One sign that you are doing something right is the willingness of your customers to reccomend you. Some do this with a statement, some a twitter, and some just by word of mouth. The most powerful testamonial is on video. This is the most personal kind of reccomendation. The person is putting their face online…
I was perusing the design section of the bookstore and noticed something odd. I couldn’t find any B2B (Business-to-Business) application design books. Clearly, it is a different process and skill set than a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) application. Let’s take a case study. Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry have alot to be proud of.…
Apparently this has been available to watch for a long time and I just didn’t know it. I can’t figure out a way to download the original video source. Hopefully, I can get a hold of that before too long. Original Source Link Listening to my own voice is bizarre. I sound like my brother.…
What does it mean to be a design driven company? Every company has someone doing design, so why aren’t they ‘design-driven’? Does “Design” and “Usability” mean the same thing? Intuit considered themselves a usability-first company in their products, but I would say (after working their for a year) that they were downright hostile to designers.…
For anyone who has ever used a Microsoft product, this will seem familiar. Why can’t Microsoft respect the “Remember My Credentials” checkbox? They never remember anything! Why bother with the box making me think it would work and then just ignore my request. Rather than complain bitterly, I did some googling to try and find…
This has been itching me for a month. On May 30, Google had posted this blog about their original favIcon. I liked it. Simple G. Then they updated in January to the colorful g. Since then it has been distracting me. It doesn’t look like Google to me. It doesn’t remind me of Google. The…
Coincidentally, I posted a little UX thing about waiting spinners. Today, I see in Ajaxian a link to http://preloaders.net/. Very nice work. These are creative and different. Finally, we are taking steps forward. These are a great start. In general, we need to be creative and use spinners that are unique to our applications. Don’t fall…
All three kids are coughing with a fever. What’s up with that? It’s like a germ factory in here! Next, Katie will get sick. For some reason, it rarely affects me. When I was a kid, I had to fake being sick the night before and then follow through in the morning. That way my…
I love talking to groups about user experience. It is so much fun. Slideshow behind me and eyeballs in front, it is energizing and fun. I wish I could do it all day long. I have been doing my best to get better and better and the medium, but practice definetely makes perfect. I…
We have been watching the entire television series from Netflix for The Muppets. We watch it with the text “interesting tidbits” option turned on so we can read about the scene we are watching. The boys are loving it. The design of the show is brilliant. First the name, The Muppets. It’s like a puppet,…
Let’s say you are working on an application. There are hundreds of decisions every week, sometimes every day. Decisions can be big and small. How quickly should something animate? What color should the button be? Is it better 2px to the left or to the right? Decisions like these accumulate into the design of your…
Consider the spinner. There are even sites to help you build these ubiquitous items. They serve a very useful function. At heart, the spinner is an animation to take your mind off the fact that the system isn’t instantaneous. They are also there to communicate to you, “I know what you want, and I am…
Have you noticed these new little buttons on Google search? These are pretty interesting considering I haven’t really heard one blip from Google on the actual utility of this feature. I tried clicking on a few of them. Either it is affecting my own personal search ordering or they are keeping track. Notice how it…
This morning I turned on one of our computers, a Dell D610 laptop. For some reason, the mouse just refused to work. The keypad wasn’t working, and the nubbin stick in the middle didn’t work either. I’m not sure what happened, but it’s like the devices just ceased to exist. However, I was able to…