design

The Immovable User Meets Irresistible Design

August 26, 2011
Thumbnail image for The Immovable User Meets Irresistible Design

There’s a nice article over at all tech considered about the symbiotic relationship between Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.  Ive has designed Apple products since the fruit colored iMacs, and Steve Jobs is, well…  Steve Jobs.  The article describes the intimate working relationship between Jobs an Ive since The Steve returned to Apple in 1992.
The [...]

Read the full article →

Prioritizing Preferece: The Challenge of Managing Design

September 9, 2010
Thumbnail image for Prioritizing Preferece: The Challenge of Managing Design

Managing any initiative is a complex affair – juggling timelines, milestones, and dependencies; managing risks and mitigating factors.  The management of design processes gets geometrically more complex when you add the wildcard of personal preference to decision points.  Many non-designers are incapable of articulating their reasons for preference-based choices in a way that makes sense [...]

Read the full article →

Our Objects Are Listening

June 29, 2010
Thumbnail image for Our Objects Are Listening

In the last post, I mentioned that our objects are listening to us.  Much of this is done in the name of providing a better experience – if an object can adjust to the way in which you interact with it, it should be able to anticipate some of your future requirements or actions.  In [...]

Read the full article →

Design Traceability

April 23, 2010
Thumbnail image for Design Traceability

Kids are notorious for asking “Why?”  Each answer you provide leads to another “why.”  Each exchange leads closer to some central truth.  With kids, that central truth usually ends up being, “Because I said so!”  To designers, business stakeholders are also notorious.  Not so much for asking why as they are for saying, “I think [...]

Read the full article →

Design Science

April 8, 2010
Thumbnail image for Design Science

My grandfather told me a story (perhaps apocryphal) of a final exam he took in a college Philosophy class. As he told it, the professor walked in, grabbed the chalk, and wrote “WHY?” in big letters on the board. He then sat down without saying a word and began waiting for the students [...]

Read the full article →

Following Function

March 24, 2010
Thumbnail image for Following Function

Smashing Magazine has a good article written by Steven Bradley examining web design through the Bauhaus lens of “form follows function.” He first gives a pretty good summary of the history of Bauhaus and the evolution of its principles, then turns his attention to interpreting the validity of form following function. Unfortunately, [...]

Read the full article →

Are top-tier firms worth the price?

March 16, 2007

As I mentioned in the previous post, the client was planning on engaging a top-tier firm to perform the heuristic evaluation. The quote they got gave them a bit of sticker-shock. Even to me (a salty vet), 30K seems steep for a heuristic review – especially when you consider they weren’t providing any [...]

Read the full article →

They may say they value usability

March 16, 2007

I had the opportunity to provide some usability counsel to a client of the firm today. The client is implementing a multi-million dollar platform to provide commercial line insurance quoting functionality to their independent agents. I was contacted by the project team because the client had expressed an interest in utilizing user-centered design [...]

Read the full article →

Vista: Throbbers, and Progress Bars

February 1, 2007

I installed Vista on my home-built PC about three weeks ago to stream HD video to my Xbox 360 and to generally kick the tires a bit. There’s a lot to be said about the usability of Vista (both good and bad), and I’ll detail that over time. This post is to address [...]

Read the full article →