Category Archives: user experience
SXSWi ‘09 submission
Any UX practitioner worth their grain of salt will tell you that Snap’s Rhythm is a Dancer is one of the most influential pieces of music within the experience design field. And now it’s my turn to pay homage to … Continue reading
Silverback & RITE (sitting in a tree)
We finally released Steve the Gorilla in to the wild. This was Clearleft’s first foray in to the desktop application world and brought its own unique challenges. It actually feels good to escape the confines of a browser. In fact, … Continue reading
Context over dogma
This is lovely for many reasons, but it’s the last line that gets me: Context over dogma. What a beautiful way to put it.
Safe
I’ve been wrangling with something for a while. I was hoping the wrangling would end and I’d reach a logical conclusion to this all. And then blog about it. But that’s not happening so I’m resorting to a splurge. Maybe … Continue reading
Readlet
Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for a while now. There’s no deep-and-meaningful-here — it does the simple things well and that’s all I really want from this kind of tool. As Jeremy noted earlier in the … Continue reading
Humility & the Interaction Designer
When asked what personal qualities make a good interaction designer, Larry Tesler highlighted humility: “Enough confidence to believe you can solve any design problem and enough humility to understand that most of your ideas are probably bad. Enough humility to … Continue reading
Listening to Interaction
“…watching a tool in use is the same as observing a conversation. everything, in a sense, has its inputs and outputs. From that point of view, the boundary between “interactive” and “noninteractive” tools start to dissolve. Interaction design is largely … Continue reading
Ignore the Exceptions
Complex information, such as price lists and timetables, cannot be designed on a preconceived grid. The page arrangement has to stem from the content and structure of the information itself. First you have to find the shortest and the longest … Continue reading
No
Oh deary me. The new(ish) Marks and Spencer website has a flash intro. I so hoped these days were behind us. I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the collective frustration of the site’s users or the fact that a designer … Continue reading
User Goals
Alan Coopers’ About Face 2.0 talks extensively on the importance of personas during the design process. At Clearleft, we use many of the approaches he recommends. Just recently, I was leafing through the relevant chapters and was reminded of a … Continue reading