One of my pet peeves are buried calls to action. Thats when you can’t find the button – or other affordance – which allows you to proceed with an interaction flow. Here’s a new take – prominent inactive call to action. Hidden “real” call to action. Question: how do you proceed with this purchase of [...]
I’m often asked about good ways of meeting people working in UX, either to hire them, get hired, or simply to break out of the freelancer’s isolation and meet some human beings with like interests. Whatever your interest in going, here are some active groups I recommend: Designers and Geeks [...]
Apple is making great inroads into removing some of the clutter that has built up in our desktop UI over the past few decades. Recently they removed the scroll bar on static views (the scroll bar does not appear until the view is scrolled). Response to this has been mixed. For some, its elegant, minimal and natural progression [...]
I’ve been reading (and writing) a lot of code recently and wanted to share a graphical technique for understanding an alien codebase. Code can be hard to follow, especially if you didn’t write it, and even more so if you are new to a language. Web apps are particularly hard to follow since they consist [...]
It can be challenging to run a group UX review, even when the participants know each other. There is always someone who talks endlessly, raising nitpicks and alienating other team members, others who talk too little, and those at their back who are miles away doing their email. Its also hard to cover all the [...]
Django is getting me down. I want to love it. You see, I love python but its so hard to do some seemingly trivial stuff: Getting my AJAX POSTS past Django’s inbuilt CSRF filtering still isn’t working (see my previous post). My suspicion is some interaction between Django, Passenger, Dreamhost but I don’t know for [...]
Ah the joys of coding – hitting your head against something which appears so easy but is actually quite fiddly. All the more painful after having some fun with the Google maps Javascript tutorial and feeling Javascript was quite easy. So what was the something? Making an AJAX POST from some Javascript to a Django service. I [...]
Day 1: finished Peepcode’s Javascript+AJAX tutorial. Good stuff. Always wondered what JSON stood for. JavaScript Object Notation … a human-readable data format for associative arrays. Nice. Then, after some battling, a victory. I finally got my friend Tim’s android app prototype working using the MacOS Android cmd-line dev tools. This was surprisingly non-trivial since the Google [...]
The time has come. You see, I used to code. Indeed it used to be my career. Then I got involved in UX, learned the joy of prototyping, and now I don’t code. Well to be exact – I’m rusty. Oh, I can still hack scripts in python (mostly log analysis and text processing), and [...]
I just completed my first triathlon, the Wildflower Half Ironman and wanted to share my experiences. Plus I might try to talk you into doing something similar for Team in Training. A Great Cause Firstly, I have to say a big thanks to all my supporters. At the time of writing (May 2011), I’ve raised $4425 [...]
Having been an engineer in a previous life, I’ve been a long advocate of the RTFM response when asked a silly technical problem: RTFM = “Read the F****** Manual” Where the third word can be anything starting with F depending on your mood, the inquirer, and so on. It could be “fantastic”, “friendly”, “frightful”, you [...]
I’ve been called an Apple fanboy in the past, and its true, I am. In particular, I respect and enjoy Apple’s fantastic design and the way their products tend to provide a great user experience for their customers. However, myself and many others have been very disappointed with Apple Ping. Complaints have included limited artist [...]
Image credits: Remixed from JD Lasica’s original. Having just set up a tech consultancy, I’m pleased to confirm that the process of setting up a business in San Francisco is relatively straightforward. So far anyway (check in with me again at tax time). That said, there’s still a few hoops to jump through. Here’s my [...]
Location-based social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite are getting a lot of attention for their integration of social networking with physical location. They allow you to “checkin” at locations around town, see who else is there, share tips, collect points and special offers, and see where you friends are. There’s a certain addictiveness [...]
Hello and welcome to my new professional blog which I’m going to use to publish interesting stuff relevant to my new User Experience research consulting business. Since working at Google, I’ve been working as an independent consultant, mainly helping startups by conducting UX audits of their technology. Its proving to be great fun, and I’m [...]