“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…