Davin's blog

Category: User experience, web, technology

  • How WordPress falters as a CMS: Multiple content fields

    WordPress is amazing and keeps getting better, but I want to be clear about an inherent limitation that WordPress has as a content management system (CMS). That limitation is that WordPress doesn’t handle multiple content regions on web pages. Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Many stories in user experience

    I just watched this TED talk, “Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.” Please, take the 18 minutes to watch it, then continue to read. Watching this talk brought to mind two thoughts related to user experience work. First, in a recent edition of Interactions magazine there is an article “Stories that inspire action”…

  • A Sad Tale of Pagination

    I imagine some professional chefs are accused of over-analyzing a bowl of soup now and then. Like that, as a user experience designer, I get caught up in little pieces of user interface on a regular basis. This particular story concerns a navigation system that utilizes pagination in what at first seems an obvious choice,…