When you only have a few items to look at, you can pay alot of attention. I have lots of items begging for my attention. Emails, RSS feed articles, critical alerts from systems, feature requests, ideas, bug reports, summary emails and more all vie for our daily attention. When there are only a few items, it is…
I have been a Microsoft guy my whole life. I used DOS, Windows 3.1 as a kid. I beta tested Windows 95, Windows 98, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. I also beta tested every browser they have ever shipped from the first version of Internet Explorer as well as every version of…
A story from a friend, but it probably sounds familiar to many of you. It is related to the magic triangle of Scope, Resources and Time. You can only focus on one. Trying to focus on two or three is a fool’s game and inevitably leads to failure. Here is an illustration of trying to…
Ben Nadel’s website uses a particular User Experience technique that I think is absolutely brilliant. Let’s call it “names and faces”. The idea was originally in a book “Made to Stick” by Chip & Dan Heath. Summary of the story: The Daily Record, founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams, has a simple core idea: local coverage.…
Conceptual Design Conceptual Design is the ability to communicate a holistic architecture of a large product, service or solution. A conceptual designer is able to mockup the end-to-end, top-to-bottom structure of this solution. This includes a strong understanding of the technologies involved, without which the conceptual designer is doing “Ivory Tower Design”. This kind of…
The video from my Sencha presentation is live on Vimeo. Whenever I see myself on video, I have a strong negative reaction to the way I look, the way my voice sounds, the way I move my arms like I am popping and locking my way through the presentation. I asked around a bit and…
One idea about a leader is that someone does things that are worth following. This does not mean they actually have followers. For example, Van Gogh lived his life in mostly poverty and isolation, but people have followed his lead in art a million times over since then. Leaders in this sense do something different…
User Experience starts very early. It includes the prejudices they come to the table with and the slogan you put on the first TV commercial they saw. Nissan and Chevy have two very different approaches. Chevy Volt: It’s more car than electric. There are several messages hidden inside this slogan. This is a $30k-$40k…
Over the past few months I have seen many examples of people trying to make a certain approach work to solve a problem. At some point, they gave up on the first approach and tried a different one. Immediately incredible progress was made. It looked like this: It was literally the day they switched that…
Every year, I hand write a bunch of holiday cards for my co-workers. No one else in the company does this (to my knowledge). I don’t know why not. It’s a wonderful gesture that most people really appreciate. An email doesn’t have nearly the same emotional connection as pen to paper. In a world of…
I am interviewing people to hire a Sr. UX Designer. Guess what is the first thing I do whenever I receive a resume? If you guessed “Look at the resume” you would be wrong. The first thing I do is search for the person’s name in Google. Unless you live in a cave, you have…
According to Wikipedia: Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression or winter blues, is a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year, experience depressive symptoms in the winter… …prevalence in the adult population of the US ranges from 1.4 percent (Florida) to 9.7 percent (New Hampshire) Apparently, it’s related to…
I spent the other day at the Moskone Center in San Francisco attending Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce. There were alot of people there, way more than I expected. Last year it was crowded and big, but this year it just seemed gargantuan. Marketo had a platinum booth this year, right in the front. We had…
I often dream of being a famous song writer. Being the front man in a famous rock band isn’t the point for me. Music draws enormous groups of people and focuses them extremely concise topics. In short, the audience sings the song along with the band. They memorize the lyrics at home and in their car and…