August 2009
21 posts
3 tags
Pedestrian Channelizing Devices
Leave it to government to make things as confusing as possible. I received this public service announcement in an email from one of our state senators:
When traffic-control signals are not in place or not in operation, the driver of a vehicle must yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any marked crosswalk or within any unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Pedestrian...
2 tags
Back to Basics: Function Valet
One of the products I’ve been working on a lot recently enables an author to build logic into their content through regular expressions. Of course, this includes the use of variables, and that requires that the UI support the definition and management of variables. There are many places within the application that variables may be selected for use, but in the initial implementation, there was a...
2 tags
Assaulted by Batteries
When is rechargeable battery technology going to catch up? Why should I have to worry about how long a battery is left on its charger, or worry about fully cycling the battery, or worry about draining it completely? I could handle it if they all worked the same way, but of course they don’t. It seems that every device I get has slightly different requirements for getting the best life out of its...
3 tags
Red Tape
I’ve mentioned before that my company does contract work for the military. Much of my most interesting work, in fact, has been on such projects. This makes it rather difficult for me to speak about my work in public.
My local IxDA chapter will be holding an event in September that is centered around interaction design for military projects. I was planning on presenting the work I’ve done for the...
2 tags
4 Years Later
A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I was planning my course for the Fall semester. Well, tonight was the first class, and I must say it is good to be back. It’s rewarding to be able to open students’ eyes to a greater potential for design and the opportunities their degrees can present them.
When I wrote that post, I was trying to decide what topics I should cover. I thought I would share what I...
2 tags
Death by a Thousand Cuts
My life is overflowing with products. Now, I’m a gadget geek, so I don’t typically think of this as a problem. However, when there are problems with the products, resolving the issues can be a real time-sink. For example, at this moment, I have a defective lawnmower battery that I’ve just contacted customer service about, the light in my garage door opener won’t turn off, the DVD player is...
3 tags
Cursor Goalie
I was typing up a list of requirements in Microsoft Word yesterday and had pasted some content in from an email I had received. There were some characters I wanted to change at the end of several lines, and I was using copy and paste to do so. But I ran into a little problem. They decided that when text is pasted into the document, it is very often the case that it has brought styling along with...
2 tags
Design Pattern: Undo/Redo
Undo and Redo are common, well-understood functions, but that doesn’t mean you can become lazy about specifying them. The developer assigned the task of implementing undo may not have given it so much thought as you have.
For example, there is a user interface I designed for building regular expressions (regex) that visualizes them in a flowchart, allowing the user to drag parts of the expression...
2 tags
Back to Basics: Greater Flexibility = Greater...
In the design of any interface that empowers the user to contribute content, be it entering text through a form on a webpage, or authoring a course for computer based training (CBT), there comes a point at which a decision must be made. Where do you draw the line that demarcates what the user has control over and what the software disallows them to do?
Every capability added to an application...
3 tags
Advanced Search
I was listening to Jared Spool’s podcast, Spoolcast, specifically the episode titled Search, Scent & the Happiness of Pursuit Followup. Jared suggested that the vast majority of people don’t use advanced search, so you should spend effort towards improving the navigation of a site, rather than creating a more powerful search feature. It triggered me to think about my own search habits, and I...
4 tags
In the Details: Alarming iCal
Apple’s iCal allows you to set multiple alarms for any event. There are many notification options to choose from, and it provides a list of past settings for quick reuse, so in many ways it is quite a robust feature. You can specify the alarm to go off minutes, hours, or days before or after the event. But there is one small detail that often annoys me. If I select “hours before”, it won’t allow...
2 tags
Don’t let the door lacerate you on the way out.
I do not carry the reputation of a klutz. I’m more likely to be thought of as slow and overly thoughtful of my actions. If I weren’t a designer, I’d likely be embarrassed to admit that I have cut my leg when closing the door after exiting my car… twice. It literally drew blood both times. The first time I did it, I didn’t think too much about it, chalking it up to a careless moment. The second...
8 tags
Cursed Cursors
I’ve done a fair amount of UI design for applications intended for use on tablet PCs. That means that the software is running on Microsoft’s tablet version of Windows. It has a number of additional features, such as a pop-up keyboard and handwriting recognition, that is specific to stylus and finger input. Typical of Microsoft, however, they haven’t really thought through the details. One thing...
3 tags
I Can Do That
Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve been writing long enough that I’ve repeated myself, partially at least. After writing the following post, I had the funny feeling that I had written something similar before, which can be found here. This post is a different take on the subject, so I’ll let it stand.
There is a famous quote by the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein:
A human being should be...
2 tags
In the Details: Auto-Up
I can remember being impressed as a child that my grandparents’ car had power windows. That was a really cool feature and so much easier and faster than the hand cranks in my parents’ car. These days, it is extremely rare to find a car that doesn’t have power windows as a standard feature. My colleague and I were quite surprised on a recent business trip when we had to pay a toll and realized that...
2 tags
Current Design Issues
I’m planning my course for the Fall semester, when I will finally be able to reuse the material I first taught in 2005. It will be a seminar—that is, it will be much more reading, writing, and discussion about design than the act of designing, although we’ll do some of that too. When I taught the course four years ago, I assigned readings on the following topics:
Design Certification Offshore...
4 tags
Interaction ’10
The announcement went out this week that IxDA is now accepting submissions for Interaction ’10 to be held in Savannah, GA, February 4-7, 2010. There are four different types of sessions that you can propose. From the conference website:
Discussions. Got a burning question that you think the interaction design community should be asking itself? Let’s sit down and discuss it. You are the discussion...
6 tags
Designer’s Toolbelt: The Typography Manual
There are a very few iPhone applications I have paid for so far. The most recent is a resource specifically of interest to designers. The Typography Manual combines, as the name implies, a typography manual with a conversion table, em calculator, rulers, and a number of references.
The manual is 60 pages covering type basics, history, typesetting, and web typography. It also includes a style...
6 tags
It’s Hip to be Foursquare
The other day, I wrote about my disappointment with Booyah, the iPhone app that claims to be an achievement system for real life. I wasn’t very impressed with it. Foursquare, on the other hand, sounds a little closer to something interesting. I tried it out, but they don’t have a Pittsburgh edition, so I wasn’t really able to use it.
The idea is that you check in while at various locations around...
5 tags
In the Details: ADDress
Occasionally, people get new email addresses. They may have changed jobs or switched ISPs. Whatever the reason, I will receive an email from them stating that they have a new email address and asking that I no longer use the old one. So, in Mail, I right-click the new address to open the contextual menu. One of the options is to add the address to an existing contact. This then opens the contact...
3 tags
The Wrong Way
There is a right way and a wrong way to update a product. I’ve been using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader for quite some time. A few days ago, I received email from NewGator saying that I should upgrade to the new beta version of the application, and that I would need a Google Reader account for it to synch with. Until now, NewsGator provided an online RSS reader and various desktop readers for...
