• The UX of Trying to Upgrade my Wife’s Phone

    We have Verizon and love the service in general.  Great reception compared to AT&T, which we had previously.  We have had very simple LG phones for a long time.  Since we have been in the contract for 2 years, we have the option of upgrading. Katie desires to check her…

  • The UX of Twitter (part 1)

    At work, I had noticed that there was s0me activity on Twitter around the product.  In other words (for my mom), people were publically saying things about Marketo, some good and some bad.  I joined twitter to see what the hubbub was.  I now have  Twitter account with actual tweets. …

  • The End of The Shield

    The Shield was my favorite show on television.  It’s over now.  They had 7 seasons and went out on top.  The show never got boring, never became ridiculous.  No one was ever abducted by aliens.  The writing was always excellent, the plot was great and the acting was superb.  I…

  • The UX of Apple Emails

    Apple usually has great experience design.  The one exception is their emails.  They always show up and look horrible.  They rely WAY too much on images and the result is that their presentation is unintelligible. On the left is the email the way it actually looks.  On the right is…

  • The UX of D&D 4th Edition

    I used to play aD&D (Advanced Dungeones and Dragons) when I was about 10 years old.  It was made by a company called TSR. It was a great game that exercised my imagination and taught me how to think creatively.  It also gave me a life-long appreciation for mythology and…

  • The UX of Wagonwheel Projects

    There is an old story I tell to describe a common engineering project that goes wrong. The Setup A customer wanted us to build a content management system for them.  They insisted we use Linux/Perl instead of Windows/Cold Fusion.  We had never used Linux/Perl before, but one of our employees…

  • The SuperDiv – Getting Closer

    Liquid Canvas is the closest thing I have seen yet to my dream of a SuperDiv. The SuperDiv is a DIV that I can apply styles like: Rounded Corners Shadows/Glows Fades Transparencies Of course, there are details on each on of those. The Liquid Canvas demo is really good.  I…

  • The UX of UltraClean Floss

    I love when things are designed well. Recently, I had my teeth cleaned.  I don’t go to the dentist enough, but when I do, I usually get all serious about my teeth for a few months.  I was in the drug store looking for floss and spent about 10 minutes…

  • Tilt-Shift Photography

    I had never heard of Tilt-Shift Photography before.  This smashing magazine article on it is fascinating.  It’s all optical illusions using focus/blur.  I love it.  Check out the time-lapse stuff at the bottom.  It blows my mind. How awesome is it that you can trick the mind with just some…

  • jQuery Lightbox

    I don’t have the opportunity to use plugins as much as I would like.  Today, I stumbled upon one that I think has excellent UX.  It is the jQuery LightBox.  Keyboard shortcuts, nice fade transitions, great usability for next/back and pleasant titles. If I were using a lightbox plugin, I…

  • Reframing Gay Marriage

    I just finished reading the very short (100 pages) book called Don’t think of an Elephant by George Lakoff.  I thought it was excellent and highly recomend it.  I want to try it out. Proposition 8 passed in California, unfortunately.  It banned Marriage for Gay/Lesbian couples.  It defined marriage as…

  • Mr. Fusion

    Remember in Back to the Future when Doc fed his car garbage and it turned it into energy?  It was called Mr. Fusion.  I thought, “What a great idea!  Trun garbage into energy!” Well, they were pretty smart, I guess.  Today I heard news about a laser at Lawrence Livermore…

  • Email Template with 3D Effect

    This one is inspired from a picture I saw with a shadow on the bottom.  The shadow doesn’t go all the way up, so I don’t have to worry about repeating background images.  It was a little bit of a pain but it worked out in the end.  I should…

  • TinyMCE and WordPress

    Hmm, I seemed to have broken my wordpress editor.  It started with me trying to install the plugin to make the comments allow rich text editing.  This threw an error about some lang function not being there.  The forums weren’t that helpful, but one said to upgrade TinyMCE.  So I…