laptops, netbooks, tablets, smart phones and other internet connected devices like xBox, Roku, DirecTV, etc. It’s nearly impossible to compare apples-to-apples. What is someone to do when they have a specific situation and want to try and get the right device? In the past 2…
I think there is an art to job postings. Many of them don’t get read and the candidate only reads the title. I know I have been guilty of not reading the text. Mainly, I think it’s because most of the text is completely inane. Must have 5+ years of experience in a 3 year…
I have to say that I am baffled by the release schedule of Android. First of all, Gingerbread was first released on a phone in December. Did it really take them 6 months to test the OS on the DroidX? Was there really that much different in it? From a user perspective, I can tell…
If you want something done right, your going to have to do it yourself. The proverb has a long history beginning with Miles Coverdale in Matrymonye (1541): That whych thou cannest do conueniently thyselfe commytte it not to another. I was talking to engineer who was distraught. He was frustrated because he spent about 2…
I love pencils. I use the Dixon Ticonderoga 2HB pencils. They are not splintery and sharpen well. I have an electric sharpener on my desk. I sharpen the pencil before I go into meetings. I use them in my notebook to take notes or doodle. Example from last week: Doodling has been proven to help…
Two people sitting at a desk is the most productive form of communication. The reason is that there is a simple interaction model. You have each person communicating and listening to only one person. There is a reason Pair Programming isn’t called Triple or Quadruple Programming. Each person you add to the mix makes communication…
This might seem counter-intuitive, but I’ll try and explain. First 30 Customers When you have only a few customers, you can lavish attention on them. The first 30 customers, you can give them your personal instant messenger, have lunch with them, go to their offices and get to know their kids. You can turn the…
The other day, Marketo hosted the first UX Eye for the Developer Guy Mid Peninsula edition. For those of you who don’t know, UX Eye is a meetup of 30-50 designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and product managers. The format is set up so 1-3 companies can demo their product and the group could do some pure unadulterated User Experience Design.…
I told a few people about JIRA Client and got a nearly universal response. They were confused as to what I was talking about. The confusion, I believe stems from the name of the product. JIRA has a web interface out of the box. Some people call the browser in a web application the “client”.…
Recently, we moved from one project/bug system to JIRA with GreenHopper. The system is highly programmable with lots of plugins and so far, we have made good strides forward. It’s not perfect by any means, but so far, so good. One area I have not been thrilled is the GreenHopper interface. Some people here love…
I absolutely loved this article by Paul Graham called Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule. It basically describes the cadence difference between people who are in meetings most of the day and people who have deliverables like designers or programmers. I drew charts to illustrate: Notice that the manager has meetings all day in one-hour chunks. For…
Imagine giving a person a copy of Intuit QuickBooks. The person has no accounting knowledge and no experience with this software or competing software. In other words, this is a layman. Imagine that their job was to get QuickBooks up and running for a small business with 30 people and 5 million in revenue. Result:…
Recently, I interviewed a person for a user interface engineering position. I made the analogy that the resume was like a user interface and that the candidate was the application. As a user, I wanted to accomplish my goal: to learn about the candidate. My user experience started the minute I picked up the resume, before I…