The reality is that everyone has negative feedback about any design. It doesn’t mean that it’s all stupid feedback, although much of it is exactly that. However, it does mean that a designer is constantly bombarded with negative critique from design peers, management and executives, engineering and product management. It is crucial to maintain a…
I didn’t do well in High School, 2.2 grade point average. In fact, I fell asleep (often) in Math class. I started well, trying to pay attention. However, that didn’t last long. The droning of the teacher saying mindless facts, asking us to rote memorize them so we can parrot them back at test time…
I hate iTunes 11. Did I get to the point too quickly? OK, I’ll try again. I use iTunes specifically because I use iPods. We have 3-4 iPods, more if you count the ones we have lost. We use them mainly for music, especially in the car. I use iTunes to manage the music and…
I recently gave my Samsung Series 9 to my wife as a hand-me-down present. This left me without a new laptop. I obviously couldn’t live with that, so I had a choice. Either buy a new laptop or get one through work. The one I lusted after was the Acer Aspire S7. That thing is…
Flashes of inspiration are a critical ingredient for great design. However, they really are brief moments in the life of a project. The real work of making something great is time consuming. It is iterating and polishing and re-ordering and re-conceptualizing and backtracking and focusing relentlessly for long periods of time. Design is a marathon,…
Verizon just upgraded my phone to Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1. It has some minor improvements, but generally speaking it isn’t much of a change. The icons look different and the email clients look newer. There is more color in the built-in apps like Calendar and Email. They have a new widget I am using for…
I am a pretty avid reader. I used to read on the train when I used public transportation every day. These days, I drive 10 minutes to work, so my reading has been fewer minutes per day. For this reason, it REALLY sucks when a book is bad. Specifically, I only read non-fiction, either design/psychology…
A huge portion of User Interface design is finding the right levels of abstractions. What I mean by this is that you have to decide what the information hierarchy is and how they map to mental models. Example System : WordPress Blog (Good)You have posts and pages. Those are objects within the system. Within those, you…
Iconography is a specialized talent. Working in such small confines making images that convey specific meanings. Previously, I have heavily endorsed using IconExperience. Over 2,500 icons in lots of sizes, with and without shadows. It’s a cornucopia of excellent images. They are very easy to mashup to create a nearly infinite set. Recently, I have…
Take a look at this fascinating 1 minute video. How can a little monkey like that have such an immediate and intense reaction to something that is unfair? We clearly have a fairness gene. Something in our brains that reacts strongly to this sort of situation. The little monkey is the 99%! How many different…
Go to any computer program you use on a daily or weekly basis. Find the online help. Next, find an article in the middle, something fairly obscure, but something you are aware of. (Not an edge case, but not a “overview” either). Read it. No seriously, slow down and read every word. I know you…
One feature I like about LinkedIn is how you can write a recommendation for someone. Basically, you sing their praises and it ends up on their profile. I have 36 recommendations for me and 58 recommendations I have written for others. Writing recommendations for excellent people makes me feel good and I think does a…
In product design, I love nothing more than being able to conquer two goals with one feature. I just did this the other day and feel very proud of myself. Almost smug. The feature was targeted towards customers, but I saw how it could be twisted, just slightly and it would become the greatest feature…
So much of UX is using logic and common sense to solve a problem. However, much of it is counter-intuitive to people. I feel like I am being Captain Obvious, but others think it is the opposite of obvious. Quite frustrating. Here is a quick top 10 examples: The more things you put on a…