Make it easy for people to learn about your product. Show them how it works. Don’t just tell them.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Design’ Category
Dark Patterns in designing the User Experience
That fact is that user-centric design usually includes many steps along the way that attempt to anticipate the user’s behavior and manipulate it a certain way.
Read MoreFlow & the User Experience
The User Experience experience belongs to the individual. Always has; always will.
Read MoreThe goings on at the UX Book Club Chicago monthly meetings (3/31/10)
If you’re not already familiar with the UX Book Club’s Chicago chapter, let me get you up to speed. It’s a small group of passionate design folks who meet downtown to talk about things in the industry. Such as our jobs, our roll as designers, and what is going on in our professional spheres. We praise each other’s triumphs, as well as bitch about other designers, clients, educators, etc. We also digress into joking about current events, or corporate drug testing, or Battlestar Galactica, or whatever happens to pop up organically throughout the evening. Oh yeah, and there’s books too. Every…
Read MoreSXSW 2010
Being involved in the web industry, one event always comes to mind when talking about big conferences, South by Southwest. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to attend this event to see what it had to offer and to experience what all the commotion was about. I have to admit, SXSW was my first real conference, so I don’t really have anything to compare it to, but from what I have heard and what I experienced, it’s hard to compare it to anything in the first place.
Before heading to the conference I did not really know what to expect.…
Read MoreWhat I’ve learned: Time for the ad industry to catch up.
Ok, everyone take a deep breath. I’m not going to go on an endless rant on why I think more companies need to modernize their approach to rich media ads……or am I? (cue evil laugh) Ahhhh-ha-ha-ha-ha.
What I will say is that a little more progressive thinking would help cut out a lot of the senseless number of versions required for some companies running rich media ads and also (potentially) increase your margin for success. So how did I come to this conclusion? Through recent conversation with some ad partners and also jumping through a technical hurdle or two.
We recently…
Read MoreAbstracting the web, the iPad, and print media coming full circle.
In another blog post, I brought up the topic of how the web is being “abstracted” into new mediums and devices such as Rich Internet Applications, netbooks and tablets (e.g. the iPad). After pondering this topic a little more, it hit me that that this concept might be a lot bigger than I initially thought, and deserving of an individual posting.
As I already mentioned, there are new mediums and devices coming out that are abstracting the web and displaying the content in other more unique forms. Instead of the typical user sitting down at his/her work station and loading up…
Read MoreAwesome Dev+Design Playground
Every so often I come across a company or community of developers (and designers) who put out great, inspiring, innovative work…for free.
I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow. On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.
Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained…
Read More
