I work with some great engineers. One in particular is fantastic, named Crash. He is a backend guy, doesn’t touch the UI much. A demo to him is all accomplished at the command prompt. He said something yesterday that was abaolutely brilliant and summed up my admiration for him. When…
I love the feeling one gets when they realize they are not alone. July 26, 2007, I was at Ajax Experience and asked the presenter Chris Wilson from Microsoft a question: Outlook 2007 doesn’t use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, “Why did Microsoft do…
I am reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. So far, its fabulous and I would suggest it to everyone. Early on in the book, there is a small section on The Beginner’s Mind. Some summarize the concept this way: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s…
I was helping two co-workers the other day. One wanted to present information in an email and the other in PowerPoint to be used with customers. (Pretty common tasks, you think?) The tricky part for me was to avoid just “fixing it”. I wanted to teach them to fish, not…
Somewhere in my childhood, I forgot exactly how to cry. I can remember exactly two times crying and it was such a tremendously powerful feeling. I was watching a movie this evening and there was a really sad, sad scene. I wanted desperately to cry. I could feel the lump…
I have been reading (and really enjoying) Seth Godin’s book, Small is the new Big. His blog is chock-full of these little insightful nuggets of wisdom. He produces them at a crazy fast rate. In his book, he talked about Squidoo, which I have heard of but never checked out.…
My least productive time of the day is 20-30 minutes before a meeting. I know that the meeting is coming, so I don’t want to be deep in the middle of something when that moment to leave my desk comes. So I end up doing a bunch of small things…
Recently, Mozilla Firefox has been challenged on my desktop as the default browser. I keep flip-flopping between Google Chrome and Firefox 3.5. I was really excited to see Aza Raskin taking the UX reigns at Firefox to see what someone with creative mojo could do with such a powerful program. …
Recently, I was in some conversations about development practices. I believe the methodology used in a technology company has a huge impact on the quality of the product. I drew up a little diagram to show the differences under ideal conditions. To be as fair as possible, I had the…
I couldn’t help myself. I downloaded and installed the Office 2010 technical preview. It’s definetely not baked all the way through, but it clearly shows the direction Microsoft is going. The big news is that Outlook now has a ribbon. Additionally, they have made some significant changes to the Outlook…
Check out this example of the new Kodak Gallery. Lightboxes have been done and done and done again, but for some reason, people keep improving (thankfully) on the technique. This example really impressed me. Some details: Nice mirror effect under the image to make it look like it’s on glass.…
A friend asked me for a list of books that are required reading for a User Experience developer. Specifically, this friend is a graphic designer and might want to branch out to UX in general. Feel free to add to my list here. The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional…
I need to upload one of these to YouTube. Which one is better? Matthew singing Puff the Magic Dragon with me on Ukulele. Click each to listen. First Take: Second Take: Matthew is alot of fun to be around.
I had referenced this piece of art in a previous post. I scanned it in. It’s a little hard to tell, but the layers are made out of tissue paper. There is a third wave of waves that is faint in the picture. It looks best on a window with…