Disclaimer: I am a progressive. I believe taxes should be raised for people making more than 750k per year and defense spending should be cut in half and the National Endowment for the Arts funding should be increased 100x. With that disclaimer out of the way I have to say…
Not any bathroom sink; this is the sink in the bathroom at my work. I use it several times a day. Take a look. Notice where the water comes out. It’s all the way to the left edge. Notice the size of the sink. 90% of the sink is wasted…
I was invited over the weekend to speak at the Wakanday 2011 conference title JS.Everywhere. It was a fascinating gathering because the emphasis was not on JavaScript in a browser, but rather on the server. 4D is the company sponsoring the event. They have had a database server product for…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
<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…
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…
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 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…
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…