The other day, I was lamenting that I didn’t have visibility regarding the usage patterns in the application I work on. I wanted to know who was “at risk” and who was an emerging power user. (Being ‘At Risk’ means that you might not renew because you aren’t using the system much). We had subjective…
Go to google and search for “foo bar” You get some variety of this: http://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar Notice the q= part. It is describing the term you searched for. Now go to yahoo.com and do the exact same thing. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=foo+bar Notice the p= part. It’s p not q. Why is Yahoo using “p” when Google is using…
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday. (Funny, that link says IE7 all over it.) I have such conflicting feelings about Microsoft. They have provided a ton of my primary software for over 20 years. I started on DOS, then moved through every single version of their operating systems. I learned to install their servers and…
Many people I know develop personas for their applications and then pretend to be the user. It’s like method acting for application development. I think this is a bad idea. The reason is simple: Users are random and unpredictable. They will click everywhere and do every possible wrong thing. An engineer once argued with me…
Imagine your users are normal smart people who are using your application during Halloween. They are happily using your great product when all of the sudden, “ding Dong!”. Oh, it must be a cute little bunch of trick or treaters. Let’s stand up and walk over to the door. Oh, what a cute little princess!…
This Saturday, I skipped P-Camp and went into San Francisco to see the Interaction Design gathering at Adapative Path‘s offices. (Photos) I have to say, I was kind of disappointed. P-Camp, last year was pretty dynamic with alot of energy and interesting talks. The IxDA conference seemed really toned down and the presentations were mixed.…
I use the concept of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (love that name) to attempt to describe how you should position your product and your customers. In the picture, you can see the different positions one could be in. A1 is when you are doing something easy and you have enough skill to do it. Like riding…
Lately, I have been really frustrated with Antivirus programs. The user experience is usually painful. I manage dozens of machines from friends and family and at work. I install antivirus all the time and have used alot of them over the years. Here is my rundown of the bad and the ugly. Norton Antivirus Every…
The presentation last night went well. Very talkative bunch, but they asked good questions. I had a good time and hope they did too. My slides can be downloaded here as a PPTX or PDF versions. I don’t like putting them on Slideshare because they only support PPT, not PPTX. I do things to my…
All weekend and yesterday (and today a little), I have been fighting off a cold of sorts. Haven’t eaten, slept most of the time, aches and pains. The worst thing is not being about to think clearly. It’s like driving in thick fog. You can do it, but it’s more dangerous and you can’t see…
I just couldn’t help myself. I had to install Windows 7 on the Netbook. I upgraded the ram from 1G to 2G for just $25 from Amazon. It took an hour or so to install. No upgrade is allowed from XP to 7, so I had to do a clean install. Not a big deal…
Jewish High Tech Community Ask my mom, I am not a good Jew. Not kosher, never go to temple, I celebrate Christmas (although we like to call it Winter Solstice), married a shiksa, kids will not have Bar Mitzvahs (great story) and disdain organized religon. However, I can honestly say that being invited to speak at…
“Say hello to my little friend!” I just go my new netbook, the Asus EeePC 1000 HE. It is slightly heavier than I expected, but not too bad. The screen is 10″ and seems plenty big for what I need. Just to be clear on my purposes, I need something for: Taking on trips that…
Marketo launched it’s Lead Management 3.0 product this weekend. It has been a long time coming (- been working on it for 4 months). The scope was pretty big. We refactored the entire UI from top to bottom. We improved usability in countless ways. The graphic design is polished and consistent. We added a bunch…