Author: mpullen

Is this the antithesis of good interaction design? Build a car that requires you to plug in or attach to another car. This therefore requires that you negotiate with someone for every aspect of your trip. This is like the shortest thumbed ride ever. http://vimeo.com/4531703

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to… Continue reading Responsive Web design

This is a great demonstration of using Kinect to operate a robot. This would be great for teaching people repetitive gross motor memory skills like I was doing at CRA. Having the ability to teach people how to enter a room and clear it requires repetitive actions and peripheral awareness. It would be interesting to… Continue reading Kinect Teloperation and Tutoring application

Top 12 UI designs of 2010 I want John’s Phone (a phone that sends and receives calls – that’s it) and would really like to try the Ref (a haptatic device to make you aware of your moods).

Secret of Success: Obsession You need to love what you do so much that you think about it all the time and do it all the time. That is the key differentiator. You need talent and intelligence, but it has to be coupled with obsession (or love as Malcolm says). http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/jul/26/secrets-of-success/

If you get a chance listen to these mini recordings of Tom Peters describing snippets from his new book. http://www.tompeters.com/books/little-big-things/ Do we want to deliver excellence? How do you do it?

The Bing-Facebook Alliance: Six Things You (and Google) Should Know is an article from Fast Company. The implications for Bing are interesting however for me as a user of these sites I have a distinct problem – my friends. Do I really want my searches influenced by the folks I have friended at this time.… Continue reading I need new friends ..

This is a great 54 min video on visualization with interviews with many people working visualization today. http://vimeo.com/14777910 by Geoff McGhee

About Face (Alan Cooper) Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (by Malcolm McCullough) Agile Experience Design (by Anders Ramsay) Card Sorting (by Donna Spencer) Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (by: Dan Brown) Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems (Interactive Technologies) (by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt) Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)… Continue reading Design Books: A list Sept 2010

Laurie Rosenwald says that she does 100 things real fast and 99 are mistakes and she picks the 1 that is sort of ok and she uses that. http://vimeo.com/4152221 I love it. I have been walking around for the past few years telling everyone that 999 times out of a thousand I am wrong and… Continue reading Mistakes on Purpose

Barry Schwartz explains the paradox of choice: http://vimeo.com/4276540 Too much choice does not always mean better. Many times it leaves people feeling like they are missing something.

Are Your EEs Motivated by Only Money? Do your top performers work better if given more money? What are they motivated by? Dan Pink argues that they are motivated by 2 things assuming that they are paid correctly to begin with: Autonomy – I want to do want I am interested in Mastery – I… Continue reading Are Your EEs Motivated by Only Money?

What technologies work with which browsers? This site lets you narrow down what you are interested in quickly and compare across browsers and browser versions. http://caniuse.com/

What happens when human structures get too complex? They implode. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/ “In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of… Continue reading What happens when human structures get too complex?

LukeW wrote up his notes from An Event Apart and had a couple of nuggets that I really liked. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1051 “In his Emotional Interface Design talk at An Event Apart in Seattle WA, Aarron Walter talked about focusing on more than usability in Web application design by outlining ways to make stronger connections to people… Continue reading Design Expectations

How can you be more productive at work and on your team? Jason Fried of 37signals says that he and his team focus on not interrupting and reducing interruptions. Get into solving the problem and doing the work and ignore the interruptions. http://bigthink.com/ideas/18522

Significant Objects (http://significantobjects.com/) has writers create a story around an object. The object and the story is then posted to eBay. All profits are given back to the artists. The items are simple items worth very little and are selling for way more than you would expect. “[The auction for this Significant Object, with story… Continue reading Stories Provide Value

Now that we have touch interfaces and these interfaces are successful in the marketplace, why can’t we have interfaces that work with touch and proximity? Matt Hirsch has put up some of his work and it is very intriguing. He is looking at existing technologies so that manufactures could build possible gestural interfaces in the… Continue reading 3D interactions

Forrester did research to show the cost of User Experience to business performance. http://www.cynergysystems.com/forrester/forrester_customer_experience.pdf

Peer-to-Peer Lending Networks Friends and Family Retirement Funds Seller Financing http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/buyingandsellingabusinessmikehandelsman/article204238.html

Tom Peters in his over the top energetic way points out how doctors on average listen to their patients for 18 seconds before jumping in. He scolds the managers of the world for doing so too. This makes me think of a “Friday Forum” at a company called Symmetrix. One of the muckety-mucks was on… Continue reading Listen … Damn it!

37 Signals has an image of the back of their book online. My favorite line is “Planning is Guessing”