Davin's blog

Tag: UX

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • UserVue review

    UserVue is an application from TechSmith. At work we’ve used it recently to do remote user interviews, where we’ve had people who use our services talk us through some emailed reports they received from us. It allows us to view and record a user’s screen, and save it as a WMV or Morae file. Additionally,…

  • Note to self regarding “Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions” by Zachary Shore

    I recently finished Zachary Shore’s book “Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions.” I think I heard an interview with Shore on a show on NPR and the lessons from the book seem important. So, some time has passed, I’ve read the book, and before I pass it on to someone else, I feel a…

  • I was a Whole Foods first-timer

    I am not a foodie. Okay, now that that is out of the way: Whole Foods is amazing. One evening at last week’s IUE2009 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my colleague Jackie and I breezed through the local Whole Foods store. From a user experience perspective, my Whole Foods experience was really great. But, let…

  • IUE2009: Now what?

    Now comes the after-conference exhalation. (And I just attended! Imagine the organizers.) My employer, Covenant Eyes, sent a small crew of people to the conference…8 of us in all. For all but me, it was the first time at any UX conference, and I think we all learned quite a bit. So now the question…