August 2007
29 posts
Design doesn't Need a Battle Plan
There’s an interesting article on BuisnessWeek’s site titled Wanted: VPs of Design.
Today more companies are welcoming designers to the executive level. “There’s been a big change in the number of VPs of design compared with just three years ago,” says Peter Lawrence, director of the Boston-based Corporate Design Foundation. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Johnson &...
This is Broken
I truly miss This is Broken, now merely a redirect to its own archives. I looked forward to the daily posts, typically photographs of hiccups in our environment or screenshots of bad software design. In June, Mark Hurst decided to consolidate his effort on a single blog, Good Experience. The “broken” submissions have been relegated to a Flickr photo pool.
I can’t blame Mark....
Looking Ahead
I met a remarkable woman tonight.
I had just finished teaching and was crossing the lobby of the Creative Arts Center, making a B line for the front doors. I noticed there were people sitting on a bench in front of the galleries, but I didn’t look at them. It was a quarter ‘til nine, and I had an hour and a half drive home. I was almost to the doors when I heard a woman’s voice...
Loving What Other People Do
The question was posed, “So, what do you love? What is it about (Interaction Design) that keeps you excited and challenged and in love with your work?”
There’s a lot to love. In the interest of keeping this a short post, one of the aspects of practicing design that immediately comes to mind is the variation. Every time I start a project with a new customer, I have the...
That Old Battle
It’s a battle that we don’t usually have to fight anymore. The importance of good design is fairly obvious when you examine contemporary commercial successes. Participants on the IxDA mailing list were invited today to respond to the post of one Ben Erwin, a product manager at NetQoS. This was mine:
Mr. Erwin,
Normally, I wouldn’t make the effort to respond to a message such...
“My personal creative process is to construct a big, tall scaffold of theory and ...”
– Joan Vermette
Seam Carving
An IxDA member just posted a pointer to a YouTube video (below) about a new image scaling technique called “seam carving”. You’ll have to watch the video to really understand it, but in a nutshell, it finds the areas within the image that have the least amount of definition and removes pixels from those areas as the image scales down. It does this in horizontal and vertical...
Stop Talking!
I hardly ever hold my Treo to my ear to talk on the phone. I use my Bluetooth headset unless I’ve unfortunately left it behind or let the battery run down. It’s extremely handy. I can talk on the phone while driving. (I know some would argue against this, but I’m of the opinion that, using a headset, it is no more distracting than talking to a person in the passenger seat.) I can...
In the Groove
I kicked off the new semester this evening. It really felt good to be back. I enjoyed having more time for myself and my family over the summer, but I did miss the intellectual exchange and the satisfaction of seeing the lightbulbs coming on. Teaching is a very satisfying pursuit.
Their first assignment is to research the field of Information Architecture, Information Design, and Library...
I Googled for Yellow Pages
A couple weeks ago, I made a (admittedly somewhat snarky) post about the YPA advertising competition. Somebody at the YPA checked their trackbacks and sent me a short message.
At some $26 billion in revenue, and employing over 70,000 people worldwide, the Yellow Pages industry is a serious business to those that work in it, and for the millions of small businesses that rely on it each day as...
Changing My Tune
As it turns out, it’s not the best idea to publish a decision made late at night after swallowing, but not fully digesting, two Tufte books in one gulp. I must retract my last post.
As I worked out my course schedule today, matching up reading assignments with projects and so forth, I realized that everything I was planning on using had actually been in The Visual Display of Quantitative...
A Toughte Decision
I’ve been planning my course for the Fall semester. I’ve decided to focus on Information Design (Information Architecture) and visualization. I had already selected Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability as a book for the course, and I knew I wanted to introduce my students to Edward R. Tufte. While I’ve seen a lot of the examples from Tufte’s books, I’ve never...
Mail Bounce
I’ve set up a lot of rules in Apple Mail to file incoming messages into different folders. There’s one that sends email from family into one folder, and another sends messages from coworkers into a work folder. There are rules for mailing lists I’m subscribed to and one that handles messages from members of my church.
Most of them are based on groups in Address Book, and the...
Principle of Least Effort
I’ve been reading Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. In chapter 3, page 55, he mentions George Kingsley Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort.
Each individual will adopt a course of action that will involve the expenditure of the probably least average of his work (by definition, least effort).
Perhaps this is true to some extent. I wouldn’t look for extra work when...
The Trouble with Tables
Is it really too much to ask that the content of a table scroll separately from the column headings? It’s a very basic usability issue. If the headers scroll off the top of the window, you may not be able to distinguish the columns (e.g. start date and end date). Every piece of desktop software worth its salt that has a tabular display scrolls the body of the table, leaving the headers in...
Designing for Good
I’m not writing anything tonight. I’ve spent too much time reading about Adaptive Path’s Charmr. You should be reading about it too.
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Oversight
While visiting my brother this weekend, we spent a few hours at a community pool. We were getting ready to leave, and I was using the restroom. I was standing at a urinal, and a young boy walked up to the one beside me, did his business, and left without flushing. I had been staring at a sign requesting that I please flush when finished, and at first thought poorly of the youngster, but it only...
Doh!
My family was traveling Thursday night for a long weekend with my brother. We stopped at a Burger King for dinner (my daughter’s choice). My daughters have never seen The Simpsons, but they were excited about the toys from the feature film that came in their kid’s meals.
Printed on the front of the bag was a small disclaimer, explaining that the movie is rated PG-13, contains strong...
Ambient Umbrella
Ambient Devices has announced the Ambient Umbrella. The umbrella receives information directly from AccuWeather.com. If rain or snow is predicted, the handle of the umbrella glows. The claim is that due to the glow, you will remember to take it with you.
I have two umbrellas. One is a large golf umbrella that I keep in the trunk of my car. The other is a tiny umbrella that I keep in a desk...
Is this a Joke?
I’ve mentioned before that I teach part time. I received email today addressed, “Dear Professor”. It invited me to have my students participate in the Yellow Pages Association Advertising Competition. According to the message, it “provides “real world” experience for students interested in pursuing an education and/or career in advertising, marketing, graphic design or a...
IDSA Site
The IDSA’s website featuring the IDEA winners is a standard design with clear navigation and a clean, grid-based layout. Every winner gets several paragraphs of exposition and a picture. I quite prefer their site to BusinessWeek’s, the other IDEA sponsor, which groups winners into articles about different facets of the designs.
There is one key detail, however, where IDSA missed the...
What is that?
Another IDEA winner was the HomeHero Fire Extinguisher.
“This design shows how elegance can enhance function. These designers understand that if a fire extinguisher looks good, users will be more likely to keep it handy.”
Steve Wilcox, FIDSA, Principal, Design Science
I understand this logic. I agree that it is a beautifully designed object. I have to wonder, however, if aesthetic elegance...
Real Estate Adjustment
I posted some time ago about the new features in Safari 3. I just experienced a little reminder which made me appreciate the ability to resize text areas. The screenshot below shows a form that I was presented with on a commercial website. It’s a form for requesting information from a retail location. The text area is where you are supposed to enter your request.
The left side shows the...
Routing for Google Maps
I made one of those pleasant discoveries this morning—the kind that make me speak out loud to an empty room. “Nice!”
One problem with route planning in Google Maps has always been that it tells me too much. If I’m getting directions from my house, I don’t need to know how to get out of my neighborhood. I’ve got that down cold. I really only need the last quarter or...
A Wrench with a Twist
I’ve been catching up on all of the news I missed during my one-week respite. The 2007 IDEA winners were announced. There are many exquisite examples of innovative design, but a couple of them stood out for me. I’m usually most impressed by innovations on old tools that have been around, and mostly unchanged, for decades—the OXO Good Grips potato peeler, for example.
Winning a bronze...
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