Focus + Context

When I lived in the US, I had a Bank of America checking account. I used their online banking services all the time, and, simply put, it was awesome. Not only did it do a whole lot (bill pay, transfer funds, updates, etc.) but it was so easy to use.
Now I do my banking with [...]

To keep this concise, I’ll skip the part about how I haven’t written a blog post in months, and feel like a slacker for it, but my excuse is that I’ve been real busy with other things (like work, triathlon training and planning an epic hike for this summer), and how I always get really [...]

There’s a really famous quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke that I love:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
Sometimes, I am just floored by the elegance and truthfulness of this quote, when, using some piece of technology, I stop and wonder “how the heck is this working?”  And I think that, at least on [...]

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I got angry at my computer. Not just perturbed, but teeth-clenching, fist pounding, expletive-blurting, co-worker-disturbing angry.
Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I [...]

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. I’ve been busy, sure, but it’s mostly just laziness.
I recently moved from Chicago, IL, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada. Jury’s still out on whether or not trading the El for the C-Train, pizza and hot dogs for Vietnamese subs, or the lake for the mountains (which [...]

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 [...]