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Zen rock gardens, accessibility, information architecture
I was walking into work this morning, thinking about 1st, 2nd, 3rd orders of order (“Everything is Miscellaneous” by Weinberger) and came across a frozen pond. The pond is shaped like a teardrop and has three clumps of grass growing from it. As I considered the space between the clumps of grass, it reminded me…
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Usability in Packaging
A couple evenings ago I attended a presentation by Laura Bix from the MSU School of Packaging. The presentation was about how Laura and a couple of her graduate students have been employing user experience design methods in the package design process. The short of it is, they’re doing great work. I appreciated seeing usability…
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Congratulations, your bank account has been deleted!
I actually got this feedback from a website a couple days ago. It struck me as a funny confirmation.
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What does it take to be an evangelist of good interface design?
Reference: The Art of Evangelism, Guy Kawasaki Here are Kawasaki’s list of ten ways of looking at evangelism and my interpretation of them as someone who might be an evangelist within an organization for good interface design. 1. Create a cause. We need to do good interface design on our products, because it makes life…
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Techie error text
As I logged in to a local coffee shop wireless network, I got this message. I took a snapshot because I thought the error text was telling. Clearly, a programmer wrote it. Else you can always goto following url to logout… Here’s the thing: nobody actually says else and goto isn’t actually a word. And,…
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Nice error text from Gmail
I like the peronality coming through what would normally be very dull error text.
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UX is a quality, not discipline, thoughts spurred by Peter Merholz
I thought this post from Peter Merholz was a nice philosophical step-back for usability. User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and…
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Features of robust dynamic menus
There are many fine examples of dynamic menus, menus that display sub menus when you hover your mouse pointer or bring focus to them in other ways, such as tabbing through links with your keyboard. I was reading a recent article on AlistApart.com regarding hybrid CSS menus, and the discussion that followed the article showed…
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Beauty of a web site
Tractinsky, N., Katz, A.S., and Ikar, D.
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Fitt’s Law Applied to the Web
Fitt’s Law Applied to the Web by Scott Berkun, Microsoft Corporation. The basic idea in Fitts’s Law is that any time a person uses a mouse to move the mouse pointer, certain characteristics of objects on the screen make them easy or hard to click on. The farther the person has to move the mouse…