-
Better Year Over Year Line Graphs Using Time as a Visual Metaphor
Have you ever seen a line chart that shows monthly revenues, or some other number, and compares this year to last year to the year before and so on? You know, the one with lines the color of a gumball variety pack? (This is a random dataset for illustration, so don’t look at it too…
-
A Method for Coaching for Performance at Work
Once upon a time, in a company in a far off land, there was a User Experience team led by Alice. Alice was mentoring Bob, a design researcher who was only a couple of years into the field. Bob had been working hard in preparation for a presentation of the latest round of research, and…
-
My toolset for digital sketching: Wacom One and Sketchbook Pro
Background Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked in an office with 2 wall-sized whiteboards and carried notebooks and pens with me. I diagrammed many times a week, in meetings and in private as a thinking exercise. I’ve been working this way for all of my professional life, and I have a long background in user…
-
Budgeting for UX Managers
Budgeting for UX is a conflict of mental models: Ours and Accounting’s. If we start with Accounting’s model, we’re more likely to make mistakes. So, do the version that makes sense first, and then reformulate it for Accounting’s needs.
-
Oblique Strategies, a creative tool, in a web version
In Oct 2022 I made a web-based derivative of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. I read about a deck of cards made by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in 1975, which had the purpose of spurring on creative thinking by inserting a random prompt. I imagine Eno composing music in some endless…
-
Frequency of Error is Important in User Interface
(I published this in 2020, but it had been sitting as a draft since 2015. I presume this error set from Microsoft may not be relevant, although the idea could be.) Late last week, right after I stopped running with scissors, I picked up a Microsoft Surface 3 tablet running Windows 10. Over the weekend…
-
Vacationing near Munising, MI today
-
Organizational Physics OmniGraffle Stencil
Here’s an OmniGraffle stencil based on Lex Sisney’s Organizational Physics.
-
Does design precede strategy?
More than any other type of worker, earnest designers and design researchers wrangle with real strategy formulation, often blazing a trail for a company and its management.
-
“Click Here,” MS Outlook, Seriously?
“Click here” is at best a hint for folks who are befuddled by text that is blue and underlined. It is needlessly redundant. When you are tempted to use it, revise your language, and we’ll all be better off. Microsoft has carelessly provided us this example.