Imagine giving a person a copy of Intuit QuickBooks. The person has no accounting knowledge and no experience with this software or competing software. In other words, this is a layman. Imagine that their job was to get QuickBooks up and running for a small business with 30 people and 5 million in revenue. Result:…
Recently, I interviewed a person for a user interface engineering position. I made the analogy that the resume was like a user interface and that the candidate was the application. As a user, I wanted to accomplish my goal: to learn about the candidate. My user experience started the minute I picked up the resume, before I…
As one becomes an expert in any hobby or craft, one learns about the best equipment that is possible to buy. The dynamics of the cost-value curve are as follows: In the beginning, you can spend the least amount possible. This is what many amateurs do. The quality is pretty low. By spending a little…
There is a problem that I can’t seem to find a solution for. Check out this screenshot below. It is a screen grab of 12px arial from different browsers next to Photoshop trying to make the same font. (Zoom: 200%) Notice how the same text looks the same in all of the different browsers on…
I wish I had a magic analytics machine. You could ask it any question you want and it would blink a LED lights, beep boop a few times, click clack click and within 10 seconds, spit out the answer. It would be able to tabulate people’s thoughts or impossible data to collect. It could even…
The media has been trying their best to keep changing the subject. It got me thinking about distractions. For example: If you were trying to focus the world’s attention on the Iraq war (2003) then you sure as hell didn’t want New Orleans to be submerged in water. If you were raising money for New…
I hired a new UX Designer who is in the process of learning about the company. It got me thinking about how many people go through this same process. I am sure there is a bell curve of people who have ample time to learn and others who are thrown into the deep end on…
Punchline: Yes! Business-to-business applications should have a sense of humor just like consumer applications. Enterprise users are human beings. They have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts just like you do. They watch sports and sit-coms on TV just like you do. They laugh, they cry and have emotions just like everyone else. Enterprise users have…
Years ago, Bill Mirbach suggested I read the book When Prophecy Fails:A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. The book was about a group in the 50’s that predicted the end of the world. Several academics joined the group and studied it from the inside. The basic…
I’ve noticed that topics I might write about here, I ended up writing on Quora. (Actually Atanasio noticed it, but still, the point is the same.) Hmm, not sure where that is going. An interesting question about how designers deal with frustration. Here is my answer: I take the product I design very personally. If…
I think I am highly subject to fads. I used to use the jQuery mailing list every day. Then it was Experts-Exchange.com, then UXExchange.com, then UI.stackexchange.com and most recently it’s Quora.com. I am generally hooked into the UX, UI, Design topics. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks. Here are some of my…
Every now and then, one is surprised by something and then forgets about it. I do my best to remember the things that surprise me. I try to linger on the things that make my eyes open up a little wider and make my mind work a little harder. I believe this is good for…
Technical Debt is a fairly common metaphor used in software development. (Nice write up.) Ward Cunningham first drew the comparison between technical complexity and debt in a 1992 experience report: Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The…
Real Artists Ship – Steve Jobs When you are working on a product, feature or even service there are two competing ideals. On the one hand, you want the product to be perfect and work well with no bugs. On the other hand, you want to just ship it, to let it go to market…