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…
Google Maps and street view is getting scary. For a while, Microsoft’s Maps, was the closest look at my house. But the Street View for Google is just crazy. It’s a digital photo from the street of every house in my neighboorhood. Interestingly, I can’t make out any of the license plates on the cars. …
I recently upgraded my DirecTV so that I get HD and DVR in one box. It took a week to get it actually working. Some technical problem, lets skip that. The device has an ethernet port so I bought a special ethernet to wifi connection. It took a little while, but I finally got it…
I don’t have a Blackberry. I appreciate it’s UX very much for the primary user. It’s downright addicting. However, the UX of the person WATCHING the person using the Blackberry isn’t nearly as good. Hold on a sec. Click. Spin ball. Type. Wait. Wait. Ok, I’m back. How lame is that? Every person with a…
Business Model #1: Enterprise This is when your product costs over 100k. Maybe even in the millions. The sales cycle is pretty long. It requires lots of documents to make the sale and build the product. RFI, RFP, MRD, PRD, Roadmap, the list goes on and on. This is a tough business to be in. …
A nice review of Marketo. I really feel like Marketo is starting to gain momentum in a serious way. Articles like this make me feel all warm inside that I was able to have a positive impact on a company and on the people who use the product. This raises an important thought for me. …
Every once in a while, I do a little exploration on the web to look for interesting things. I don’t do it that often because it is a road that leads to everywhere and I could get lost for hours. However, I feel compelled to do it a little bit of the time and this…
I wrote this a while back for the book too. It described the design process in most organizations as I perceived it. I cleaned it up a bit and made it into HTML instead of a Word doc or PDF. I called it Design Pitfalls. This is another in the series of stuff from the…
I was looking at some of the documents I produced in writing the book. I really like some of them. They don’t string together like a book, but taken individually as just a single serving of UX, they actually are useful. Well, I think so anyway. I am going to package them up and post…
Three bits of interesting UI news today. First is a spotlight from the ExtJS blog called VersoChat. Mostly, I just read the blog, skimmed their website and looked closely at the big JPEG on EXT. Default skin, but very nice icons. I wonder where they got those ones. The Information Architecture (IA) is definetely designed…