I recently started writing for boxesandarrows.com and will be linking to their site from here. I have an upcoming article on Cross Cultural Design Thinking.
Read MoreDon’t be this site!
I received an email notification that I had a package from UPS. There was a link that said I could sign for the package online. “Cool!”, I thought. I’d never heard of being able to sign for a package online instead of in person. “UPS must think of everything!” And so began an hour of aggravation, going in circles, a hunt for customer service, wrong rabbit holes and ultimately an…
Read MoreBut Choices Are Good, Right?
Choices Equal Complexity Choices sound like a great thing. We tend to think that when we have a ton of choices, we have the ability to find things that are more perfect or customized for us. Choices give us a sense of autonomy, independence, and even uniqueness. Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, uses recent social science research to show that more choice actually creates…
Read MoreMommy? Where do User Interface Designers Come From?
Well dear, when a product manager and a developer love each other very, very much….. 🙂 Ahem! Not really! But there are a few main backgrounds that we tend to come from and it’s helpful for teams to understand these backgrounds to know what they’re likely to get. Each background tends to have strengths and weaknesses though individuals from a given background may vary from the typical strengths and weaknesses…
Read MoreHow to Design an Application
User Experience Design Process First, a few notes: What’s below mostly applies to a waterfall methodology. In Agile Experience Design, portions of this process can be applied in short sprints but there are additional concerns that are not addressed here. In general, all of these steps still happen, but often in parallel to each other, where this article makes it sound sequential. Identifying a need in the market is a…
Read MoreDesigning User Interfaces with the Colorblind in Mind
User Interface Designers Need to Understand Color Blindness There are various types of color blindness, some more common and some quite rare. Most color blindness issues are genetic and found on the x chromosome, which is why it’s much more common in men than women. (Women have two copies of the x chromosome but men only have one.) The different types of red-green color blindness may affect as many as…
Read MoreGeographically Distributed Teams in Agile Software Development
Many Agile development teams are not geographically co-located. The idea of working together in a war room (or at least an open office), is central to the vision of Agile, but runs contrary to the reality that most of us live in. Collocated teams have conversations in the aisles, hallways, and over lunch where work gets done both formally and informally. Much is lost when teams are geographically distributed. Cockburn…
Read More3 Usability Best Practices You Dare Not Break!
Everyone has an opinion about user interface design. Trained or untrained. Engineer. Sales person. Product manager. Executive management. It doesn’t matter who you are, anyone who works in software has some kind of opinion on the user experience. And this is a good thing! Through collaboration, the user interface becomes stronger. Many usability best practices are not set in stone. But these 3 are. User Experience Best Practices But there…
Read MoreUser Interface Design Prototyping Tools – A Review
There are many options for rapid prototyping these days. There are the old stalwart standbys like Visio, InDesign, and even PowerPoint. I’ve been using Visio for years, but decided to step out of my box and see what else was out there for user interface design prototyping tools. Here’s a bit of what I’ve found. Balsamiq Review Balsamiq creates interfaces that look like they were sketched by hand. This is…
Read MorePersona Abuse in User Interface Design
Personas in User Experience Design Personas in User Experience design should always be referred to by name as if they are real people. If you start talking about them and identifying them by their role, you are no longer doing persona-based user interface design! Back when Alan Cooper first wrote, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, I had an opportunity to work with his agency. I brought them in to help…
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