Focus + Context

From GMail. Apparently I tried to upload a file when I was offline or something. Awesome.

One of the challenging things about doing strategic planning / user experience design for the mobile technology industry, is that things are in constant flux. The industry moves so quickly, with so many new players popping up and dying out, new social networks growing rapidly or shrivelling away to obsolesence, shifts in mobile platforms, a [...]

I always appreciate when I can pick something up and start using it without having to read any instructions, but I also am always very thankful when a product manages to fit everything you need to know about how to use it right there on the product itself. Sometimes this is done with a sticker [...]

I’ve been working with this excellent organization called DIYcity. It’s a grassroots movement  (dare I say?) which is chartered to design and build web-based solutions to help alleviate some of the problems that plague the cities in which we live (more in this in another post, I promise). It was started by a  guy named [...]

On a recent vacation to Houston, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFA H). I’m not as keen on fine arts museums (I much prefer modern, or design) — but wow! was impressed. The building itself is gorgeous, and even though we seemed to have visited in a gap [...]

Today was an historic day, and I’ve got the screenshots to prove it!

Walking into Chicago Public Library after work to pick up a book (I had no idea that you could get these things anywhere other than Amazon!), I saw a sign which said something to the effect of “The library auditorium will be open [...]

Maybe this is old news by now. Is it just me, or does the Obama ‘08 campaign logo look a whole lot like the USDA Organic logo?

 
I guess that the shapes in the Obama logo are generic enough that it could be interpreted in any number of ways  - an american flag? sunrise over a [...]

I saw a post on BoingBoing tonight that referenced a (fairly new?) community called DIYCity
From their site:

Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?
Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to [...]

I recently wrote  about the usability of user interfaces for streaming video, and concluded hands down that Netflix had the nicest. My only gripe was the fact that it was so smart, and left such little control to the user, that I’d often find myself in the situation where it had done a check to [...]

It’s all about Feedback
Feedback is important. Whether in the context of personal relationships, professional careers, or user interface design, it’s important for people to know how they’re doing and what’s going on in some one else’s head (or on some server). In fact, I can think of very few situations where more feedback would be [...]