Part of this post is just a test. However, the setup process of Twitter Tools is insane now. It’s not their fault. Twitter has a ridiculous serious of complex hoops to jump through to get this stuff to work. You have to put in all kinds of technical info. The basic premise is simple. I post a…
How do you get people to stop, turn around and look at what you have? One way is to turn something on its head. Case in point: Cee Lo Gren’s Fuck You song. He took an Al Green-like melody and Motown sensibility and sings beautifully, smiling the whole time, telling this girl, “Fuck Yoooooouuuuu”. It’s…
I have a wide variety of risk profiles. In a restaurant, I like to try odd combinations of foods that I don’t know if they will taste good together. On the other hand, I have a much lower tolerance for risk when it comes to driving. In my professional career, I have been open to…
One thing I hate is being called a bottleneck. I work pretty quickly and usually stay ahead of engineers needs. I think I produce designs pretty quickly with a good degree of fidelity and creativity (if I do say so myself). However, there are times when I feel behind. Usually, this is right after a decision is…
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend” Theophrastus (Greek Peripatetic philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, 372-287 bc) Time is a non-renewable energy source. You can’t unwind the clock. Time is precious, but I didn’t always think so. Time used to seem infinite. Like a refrigerator full of my favorite foods. Now, it seems like…
I had a major UX insight recently. The learning came through my recent phone upgrade. I couldn’t take my HTC Touch Pro 2 anymore. Windows Mobile was just an awful experience. It called people magically from inside my pocket and refused to answer when they called me. Verizon allowed me to upgrade a bit early,…
Many designers I know shun using big fonts. They want the text to be as tiny as possible. Years ago, I used to argue with my partners at Koko Interactive about font-size. Katie wanted Gigantic; Spencer wanted invisible; and I wanted in the middle. I now know, Katie was right. Gigantic is great when you…
Are you a craftsman in your job? Do you look at how other people do it and comb over the details, critiquing or praising each element? Do you consider yourself a student of the game? Someone who is striving to get better each day? Do you read blogs and books on your job subject matter?…
I made this page as a proof-of-concept for the Google Translate API. The Google Translate developer page was helpful, as was the jQuery wrapper for it. It was easy to implement and works very quickly. Unfortunately, the results stink. Sarah, who sites next to me, speaks Chinese. She says the results made no sense. Pavel,…
At work, there are a few servers that are getting launched for a new service. I said that the name of the URL is a design element and users will see it and react to it. I got several looks of disbelief, but I pushed on this as a strong UX principle. The user is…
Several years ago, I went to a P-Camp Unfonference. (It was fun and I strongly recommended giving it a try.) It was at that conference that I realized how long most release cycles were. They were running quarterly releases or longer. One company was still on CD releases track once per year. Software as a Service (SaaS)…
A great design solution usually doesn’t show up first in line. It doesn’t have a T-Shirt that says “I’m the best answer”. It’s hard to know when you struck gold and when you struck plain dirt. This is the same for hiring employees. Who knows if the “next” candidate will be even better than this…
StackOverflow is a really awesome movement on the web that is revolutionizing Question & Answer forums. Experts-Exchange.com is really being left in the dust mainly because of the user experience of this new upstart. There is an elegance to the overall design that I enjoy very much. The use of reputation points and badges is…
There is a particular position within an engineering group that I think contributes tremendously to the overall user experience of the customer; the escalation engineer. This is the person who does the initial triage of any bug coming in from the support team. The funny thing is that most engineers don’t want to do this…