There is a simple tip I give people about how to be good at UX. Turn your sensitivity to annoyances all the way up to 11. I asked a candidate to look at a table we eating at in a restaurant. I asked him, “What do you see that could be improved?” He said, “Nothing.”…
This is clearly a religious topic, so please open your mind while reading…yeah, good luck with that. My whole team (5 designers) use Macs. They all have MacBook Pro laptops. The tools we use are: MS PowerPoint for storyboarding designs MS Outlook for corporate email Adobe CS5 Chrome/Firefox Jira (Bug Tracker) Wiki Google Docs MS Excel (rarely)…
When I talk about the UX of something, really I am thinking about the psychology of it. I think about how it feels and how it makes people act. Of course, sometimes I stretch the definition a bit and I apologize for that. This week is a big change week for me. Lot’s of things…
I was never one to think about “fashion” or “dressing nice” or “image”. (All air-quotes) Last year, a co-worker told me that he has paid a personal consultant to help pick out a wardrobe. The truth is: he looked good! I looked at myself in the mirror and it struck me: My clothes don’t fit…
What kind of crazy designer thought this was a good idea? (Screen of an ATM machine I was using) Press Enter to Exit. It’s like Windows 95-Windows Vista: Press Start to Shut Down. I don’t ask alot. Just make sense. They had buttons for Yes and No on the pad. Why not say, “Exit Now?…
Perfect work. 100%. Every detail polished. You look at Apple products and this sort of precision and attention to detail is obvious. Steve Jobs was a master at the details and he created a company that will carry on (hopefully) his legacy. For Steve, there was very little gap between a perfect product and one…
Pyschology and UX are very closely related. How do people act? What do they think? How do they decide? To be a great UX Designer, you must understand human psychology as a core aspect of your craft. One interesting psychological phenomenon is called Fundamental Attribution Error. Take the following two examples: If you are late…
I bought two iPod Shuffle mp3 players for my kids. While in the store, I looked at the program GarageBand. It was pretty slick. In addition to learning tutorials on piano and guitar, it had real artist lessons on their songs. Sting taught you guitar for Roxanne, Alex Lifeson taught guitar on Spirit of the…
I just installed the latest Windows 8 on my Samsung Series 9 laptop. Much better than last version. I am still not a fan of Metro and I think the UI took a step backwards in many ways, but still an improvement from the previous disaster. The process was pretty smooth, except that it did a…
There is nothing worse than struggling with poorly designed software. Well, OK, lot’s of things are worse, but still it sucks. It makes you feel helpless, angry, frustrated, stupid and unproductive. I feel this way when I use JIRA. It’s so complicated. Configuration is byzantine. Links don’t look like links. Plugins don’t work. It’s not…
There is an important skill in a good designer that I call Design Defense. In any design, there are choices that one must work through. There are always alternative designs, but the one you choose should have skilled and comprehensive thinking behind it. Design Defense is about explaining those choices quickly to other stakeholders. It…
It’s incredible how freeing the exercise is. Kill your sacred cows. Think about the project you work on with a colleague and say “What would the world be like if we didn’t have __________?” Some of the greatest companies killed sacred cows and then had wild success. Salesforce.com said, “What if we didn’t have on-premise…
Every time we release a big upgrade to our SaaS software, I always get this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel rotten about all of the features that didn’t make the cut and all of the potential bugs that may still be lingering like little roadside bombs. I imagine users getting…
My wife needed dish-washing detergent and I found myself in a Walgreen pharmacy. I spotted the following product on the shelf. I thought for a second and smiled. Then I said the word you just said in your head when you saw the picture. I said it in exactly the same way while bobbing my head. “Nice!”…