Category: Uncategorized

Even thought he was focusing on Google+ I thought the multiple ways of publishing using different services was useful. “I publish both a daily and a weekly email newsletter without doing anything. It just happens. Everything I write on Google+ is automatically posted on Twitter and Facebook, and it’s made available as an RSS feed.”… Continue reading Many ways of publishing

“This page presents an idea for exploring practical algebraic problems without using symbolic variables. I call this tool a “scrubbing calculator”, because you solve problems by interactively scrubbing over numbers until you’re happy with the results. Background: This work assumes a Soulver-like environment for interactive arithmetic, and picks up where Soulver leaves off. If you… Continue reading exploring practical algebraic problems without using symbolic variables

Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?_r=2&ref=technology ” But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganannounced their… Continue reading Online education

“When technology was inherently and unavoidably complex, it was forgivable that solutions weren’t elegant and simple. It was at one time understandable that finding and visiting a new doctor could take weeks, or searching for enterprise information wasn’t successful. But with a myriad of elegant and simple solutions entering the market, users are learning to… Continue reading On Simplicity

“Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and… Continue reading Solve problems: designer or MBA?

“TED-Ed’s new free platform allows anyone to “flip” any video on YouTube by adding custom content to play alongside it, making it possible to turn any piece of video content into a teachable moment.” http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679742/ted-eds-new-video-tool-allows-anyone-to-create-video-lessons-online

http://blog.intercom.io/criticism-and-two-way-streets/

Can crowdsourcing pick the best stocks or do they just tell you the most popular? It would be interesting to see some research on this? Some people find crowdsourcing very useful for getting their search results as an example. Just because many people like something, does it make it right or good? Is there wisdom… Continue reading Crowdsourced Financial Advisors

If your product makes your users feel stupid they will not want to use it. Ask them questions like “On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident do you feel using this system?” Get to the heart of things with your questions and you will no which way people lean on the usability of… Continue reading On Measuring Usability

Lean UX Design + Product Management + Development = 1 team Externalize! Goal-driven & outcome-focused Repeatable & routinized FLOW: think -> make -> check Focus on solving the right problem Generate many options & decide quickly what to pursue Recognize hypotheses & validate them Research with users is the best source of information & inspiration… Continue reading The 9 Principles of Lean User Experience

Zeldman is teaching a class “Selling Design” and has made an online reading list. http://www.zeldman.com/2012/01/11/selling-design-an-online-reading-list/ Demystifying Design – by Jeff Gothelf – A List Apart Design Criticism and the Creative Process – by Cassie McDaniel – A List Apart Personality in Design – by Aarron Walter – A List Apart Design Professionalism – by Andy… Continue reading Communication is a key skill as a designer

Curate forums for me I would like to have a spider go out and collect the references from multiple forums and put them in one place. I want to search this aggregate site not the individual rambling. Tell Mr Spider to go to sites X, Y and Z. Look for any topic on “UI patterns”… Continue reading Curate forums for me

Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation? ” Are companies more innovative than ever before? Judging from the vast number of Fortune 500 companies professing their commitment to innovation, the answer is yes. But we sense that the more a company talks, thinks, and strategizes about innovation, the less real, big innovation it produces.” -Jens Martin Skibsted… Continue reading Innovation in Big Companies

“We are ruined by our own biases. When making decisions, we see what we want, ignore probabilities, and minimize risks that uproot our hopes. What’s worse, “we are often confident even when we are wrong,” by Daniel Kahneman “How analytics harvested from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. Call it Big… Continue reading Using Big Data to make better decisions

Your online portfolio http://carbonmade.com/ Your portfolio on an ipad http://www.xtrafolio.com/ So many portfolio tools are for images or graphics. I am looking for something that covers all of interaction and visual design so I can show click throughs and design interactions as well as graphics.

I thought this an interesting opposite of an Agile “Done.” Agile is focused on an engineering methodology of done. Below is a start up methodology of done. They are very different. I know this spectrum is very wide, but this is a good example of why each team has to define its operational rules and… Continue reading Done Manifesto

This fastcompany article is an interesting writeup of the expectations of users today. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665491/what-the-jawbone-ups-failures-tell-you-about-ui-design This is a review of a product (a wristband and smartphone app that track your wellness) that has spots of brilliance interrupted by transitions of annoyance. Follow his progression: · The wristband itself is superbly designed o track how much you’re… Continue reading User Expectations

Disruptive innovation Start with simple and affordable then change the definition. http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595

Just finished talking about “innovation” and what enterprise software companies mean by it. While the thoughts are still in my head I will write them down. It is not that this is rocket science but it seems to be missed in the discussions of doing design in a company. Is what you are working on… Continue reading Making or Saving Money

Many companies are lost when it comes to the buzzword “innovation.” This article hits on some problems I have encountered in other companies. People grasp for something to get their “innovation” then feel like it just doesn’t work. These ideas may work but what people need to do is learn the process by doing it… Continue reading 3 Barriers to Innovation

FACT: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency. Take the online color challenge, based on the official FM100 Hue Test by X-Rite. http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77&Lang=en I did this as quick as I could and got a 3. 0 is perfect. I am glad that I still… Continue reading Color Challenge

Now, let me tell you I am not a person that believes that you need to be honest 100% of the time. Sometimes you have to tell yourself what you want to hear to get through the day. However, after 17 years of working this is starting to drive me batty. Why is it that… Continue reading Intellectual Honesty

What an awesome way to learn about kearning and to put yourself to the test. Does someone do this for laying out forms? I could use that for teaching developers. http://type.method.ac/

How many times have I worked through a design got the team to agree on it and when it comes back it looks nothing alike? Design a form, design a screen, and layout the controls and the text. Make sure that the things that are grouped are what the user is looking for. Draw attention… Continue reading Developers: Just can’t see it

technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible products that work, beautifully, without fuss and with great style in simplicity NOT with ever longer lists of features and technical specifications “And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms… Continue reading Building a product. Features first?