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A Quick Tweak
I’ve moved my blog from my crusty old virtual server to WordPress.com; apologies if I’ve munged the mod_rewrite rules and for some missing images here and there.
Wrapping Up Another Semester
Last night I critiqued eighteen interactive data visualizations, and I’m quite pleased with the results. Considering that the majority of the students had no previous experience working in Flash, the projects covered the gamut from fully functiona...
In the Details: Sort Order
When the iPhone 2.0 software update was released, there was a change in the way the iPhone handled podcasts. The podcasts are organized such that all episodes of a particular podcast are listed together in what could be considered a playlist. Prev...
The Challenge of Sign-up - an Upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar
UIE Virtual Seminar - Designing for Sign-up with Joshua Porter Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008 Time: 1:30pm ET (Please note the special start time) Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take th...
In Comparison: Screenshots
Another area in which Apple’s Mac OS X outshines Windows is in taking screenshots. Up until Vista, the only way to take screenshots in Windows was to press shift + print screen. This would capture the entire screen, including multiple monitors. (C...
San Francisco UX Book Club
I just started a wiki page for the San Francisco UX Book Club. Who's in?
Transition
Moving from industry to education; from deep/big urban to small town; and I'm sure many more. My life is now filled with some pretty big transitions. It seems I am a soul in transition. I don't think i have gone more than 3 years without some maj...
Competing with the iPhone through Flash
Scoble is at Nokia World talking about some new fangled device that we’ll hear about on Wednesday. These were the paragraphs that got me: But engineering does NOT equal a great experience. Yeah, my Nokia does not drop phone calls in places ...
Service Design: What’s Next?
For the past three years, I have attended a conference on service design. In 2006, during the first ever conference on service design, everyone felt excited to come together as a community and begin talking about this new design practice. Last yea...
Snackr crashing under AIR 1.5?
Adobe AIR was just updated to 1.5 recently, and it seems to have fixed at least one long-standing Snackr bug–items should now open in tabs in Firefox rather than in new windows if you have that preference set in Firefox. However, I’ve ...
Getting Stoked for MAX Milan and Liveblogging
I’ve been on vacation the past week but I’m sitting in the Cancun airport waiting for my flight to Milan (through 2 other cities) and getting excited about MAX Milan. I’m going to be doing the Flash Catalyst keynote with one of t...
It’s Not the End of Print, but...
Last week, PC Magazine announced that January 2009 will mark its last printed edition. They will be an all-digital publication in February. I don’t find this move at all surprising and expect to see most magazines make this transition in the next ...
Wind Generated Power
A couple weeks ago, I posted Graham Curry’s visualization about the potential of wind energy in West Virginia. This is another of his visualizations narrating the generation and distribution of electricity. It depicts the mechanics within a wind g...
Things Change
Life has been quite turbulent lately. Last week I found out that I was being laid off. It was disappointing because I had poured a lot of energy into my job and into developing the design practice there. I fully understand the circumstances that ...
From the Department of Redundancy Department
One of the few things I like about Microsoft Word is its commenting feature. I like the way it expands the width of the page to add a column for the comments so that they can be directly across from the text they refer to. I like the color-coded b...
PhizzPop Chicago Highlights
A more detailed post is coming but check out The video hightlights for last Thursday's Chicago PhizzPop tour.
Latest Blog Posts
Over the last few months I have been blogging a lot over at Clearwired. Some of my posts are: Simplicity over Complexity? Subject to Change The Uber Header Arrives Olympic Medal Map The Fold From Research to Personas I Feel Your Pain
Word of the Year Finalist?!
"Topless Meetings" (meaning laptopless meetings), the term I coined back in 2006 but that got a lot of publicity back in April, was a finalist for Oxford Dictionary's Word of the year this year, beaten out by "hypermilling." Crazy/weird.
From Plain Old Search to Research Tool
It’s not very often that Google makes changes to their search user interface, but yesterday they introduced a handful of significant, new features. As described in their official announcement: Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to cus...
SpoolCast: Follow-up to Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild
SpoolCast: Q#38;A Follow-Up from Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild Recorded: November 12, 2008 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer Duration: 29m30s #124; File size: 17 MB [ Subscribe ...
Designed for Mobility
When we hear “mobility” mentioned in a design context these days, everyone immediately thinks of mobile phones. Designing for mobility tends to equate to miniaturization. Make it fit in a pocket. Make it wearable. Make it light and slim, yet durab...
The Flex Builder “Identity Crisis” and the Flash Platform
Lee Brimelow left a comment over on Keith Peter’s blog about Flex Builder. That spawned a pretty well read post over on calm in the chaos (great name). As someone that has been doing Flex development since the 1.5 days, here’s what I&#...
To Do: Get a To Do List
Of all the useful applications I’ve installed on my iPhone, one would think I would have a to do list by now. Its absence was, after all, one of my few complaints about the iPhone when I first got it, and I did expect that to be one of my first pu...
Kvetch! Reborn with Twitter a Decade Later
Oh happy day, bitching is fun again! Kvetch is back!
Horton Entend un Zou!
You are likely well aware of Amazon’s unrelenting enthusiasm in making recommendations based on your previous purchases. Occasionally, they even recommend something I’m interested in. A couple days ago, they made a mistake that they really ought t...
Roundup of the Flash Catalyst News
I was lucky enough to be a part of the MAX Day 2 keynote where we showed off Flash Catalyst so I’ve been surfing around collecting the feedback. Here’s the good stuff I’ve found so far. Almost a year after his last post, Mark An...
Serge and Andrew are Live Blogging the Day 2 Keynote at MAX
Serge and Andrew are going to be doing Day 2 Keynote Liveblog that should be a lot of fun. You can comment on everything they write so it’s a great way to share in the keynote festivities whether you’re sitting in the audience or could...
Dare to Experience?
For a few months now, as I’ve driven from the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, I’ve passed a billboard advertising the LG Dare on Verizon’s network. The slogan, “Dare to experience the best 3G network,” always makes me ...
Wrap Rage Revisited
Two weeks ago, I pointed out Amazon’s new Frustration-Free Packaging initiative. It’s a fantastic idea, and Engadget reported today that BestBuy, Sony, and Microsoft are all jumping on the bandwagon. Here’s hoping that this is the beginning of a l...
Notes from “How to be a UX Team of One?” virtual seminar
TriUPA sponsors Shanna Ward (Insight) and Janey Barnes (User-View) kindly provided these notes based on their viewing of Adaptive Path’s recent virtual seminar, “How to be a UX Team of One?” A slidecast, templates, and links rele...
UIEtips: Ideal UX Team Makeup - Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists
The User Experience world is filled with many disciplines: information architecture, user researcher, interaction design, copywriting, and visual design — to name just a few. Each of these disciplines have a rich history, a deep knowledge ba...
Meet the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenge Judges
Those of us that went to design school or have worked at a traditional or digital agency have all learned to respect the design review. All design challenge contestants for the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenge have to present to a...
Meet the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenges Teams
PhizzPop is a huge undertaking for invited teams and it’s not something that all companies can do. What’s involved? First teams need to pick three dedicated team members that can go through three-days of intensive training. Then teams need to...
CoCoMo - Collaboration for Every Developer
Along with the Flash Platform news, we’ve released CoCoMo, one of the coolest products at Adobe. CoCoMo is basically a framework that lets you add collaboration to any Flex application out there. It comes with a few basic components like vid...
The Flash Platform (again) and Hello Flash Catalyst
Gotta love the press cycle. Even though the keynote isn’t for another couple of hours, we’re going to be announcing the Flash Platform. Those of you who have been with us since the beginning may have a feeling of deja vu. You aren̵...
Welcome Back Google Reader Subscribers
Spacedaisy let me know that my feed is back in Google reader. I’ve been having blog issues lately so while it might have seemed like I haven’t been blogging, I have, you just haven’t been seeing it. So feel free to click through ...
Behind the Scenes of the MAX Keynote
I’ve been stuck in rehearsals all day but Serge stopped by and captured the magic of what’s going on behind the scenes at MAX. It’s already shaping up to be an awesome event. I’m giving some folks a tour of the San Francisc...
The Chicago PhizzPop Challenge: Posted
Here’s the challenge that the PhizzPop Chicago teams got on Friday, November 14th at 4pm. Chicago 2016 Olympics Bid Awareness Overview You’ve been selected by the Chicago 2016 Committee to help provide digital strategies to help Chicago be selecte...
Wind Potential in West Virginia
Graham Curry has spent all semester researching the current and future use of wind energy in West Virginia and has created a fine set of data visualizations. In this one, he shows the regions of the state that have the highest wind speeds and plot...
Links for 2008-11-14
Video: Urban mobile multiplayer gaming | LIFT conference Fun talk and demo by Jury Hahn of MegaPhone, who do "Phone Call Controlled, Realtime, Multiplayer [...] No related posts.
World Usability Day
Happy World Usability Day! This year’s theme is transportation. I just took the Global Transport Challenge advertised on the site. After entering the distance I travel in an average day for each mode of transportation I use, I was scored with a t...
Links for 2008-11-13
IN10 weblog - This Happened, Utrecht "Voor een eerste This Happened Nederland was het een geslaagde avond met overwegend solide presentaties, […] die verder [...] Related posts:Announcing This Happened – Utrecht I'm happy to anno...
About that iCar
Thomas L. Friedman wrote a poignant piece in his New York Times column about the U.S. auto industry and its current financial troubles. He frames the issue very well with this response: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What...
Win a Prize for Guessing the Name of Thermo
Faisal is running a contest to guess the next name of Thermo. He’s giving away a free copy of Flex 3 In Action to the closest guess. I think I’m going to give a hint here tomorrow, so stay tuned
Come see Thermo at MAX 2008!
I haven’t had much time to post to this blog (or work on Snackr) because our team has been really busy getting ready to show off an early version of Thermo at MAX 2008. In fact, we’re doing better than showing it–we’re also...
PhizzPop New York
PhizzPop occurred in New York City on November 4th (Yes, THAT November 4th). Get a taste of what’s coming to Chicago on November 20th and register for this free event at www.phizzpop.com before we sell out (We’re getting close). See...
Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR
The Dojo team just released a set of extensions for Adobe AIR. The extension basically fits a lot of the AIR APIs in to the Dojo development model so that developers used to dealing with the Dojo APIs can now very easily take advantage of AIR̵...
Daniel Szuc on UX in China
In this show I had the great pleasure of chatting with Daniel Szuc from Apogee in Hong Kong, China.
Obesity & Economics
Emily Frye has been working on a health and fitness related Service Design project for her masters degree. It is no surprise, then, that she has been dealing with data about obesity in West Virginia in my class. Her time series is a comparison bet...
Job: UI design contract
Paragon Application Systems markets five commercially available software products. Each product has its own personality. Our users range from the very technical that require maximum configurability to the less technical that want to easily find ...