Nice collection of quotes about Design. Here is mine: Design is Decisions. I love to point out all the decisions around us that create our environment to my kids. We are surrounded by decisions of people. Some made with good thinking and some with faulty thinking. Design isn’t good or bad. It’s just the decisions…
The Mozilla Labs UX series is really interesting. Great use of community to get ideas for the next generation of the browser. I think they should use something similar to ideaExchange, but that is another issue. One participant is Aza Raskin. He just posted an idea about tabs. However, I think the most interesting thing…
A long time ago I heard a comment about watches. You can tell alot about someone from the watch they wear. Watches aren’t like clothes where you pick a different outfit every day. It lasts for a while. People pick their watches pretty carefully. The watch reflects the person’s personality. Al Gore had a calculator…
Mozilla is a cool insitution. I dig what they are doing. This is a perfect example. They are asking for prototypes or ideas about the future of web browsing. I find many of the ideas interesting and inspiring, but I also find most of them disconnected from real world examples. Especially when you strip away…
This weekend is just me and the boys. It is not terribly hard, but we are watching way more TV than usual. I am tired and my brain doesn’t work as well. Katie feels this every day. 🙁 We went to the San Mateo County Fair on Friday. It was pretty lame. I remember seeing…
I have recently fallen in love with a new UI tool for large trees. There are numerous examples of applications that need this. Any application that has a tree on the left with more than 25 nodes would qualify. (Outlook, Salesforce, Marketo, MSDN, Windows File Manager, etc) Additionally, all photo sharing sites would benefit from…
Consider the three paths illustrated below. Path A represents perfect software. It takes a long time to build and a long time to debug. However, it is a mature product with zero defects. (Is this a real product??) Anyway, the point is that the user has no issues as he travels from his need to…
I rarely login to Feedburner even though I use it for my blog feeds. It’s a good service. I have a very specific critique though about the homepage. Every time I go to their homepage, I look for the button to login. I look all around the page, mostly in the blue area next to…
A while back someone had pointed me to World of Solitaire and asked for some UX advice. I tell it like it is, so for good and for bad, I will give my best advice. First, the good stuff. This is a technical marvel. Honestly, this is a ridiculously rich experience all done with 500kb…
Lately, I have been thinking about speed as the number one factor for software satisfaction. When a piece of software is fast, it makes the user so much happier than if it is just “powerful”. For example, in the early 90’s I loved XTreeGold. It was wicked fast and could do what I wanted so…
I just finished the book, Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman, Jr. Although I appreciated his overall view and the points he was making, I just thought the book fell a little flat for me. In comparison, Don’t Make Me Think, was a much more enjoyable read. Neither book really introduced me to any new…
I have been compiling some UX rules in my head getting ready for my AjaxExperience talk in October. Here are some that I have. Not too much detail here, I will expand on them at a later date. Don’t bend your users. Given 10 users, you will get 8 different ways they try to succeed…
I use Powerpoint 2007 to do all my prototyping and requirements. It’s a great tool. Much much better than PPT 2003. Over the last 18 months, I have used this technique to great success. Check out these two examples. One is an older style and the other is newer. The newer one has animation, so…
Someone asked me today what the difference was between UX and Product Management. I explained with an analogy. User Experience (UX) is like being Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory was the ultimate in UX Design. Not only was everything awesome, but it was easy to use. No one had to ask how to eat in…