It’s not everyone, but there are alot of people who have particular phrases that they say all the time. Some examples: Kevin, a guy who used to work for me, said “Essentially” about 20 times per sentence. Another variant was “Basically” which several people I know say in every sentence. At least 1 in 40…
I made this page as a proof-of-concept for the Google Translate API. The Google Translate developer page was helpful, as was the jQuery wrapper for it. It was easy to implement and works very quickly. Unfortunately, the results stink. Sarah, who sites next to me, speaks Chinese. She says the results made no sense. Pavel,…
At work, there are a few servers that are getting launched for a new service. I said that the name of the URL is a design element and users will see it and react to it. I got several looks of disbelief, but I pushed on this as a strong UX principle. The user is…
Several years ago, I went to a P-Camp Unfonference. (It was fun and I strongly recommended giving it a try.) It was at that conference that I realized how long most release cycles were. They were running quarterly releases or longer. One company was still on CD releases track once per year. Software as a Service (SaaS)…
A great design solution usually doesn’t show up first in line. It doesn’t have a T-Shirt that says “I’m the best answer”. It’s hard to know when you struck gold and when you struck plain dirt. This is the same for hiring employees. Who knows if the “next” candidate will be even better than this…
Google ranks pages according to really strange algorithms. I don’t do any active SEO on my blog. However, Google ranks me very high for certain searches. They often distract me from understanding my traffic. See illustration below: You can see all the traffic in the middle was when my posts on Windows 7 and Office 2010…
This is The Trees by Rush on Rockband 2 with Jared (8 yrs old) on drums. Expert mode means that he is required to hit the drums exactly the same frequency as the real drummer Neil Peart. He doesn’t get it perfect at all (89% accuracy), but still I am really impressed. He is just getting…
StackOverflow is a really awesome movement on the web that is revolutionizing Question & Answer forums. Experts-Exchange.com is really being left in the dust mainly because of the user experience of this new upstart. There is an elegance to the overall design that I enjoy very much. The use of reputation points and badges is…
A non-UX post. One of my kids, Ethan, ran for Student Body President of his elementary school. He was up against a dozen other kids. I don’t know the vote tallies, but I will just assume it was a victorious landslide! (Why not?) He said, when he heard the news that he won, it hit…
There is a particular position within an engineering group that I think contributes tremendously to the overall user experience of the customer; the escalation engineer. This is the person who does the initial triage of any bug coming in from the support team. The funny thing is that most engineers don’t want to do this…
I’ve been using the iPad for a little while now, trying to push myself in terms of using apps with multi-touch interfaces. Craig Villamor, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Willis and Jennifer Rhim have done an excellent job of documenting the gestures a user can perform. I’ve also been playing with the new Sencha Touch, which is…
I played Softball last night for the first time in quite a while. There is a specific feeling that I get when I hit a ball well. It’s the same feeling I get when I hit a good shot in golf or shoot a difficult shot in pool or hit a winner in tennis. It’s…
<rant> How many engineers does it take to edit CSS? It’s a trick question, engineers hate CSS. They say it’s “non-deterministic”. So who is left to mess around with the 3rd party app to skin it and make it look right? I “volunteered”. So the first thing to do is to look at the generated…
I don’t use Facebook all that much. I know it’s super popular, and I maintain it at the bare minimum level, but I can’t really get into it. Recently I watched an online presentation from a UX guy at Google about Social Networking. One major point really resonated with me: The complete lack of segmentation…