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…
As one becomes an expert in any hobby or craft, one learns about the best equipment that is possible to buy. The dynamics of the cost-value curve are as follows: In the beginning, you can spend the least amount possible. This is what many amateurs do. The quality is pretty low. By spending a little…
There is a problem that I can’t seem to find a solution for. Check out this screenshot below. It is a screen grab of 12px arial from different browsers next to Photoshop trying to make the same font. (Zoom: 200%) Notice how the same text looks the same in all of the different browsers on…
I wish I had a magic analytics machine. You could ask it any question you want and it would blink a LED lights, beep boop a few times, click clack click and within 10 seconds, spit out the answer. It would be able to tabulate people’s thoughts or impossible data to collect. It could even…
Next time you are in a meeting, look around the table. How many people are working on laptops? How many are working on their iPhones, Blackberrys or Androids? How many are making eye contact with the person talking and engaging in the conversation? Some meetings are better than others, but every day I am in…
The media has been trying their best to keep changing the subject. It got me thinking about distractions. For example: If you were trying to focus the world’s attention on the Iraq war (2003) then you sure as hell didn’t want New Orleans to be submerged in water. If you were raising money for New…