Years ago, Alan Cooper pioneered the concept of personas, which are basically fictitious people who represent the customer. They are stand-ins that are used to create empathy for the real people. They are created by amalgamating different characteristics of potential customers into one pretend person. Personas are very useful for decision making, especially for the…
You have to hand it to Google. They innovate. They come out with stuff that is new and different. I like that about them. It makes me want to use and buy their products. Google Wave is a great example. What is Google Wave? I imagined the conversation when they pitched the idea. In my…
Katie lost her flip phone. We just upgraded it last month and we didn’t purchase the insurance. d’Oh! Some kid picked it up and started calling all his friends saying, “Dude! I just got a new phone, this is my new number!” Katie was disappointed in the lack of goodness in her fellow citizens. Ok,…
Last night, I helped out a company called CVSDude with some UX stuff. An interesting question came up: What does “Dude” mean in the United States? Words have enormous power to frame what something is or isn’t. To evoke imagery or emotions, words are often the most overlooked part of the user experience. Here is…
I got this email the other day from Google. Hi, We wanted to let you know about some exciting changes to your Google paid storage plan. While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. On Tuesday, November…
It took me a looooong time to get Office 2010 beta 2 installed. Uninstalling 2010b1 was a disaster. I had to manually remove hundreds of registry keys to kill the thing. Finally, I got the new version installed. This is a very interesting release. Microsoft has spent quite a bit of time working on the…
Still using the HTC Touch Pro 2. I don’t hate it although there are some significant flaws, like the placement of the “sleep” button. It’s exactly in the most annoying place. Anyway, Microsoft has been threatening to release a 6.5 upgrade ROM for my device, but no dice yet. Meanwhile, they released the Windows Mobile…
I have an addiction to answering questions. I can’t stop myself. I want to (have to) help. I used to use Experts-Exchange.com alot. However, they have no UX section and once I stopped using jQuery, I didn’t find it that compelling. I tried StackOverflow, but I got locked out of my account and can’t get…
I work up thinking it was an hour ago, and missed the train to San Francisco, so it looks like I will miss the last 3 hours of the conference. Still, my opinion of the Business of Software conference is that it is the best conference I have ever attended. Not that I have been…
This morning, I opened up my email and had a strange experience. No email. Really? None? So just on a lark, I checked the spam folder. Mine was full of 3600 messages. So I started looking through. Before too long, I had 10 false positives. Ack! No wonder I think GMail does a great job…
I upgraded to Firefox 3.6 just to try it out. In Windows 7, it did this subtle thing which completely annoys me and forced me to uninstall. In earlier versions, the window at the bottom worked properly. Now, it creates this multiple window model in the bar. When I CLICK on the Firefox icon, I…
I loved Ryan Carson‘s presentation. Awesome content, and wonderful use of music and video. I loved it. Here is a summary of the lessons he taught us. These are 8 things to do to have a remarkable company. Be Passionate Remind your team that it matters Be Opinionated Blog about it Love your customers Physically…
Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot just pointed us to this great free tool to analyze your website called Website Grader. Check it out. I found it fascinating for commadot.com. The part I liked best was the little “working on it” spinner.
I don’t use Twitter all that much. However, since I am at the Business of Software conference, I decided to participate. The hashtag is #BoS2009. At first it was interesting, although alot of the content was mundane. It was just repeating what the person said. I downloaded TweetDeck to try it in a different context.…