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Experience theme for Covenant Eyes
Cindy Chastain’s article, “Experience Themes,” at Boxes and Arrows outlines a neat way to package the concepts that help user experience designers put creative work into context. When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I’d write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An…
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Seams between systems and the Vignelli NYC subway map
I just read “Mr. Vignelli’s Map” by Michael Bierut over at Design Observer. In the post, Bierut remembers and analyzes why the public rejected Vignelli’s map of the New York City subway system. (Here’s the Vignelli subway map.) The Vignelli map smartly acknowledged that for passengers of the subway focused on navigating the subway system…
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The Thanksgiving Duck
As mentioned last post, I tried a duck for Thanksgiving. Lila summed it up with “It’s okay Dad, but it’s not appealing.” I could not fit the bird into the crock pot, so my Plan A was foiled. Instead I roasted it in the oven. I applied poultry seasoning and tucked onion and apple chunks…
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A recipe for disaster?
Against the advice of Adam, I am going to attempt to cook a small turkey in my crock pot for Thanksgiving. It’s just me, Lila, and Eva, so we don’t need a big bird. If I can’t get it to fit in the crock pot I reserve the right to abort to Plan B, which…
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WUD 2009 at MSU recap
Yesterday’s World Usability Day event at Michigan State University was good—but a little odd. The morning sessions were spot-on, and some of the afternoon talks were good as well. However, it was clear that some panelists didn’t understand their audience of usability and accessibility practitioners. Their talks were still interesting, but they didn’t understand the…
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WUD: captcha problems discussed in assistive tech expo
Tom Schultz and I are at the World Usability Day event hosted by Michigan State University today. We sat in a session this morning that focused on a demonstration and discussion of assistive technologies. An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual impairments. One of the presenters went…
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Paper: crucial to Web design
At first thought, Web design is a digital job. But as long as I have done this work, I’ve had paper on hand. In the 90s I’d quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each…
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XSL to get text from Apple Pages documents
Pages is the name of Apple’s basic word processor program that comes with their iWork suite of applications. It’s not a bad program, but a number of months ago I needed to switch up to MS Word for the Mac. Well, this morning I was looking through some old files and found a text document…
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Pistol match, Oct 20, 2009: the good and the bad
Last night after work I drove up to Bay City to Duncan’s Outdoors Shop to compete in a pistol league match. It’s the second one I’ve made it to, and shot some of my best…and worst scores. National Match Course 1 Total SF TF RF 95 91-2X 93-1X 279-3X National Match Course 2 Total SF…
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Bing delivers surprising amount of traffic to rangelistings.com
One of my hobby sites is rangelistings.com, a site with the goal of providing a map of each state with the locations of shooting ranges on it. I keep an eye on the web traffic pretty regularly, and about 90% of the traffic it receives is from search engines. Up till the last couple of…