This afternoon, a friend of mine posted a link to the HTML5 Readiness visualization. I am a bit smitten with this tool - for a number of reasons. It is useful, usable, and compelling. First off, it effectively communicates which browsers are capable of which "new world features." You can use this to plan which features to use when developing your site because it's easy to … [Read more...]
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 that should be blue," or, "This site needs more... … [Read more...]
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 to turn in their essays. Around the auditorium, students began scribbling long treatises on … [Read more...]
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, he takes his analysis to logical extremes … [Read more...]
Zeitgeist from the Cloud – Tapping your audience
Jeffrey Veen has an interesting post over at his blog discussing a stream of Twitter data coming in while he was speaking at a conference. He says he felt as though he was cheating on an exam by "listening" to what the audience was saying as he was speaking. By addressing audience concerns as they hit the cloud, he was able to turn the audience in his favor. I saw this … [Read more...]
A Salesman in Thespian’s Clothing
This may just be me, but it seems like there's a... I can't tell if it's insidious or clever... trend to make commercials appear similar to the shows during which they air. I noticed it first during an episode of "Lost." I noticed it because my wife and I almost always time-shift our viewing of the episode due to having young children and a band that needs to practice. As … [Read more...]
Making People the Molecule is Key (Even for the Enterprise)
Bill Ives wrote an interesting initial look at Booz Allen's Social Knowledge Management software. Booz was wrestling with the task of getting 18K employees worldwide to collaborate more effectively and intimately. They are solving it with a solution they call Hello. My day job is working for a professional services firm. Although we are much smaller than Booz, we wrestle … [Read more...]
A Word on the Tagline
You may notice the tripartite slogan that's part of the logo of this site: Useful, Usable, Compelling. Those three concepts are the pillars of the framework I use to design or analyze a system. In short, what I mean by these terms is: Useful Does the thing do what it's supposed to do and only what it's supposed to do? In other words, I'm using your site/app/thing to … [Read more...]
Why Apple Rulez!
So, "Welcome to Macintosh" was just playing on CNBC. I was cleaning up from the dual birthday party for both of my kids, so I left it on. All in all, it's maybe a bit too simplistic and a bit too reverent of the fruit company from Cupertino, but it made some valid points. The most important point it made was that "Apple doesn't compare itself to another company." I think … [Read more...]
Catching a Wave
While some of the initial fervor over Google Wave has died down, desire to obtain one of the elusive invites remains just this side of Charlie Bucket's desire for one of Wonka's Golden Tickets. For those who have been lucky enough to receive an invite (like myself), an initial period of confusion is soon replaced by other periods of confusion. It's not that the platform … [Read more...]
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