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UX and Project Mangement cross-over article from Interactions magazine
A Taxonomy of Models Used in the Design Process by Joanne Mendel in the Jan + Feb 2012 edition of Interactions magazine is pretty interesting. At Covenant Eyes we’re continually in the churn of Agile development, and integrating user experience work can be challenging. We’re figuring it out, and have definitely made some breakthroughs, but…
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How I use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign from Google Analytics
My friend Adam called me this evening to ask how I’ve used the Google Analytics tracking codes utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. He’s working on an app to help marketers generate HTML e-mails, and is thinking about automating the inclusion of these tracking codes. The utm_medium is pretty straightforward in that the medium would be values…
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Does Kanban hurt Agile teams by decreasing iterative development?
Kanban is a balm now being used by some Agile development teams to soothe the pain caused by timeboxed development cycles. Jeff Patton’s statement, “Short timeboxes herniate,” sums up that pain (from his excellent post “Kanban development oversimplified”). As a Product Owner with a team that started out using Scrum and has gradually drifted to…
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Small-caps, web text, and CSS
There’s a trick to getting small-caps to work on the web, and it’s counter-intuitive. Let’s say you had an abbreviation, like CSS, that you wanted to put into small-caps, say with a little extra tracking. You might think you could use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps, and you’d be good to go. Not so. Here’s…
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The problem with the line break (BR) tag
We’ve got the <br /> tag all wrong. It’s time to make it right. We all know the <br /> tag is used to insert a line break in HTML. But what we’ve been missing is that we were too often after something else. Let me explain. Common reasons to use line breaks Why would…
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A model for UX design reviews
Design reviews are so important for our work as user experience designers, but they too often fail us. Here is a model for design reviews that overcomes the problems of ego, emotion, and communication that so often get in the way of helpful feedback. Alaina Kraus, Caitlin Potts, and I presented this process for the…
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Addendum to “Getting More From Analysis” by Lewandoswki and Dilworth
UX Magazine published Getting More From Analysis by Jared Lewandowski and John Dilworth on Dec 16, 2010. The authors provide a summary of analysis as part of three design activities: Analysis Synthesis Evaluation Diagramming these activities They also provide some models for conceiving of these three activities, from linear to finally advising on a traditional…
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Signing and Encrypting E-mail on Mac OS X 10.6 Using Self-Signed Certificates
A few years ago I wrote about using Thawte’s personal e-mail signing certificates for setting up secure S/MIME encryption with Apple Mail. Well, Thawte, so I understand, is phasing out that service. So, I’ve been wondering how to do self-signing on the Mac to set up S/MIME encrypted e-mails. This evening, I found out. Credit…
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Google Analytics for WordPress (version 4.09) trips HTML validation when tracking outbound links
When I write HTML, running code through the W3C Validator is part of my process. If the code doesn’t pass the validator, there’s a slim chance I’ll consider that code ready for anything. So after I upgraded this blog to WordPress 3.01’s Twenty Ten theme, I was mildly irritated to find that I had a…
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Thoughts on Richard Saul Wurman’s Why Design Now talk
Richard Saul Wurman, author of “Information Architects” and founder of the TED conference, spoke at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum‘s “Why Design Now” event. This is that talk. Wurman emphasizes that so much is designed, even the questions that we ask. To illustrate, at one point he asked Bill Moggridge, who was attending as the…