Gianni Botsford Architects : 092 : Casa Kike
. Excellent continuation of the cross-bracing into the built-in shelves. Pretty and graphic.
Exploratory Design — Homage to the Stamp
Progress
I’ve recently spent some time using
Wesabe
, during which one
Andre Arko
implemented one of my wishes (“archive” an account), and mentioned that he’d be working on the transaction view in the near future. Excellent. Transaction view is where I spend the most time in Wesabe, having not yet dug in to the social components. […]
Trapped on Palm?
My
Twitter
question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the
Palm III
launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance […]
It alarms me that so many sites have no background color. That’s right, NO background color. Sure, they look fine, but only by accident: I changed my browser’s default colors to blue text on a yellow background, and I’m seeing a lot of yellow these days (and a little bit of blue). Not everywhere, but […]
A new grocery store opened in my neighborhood last week.
Fresh & Easy
claims to provide high-quality food at “unbelievable” prices in a friendly, small-store format. They further claim caring for the environment and an emphasis on local sourcing of produce.
Our little slice of Los Angeles is grocery-starved, so Thursday’s hotly anticipated opening was well-attended. […]
Every time I elect to subscribe to someone’s RSS feed I am presented with this well-meaning page:
I have NEVER clicked on “Add to Google homepage.” I ALWAYS click on “Add to Google Reader.” Google probably knows this. I grab and shed feeds rather quickly, so this page is a frequent (and frequently annoying) interruption […]
I received an eVite today, the first in a long while. It was not a great experience.
Strike one: lack of context.
The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no […]
Jason Fried over at 37signals
mentioned
today that he gets a lot of questions about “growing the business”: why aren’t they, when will they, etc.
They don’t plan to. Not in the traditional sense, by hiring. What’s important here is that they have oriented their business, and especially their products, to succeed without requiring additional head […]
Getting to know your customers is both fashionable and a good idea. But if you work for a large corporation, you may find several obstacles to forming a direct relationship with customers. All is not lost; you can kick-start your customer research by looking within your company for evidence of user experience problems.
Technical Support
: Customer […]
My friends and family have been complaining for years now, which is why I’ve never purchased a Motorola phone:
”[…]the Razr turns out to be bad design, really bad design, because it has an awful user-interface.”
Bret Victor posted an excellent paper,
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
, over a year ago, but there are valuable lessons within that most of us have yet to learn. It is a good read, but don’t try to print it…
Iain Barker discusses a nice way to test content structures in
Measuring the Success Of a Classification System
today on
Boxes and Arrows
. It would be ideal to use such a technique on a
hierarchically-organized menu-driven embedded interface
.
No video?
See it at BrightCove
.
Key points from the talk:
The design process, while iterative, is largely a destructive process, where many many ideas are generated and nearly all of them are eventually thrown out. Quality at the end depends greatly on having a large quantity of options to sift through at the beginning.
A sketch is […]
At work we’ve recently begun some serious (read: crash program-style fast and furious) work on an embedded software interface for a small handheld device. […] A top use case, for us, is one that is crucial to a person’s adoption of the device, day-to-day use of the device, or is bound up with a safety or security concern. […] With an existing product or launched site or service you can learn where the problems are from a variety of sources […] For a new product, ideally you have a solid sense of what the top use cases should be, if the product is at all well-defined.
I ought to clarify what is happening here. This is a live redesign, I’m experimenting with the arrangement of content, and I’m trying to establish a solid vertical rhythm to my pages. Each of these is in response to specific dissatisfactions with blogs, or my attention to personal work, or typography on the web, so I’ll be fiddling about with all three. Mind the gap.
I post infrequently enough that you wouldn’t have noticed, but I’m on vacation. Maui, to be precise. It is lovely, and the Junetime habit of the islands (sun during the day, rain at night) makes for lovely slumbering.
It seems that I can’t take a vacation from usability critique, or more likely
usability problems
, try as […]
From the
AIGA
website:
The complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols developed by AIGA is now available on the web, free of charge. Signs are available in EPS and GIF formats.
AIGA forgot, however, that not all of us use Macs. The very nice set of 50 symbols is only available for download from AIGA as an […]
A number of individuals have posted on their sites handy Pantone Matching System (PMS) to RGB color conversion charts. These can be pretty hefty downloads, but I’ve made a small one…
Boxes and Arrows
continues to publish insightful and relevant articles. And the fact that two of my recent favorites just happen to include the words “Design Success” in their titles isn’t a factor, no siree.
Most recently,
Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
details a method for performing
stakeholder analysis
, an exceedingly useful technique that […]
Apple has done a reasonably good job of making
ZCN
(Zero Configuration Networking) a reality; now what we need is “ZCE,” Zero Configuration Email. Or at least Minimal Configuration Email.
Isn’t email easy enough? Well, no. My wife has been pretty troubled by ever-increasing rates of spam on her trusty Yahoo webmail account, so it is […]
We’ve recently heard tell of ways that users “get around” what they find inconvenient about our therapy management application. I find this sort of revelation surpassingly interesting because it reveals not only deficiencies in the application, but new ways that people
want
to use it.
It is almost as if they are writing the requirements for […]
Jeff
interesting:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
Jon
I read that; it sums up a few of my feelings on the matter pretty well. 1) what problem are we trying to solve 2) for whom, and 3) who will be doing the work? How can we help person 3 do task 1 in a way that will satisfy both person 3 and […]
Recently I began an interface review for a well-known medical device manufacturer. These folks are pretty well plugged in to who their customer is and what is important to them, so I figured that it would seem inappropriate to begin an interface review in a traditional User-Centered manner, questioning the great body of express and implied market research that the company has done�