I have been a Microsoft guy my whole life. I used DOS, Windows 3.1 as a kid. I beta tested Windows 95, Windows 98, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. I also beta tested every browser they have ever shipped from the first version of Internet Explorer as…
jQuery 1.5 was released today. jQuery was one of the most important breakthroughs for me as a designer. I was an expert in HTML and CSS, but I was not able to program. My career aspirations were pointing towards design and jQuery was the perfect lever to get more out…
A story from a friend, but it probably sounds familiar to many of you. It is related to the magic triangle of Scope, Resources and Time. You can only focus on one. Trying to focus on two or three is a fool’s game and inevitably leads to failure. Here is…
Ben Nadel’s website uses a particular User Experience technique that I think is absolutely brilliant. Let’s call it “names and faces”. The idea was originally in a book “Made to Stick” by Chip & Dan Heath. Summary of the story: The Daily Record, founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams, has a…
I just watched a DVD of just Pixar short films. They were wonderful, but the best moment came in the documentary about Pixar’s early history. John Lasseter was an animator from Disney. He joined a group of PhDs in computer science in a small room. They bounced ideas off each…
Conceptual Design Conceptual Design is the ability to communicate a holistic architecture of a large product, service or solution. A conceptual designer is able to mockup the end-to-end, top-to-bottom structure of this solution. This includes a strong understanding of the technologies involved, without which the conceptual designer is doing “Ivory…
The video from my Sencha presentation is live on Vimeo. Whenever I see myself on video, I have a strong negative reaction to the way I look, the way my voice sounds, the way I move my arms like I am popping and locking my way through the presentation. I…
One idea about a leader is that someone does things that are worth following. This does not mean they actually have followers. For example, Van Gogh lived his life in mostly poverty and isolation, but people have followed his lead in art a million times over since then. Leaders in…
User Experience starts very early. It includes the prejudices they come to the table with and the slogan you put on the first TV commercial they saw. Nissan and Chevy have two very different approaches. Chevy Volt: It’s more car than electric. There are several messages hidden inside this slogan.…
A very early web WIN for me was Thanksgiving 1995. My father had asked during during dinner conversation, “How old is Kiri Te Kanawa?” Today, finding the answer is simple. You go to Google and misspell her name go to Kiri’s Wikipedia page and do the math. If you are bad at…
On the radio I heard a person say, “I’m glad the mayor is thinking of housing as the solution for homelessness.” (Editor note: duh!) She wasn’t being sarcastic and making a joke. She was being a talking head that stays on message and tries not to say anything controversial. I recently…
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring except for the loudest three little monsters you ever saw. My goodness, my 3 boys were a terror today. I should have made them run a few miles in the park. They were wound up and fighting…
Over the past few months I have seen many examples of people trying to make a certain approach work to solve a problem. At some point, they gave up on the first approach and tried a different one. Immediately incredible progress was made. It looked like this: It was literally…
Every year, I hand write a bunch of holiday cards for my co-workers. No one else in the company does this (to my knowledge). I don’t know why not. It’s a wonderful gesture that most people really appreciate. An email doesn’t have nearly the same emotional connection as pen to…