I believe that you shouldn’t design in the chronological order the user will use the product. In other words, you don’t need to design the login screen first. You can pick a point in the middle. I call it an “anchor point”. This point serves as one of the important foundation interfaces. It shows a…
A colleague once asked me why Craigslist had become so successful with such bad design. Craigslist is a complicated company without a ton of information online. It doesn’t employee many people and has made a good deal of money. On the surface, it looks ugly. However, it has been very popular. Fascinating reading on Quora about why…
Yesterday, I was staring at my screen trying to figure out how a user would create and manage the object I conceived. I wasn’t even staring at a blank canvas. I was staring at a hole, a nothing, an absence of something. It was my job to get rid of this “nothing” and replace it…
When designing something new, you have to choose what it looks like and how it acts. One designer said to me, “It should be timeless and classic.” I disagreed. If you are designing something new, it should be noteworthy and contemporary. One example is the iPhone. Pick up an original version and it will not at…
Dear Mr./Mrs LinkedIn, You have the most potential and most fuckups of any site on the web. I love you and I hate you. The Good You are THE defacto social network for professionals. There are plenty of times that your user interface does the right thing. Discovery of new people is usually pretty accurate.…
Twitter and LinkedIn have very different algorithms for me. Who I follow on Twitter Hardly anyone. The stream gets to be too much for me. I can’t follow it. So I end up following just the accounts I really care about. It’s just 5. Codrops – I am in love with the effects on this…
I crushed it today. Yes, I’m not humble about this. No apologies. Let me rewind. I’ve been working on the information architecture for the Engagio application over the past couple of weeks. This means that I am wrapping my head around the various objects you need to do Account Based Marketing. Think about a random…
I often told people that Eloqua had more functionality than Marketo. I also said it didn’t matter. Marketo beat Eloqua for a different reason. It wasn’t what you could do, but HOW you could do it. UX Rule #12: It’s not how many things you can do, it’s HOW you can get them done. It’s…
Everything has an amount that is “just right”. It’s often called the Goldilocks principle. Example: These planets either have too much greenhouse effect or too little to be able to sustain life as we know it. The differences between the three planets have been termed the “Goldilocks Principle” (Venus is too hot, Mars is too…
I’ve officially switched my allegiance from IconExperience to Icons8. IconExperience They did a great job for many years of having a comprehensive iconset in a wonderful system where you could find what you wanted. However, after the V collection, the next bunch of sets were pretty low quality. The O-collection is too chunky and ugly,…
In many organizations, the product managers (PM) are the ones who define the “solution” for their project. They create wireframes and detailed UI requirements. They basically put the product designers (UX) into the role of “make it look pretty”. UI Graphic design is important, but it is not User Experience Design. What is User Experience…
I’ve heard the expression from executives, “Let’s slay this dragon once and for all.” What they mean is “We have had complaints from customers on [topic x]. Let’s do a project that makes all of those complaints go away. The dragon in this metaphor is the complaints that customers have. I think this is the…
As a designer, I have always appreciated tight integrations. The fact that I can copy a bunch of cells in Excel and paste them into PowerPoint is just awesome. When designing Marketo, I thought of the solution as one small city. There was the neighborhood of making landing pages and the adjacent neighborhood of forms,…
Sometimes, you need to reinvent something. I’ve done it several times in my career and have successful. However sometimes, you just gotta leave it alone. Microsoft just released a new product called Sway. (I’ll review it later maybe). Anyway, they felt the need to reinvent this. Bold is no longer B. It’s E. E for…