May 2008
24 posts
2 tags
Blog of the Week: inspireUX
Every few days, Catriona Cornett posts a quote on inspireUX. Each one is neatly laid out as a small card. As the instructions on the blog say, “inspireUX provides quotes from people who truly understand the importance of a positive user experience. Download the quote cards and print them out on 4x6” index cards or on standard sized pieces of paper to help inspire you when creating your own...
3 tags
Designer’s Toolbelt: Firebug
Firebug is a free, open source add-on for Firefox, and nobody who does web work should be without it. Regardless of which tools you use for generating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Firebug is what you need for troubleshooting and validation. Firebug adds a pane at the bottom of the browser window that can be easily opened and closed. It can also be opened in a separate window. This pane provides a...
2 tags
Delicious GUI
Delicious Monster has finally released version 2 of Delicious Library, an application for cataloging books, movies, music, games, and practically anything else you want to catalog. I say “finally” because it has been four years since version 1. They claimed to be waiting for the release of Leopard, but even that was several months ago. The original Delicious Library was a big hit, won many awards,...
2 tags
Hang it all!
An ironing board is a designed object. It is shaped to a specific purpose. It has a broad end and a narrow end. It has rounded corners. It is a flat surface, and the edges overhang the supports. Its design facilitates the arrangement of different types of clothing—long enough to support an entire pant leg, narrow enough to fit inside a shirt sleeve. I can only imagine what someone was thinking...
2 tags
2 tags
What We Do Best
Last Thursday, I gave my quick answer to the question “What do you do best?” On Friday, I posed the question to the IxDA list. Here are the answers I received. Kvetch - Will Evans …I let things bother me. I locate problems and I make noise about them. - Katie Albers …connect the various elements of the users’ experience and make sure everything works together to achieve the purpose for...
3 tags
Tangible Interaction Design
I just read today the announcement for a new masters program at CMU: Masters of Tangible Interaction Design. So what, you may ask, is Tangible Interaction Design? As defined in the announcement, it is “…the speculative design of computationally embedded objects and places.” What this means in more pedestrian terms is that students will learn how to design products and services based on the...
2 tags
What I Do Best
I was recently asked what I do best. Please don’t think I’m a braggart when I say that it was a difficult question to answer. With my broad design background and varied industry experience, there are a number of design-related activities at which I excell. I didn’t take much time to think about the answer. I said that my strength lies in my ability to quickly learn new domains,...
4 tags
Critique: Adobe Mobile Gallery
Of all companies, I would expect Adobe to have a decent Flash-based website. The Adobe Mobile Gallery is an excellent example of gratuitous use of Flash animation, resulting in poor usability. It initially shows five different phone models, each with a different application showing on its screen. The phones are placed within a three-dimensional space with some in the foreground and some farther...
2 tags
KFC
The legacy of Colonel Sanders has, in recent years, been heavily branded as KFC, rather than the verbose Kentucky Fried Chicken—so much so that I no longer think about the full name. A couple weekends ago, my family was in Tennessee for my cousin’s wedding. We were traveling home and needed to stop somewhere for lunch. We saw a sign for KFC and decided that was different enough from the other...
5 tags
D&AD Awards
The winners of the D&AD awards were announced last week. It was a record-breaking year with six Black Pencils awarded. A very prestigious award, the Black Pencil is only given to designs that meet very high standards. There have been years when no Black Pencils were awarded at all. It is quite a testament to Apple that they received two Black Pencils in the Product Design category. The iMac...
4 tags
Blog of the Week: The Prepared Mind
Where have you gone Chris Gee? The Prepared Mind was the first blog I subscribed to an RSS feed for. Chris was an active blogger and provided good commentary on current events in both Graphic and Interaction Design. His was also the first design-related podcast I subscribed to, featuring very relevant discussions with the likes of Von Glitschka, GK VanPatter, and Jason Fried. Chris was a loud...
3 tags
Here I Come to Save the Day...
I have always been a one-mouse-button man. I have had my reasons. I’ve never found multi-button mice comfortable. It always felt as if they were forcing my hand into a particular position, rather than letting it comfortably rest as it pleased. Have you ever held a drink bottle that was shaped with depressions for fingers and thumb? Did it actually fit your grip? I used to be annoyed by Arizona...
1 tag
One Line of Service Design
This post is a couple months late. I was tagged by Jeff Howard, author of the blog Design for Service, back in March, but I somehow missed it. I just noticed this past weekend. Better late than never, I guess. Marc Fonteijn ran an exercise on his blog, 31 Volts, called One Line of Service Design, in which he invited designers to give one-line definitions, examples, or descriptions of Service...
4 tags
I’m a discount code!
I mentioned a few days ago that I had contributed a “perspective” to Luke Wroblewski’s book. I just received my copy in the mail today. At 226 pages, it’s hefty for a paperback, and it’s chock full of color images—examples of web forms that represent good and bad design. My perspective, titled A Case Study of Explosive Ordnance Disposal, is in the section about overlays on pages 169 to 171. The...
2 tags
CrayAngles
About any restaurant we go to these days provides crayons and something for my kids to color on. We then repeatedly bend over to pick up the crayons that have fallen on the floor throughout the meal. As yesterday was Mother’s Day, we went out for dinner after church. We tried a new restaurant called Walnut Grove. The design of the interior was quite nice and I approved of their choice of...
1 tag
2 tags
Blog of the Week: Icon-O-Cast
There aren’t very many design-related podcasts out there. A select few are of consistently high quality. Lunar Design started Icon-O-Cast in June of 2007. They’ve been releasing one or two episodes per Month ever since. From interviews with the likes of Don Norman to conference presentations and in-house discussions, John Edson and other Lunar employees cover a lot of ground. There are five...
3 tags
In the Details: Button Hook
All of the cars I’ve driven in the past have had pretty standard switches for the automatic windows. They are vertically-oriented, two-way switches. Push down, and the window goes down. Push up, and the window goes up. My Mazda5 has a different control that I have noticed in other cars recently. It’s located on the arm rest on the door, so it is on a horizontal surface. Right off the bat, this...
2 tags
Instant Winner
The internet has improved a lot of things and created wonderful new experiences. Due to this success, it seems that everything now must have a web component. This doesn’t always result in an improved experience. I don’t care all that much about sweepstakes, but it struck me over the weekend that there is no longer such a thing as an “instant winner”. It used to be that you would scratch off a...
4 tags
Web Form Design
Luke Wroblewski’s new book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, has just been published by Rosenfeld Media. This promises to be a very insightful book, and I’m looking forward to reading it. I’m also particularly interested in this book because I made a small contribution to it. I wrote one of several “perspectives” included in the book, explaining some of the detailed decisions made in the...
1 tag
Free Speech
I was traveling this weekend to attend a cousin’s wedding. On the drive there, my car was damaged when a piece of metal pipe flew off of a flatbed truck and glanced off my roof. Fortunately, nobody was injured and the damage to the car was minor. When I called Allstate to report the incident, I was first confronted with an automated answering system. This was not surprising, and I listened,...
5 tags
Blog of the Week: Brand New
What do Ford, Starz, Discovery Channel, the Seattle Founders FC, Thomson Reuters, SanDisk, and Intuit all have in common? They’re all rebranding themselves with new logos, and thus have all recently been featured on Brand New, one of the blogs from UnderConsideration. Brand New, on an almost daily basis, publishes opinions of corporate and brand identity work. Beginning with a visual comparison of...
3 tags
Keyboard Tradeoffs
For the past four and a half years, I’ve been using Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I love the flexibility provided by the cordless devices. When I ordered my new Mac Pro, I went ahead and upgraded to the new wireless keyboard and cordless Mighty Mouse. This was a bit of a gamble. The previous wireless keyboard was full-size. It had a number keypad, full-size cursor keys, 16 function keys,...
