Part of this post is just a test. However, the setup process of Twitter Tools is insane now. It’s not their fault. Twitter has a ridiculous serious of complex hoops to jump through to get this stuff to work. You have to put in all kinds of technical info. The basic premise…
How do you get people to stop, turn around and look at what you have? One way is to turn something on its head. Case in point: Cee Lo Gren’s Fuck You song. He took an Al Green-like melody and Motown sensibility and sings beautifully, smiling the whole time, telling…
I have a wide variety of risk profiles. In a restaurant, I like to try odd combinations of foods that I don’t know if they will taste good together. On the other hand, I have a much lower tolerance for risk when it comes to driving. In my professional career,…
One thing I hate is being called a bottleneck. I work pretty quickly and usually stay ahead of engineers needs. I think I produce designs pretty quickly with a good degree of fidelity and creativity (if I do say so myself). However, there are times when I feel behind. Usually, this is…
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend” Theophrastus (Greek Peripatetic philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, 372-287 bc) Time is a non-renewable energy source. You can’t unwind the clock. Time is precious, but I didn’t always think so. Time used to seem infinite. Like a refrigerator full of my favorite…
I had a major UX insight recently. The learning came through my recent phone upgrade. I couldn’t take my HTC Touch Pro 2 anymore. Windows Mobile was just an awful experience. It called people magically from inside my pocket and refused to answer when they called me. Verizon allowed me…
Many designers I know shun using big fonts. They want the text to be as tiny as possible. Years ago, I used to argue with my partners at Koko Interactive about font-size. Katie wanted Gigantic; Spencer wanted invisible; and I wanted in the middle. I now know, Katie was right.…
Are you a craftsman in your job? Do you look at how other people do it and comb over the details, critiquing or praising each element? Do you consider yourself a student of the game? Someone who is striving to get better each day? Do you read blogs and books…
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.…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…