Category: Design
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Adversarial Design, Part 3: Arguing the Unarguable
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Debating the merits of competing design ideas is fun and, as I’ve argued in parts one and two, can be extremely productive. But some design disputes are, I think, unanswerable. And it’s important to realize when a debate has crossed over from something you can resolve to something you will never reach any definitive conclusion…
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Adversarial Design, Part 2: Testing by Discussing
You can’t really validate or invalidate a design idea just by looking at it and declaring it a success or failure because of some best practice or design heuristic that usually works. You’re just talking about theories. Ultimately, no design disputes can be settled convincingly without making a model and testing it out. But a…
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Shoot Your Family
I have two pieces of advice for user experience design professionals visiting their families over the traditional end-of-year holiday season. First, take this opportunity to do some intimate, informal usability testing with your family and loved ones. I’ve written about this before, but I am encouraging it again: There’s a good chance that many of…
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Designed in Detroit by General Motors
I am a 37-year-old user experience designer, and I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t even know how to drive a car. I moved to New York City when I was 18 and I just never really needed to learn. Moreover, I don’t even find automobiles all that interesting or seductive, at least not…
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Behavior is Seven!
Today is the seventh anniversary of the incorporation of Behavior, the humble web and user experience design consultancy I helped found in 2001. Happy birthday to us! My four awesome partners and I started the company in what at the time seemed like the worst possible economic climate to launch a new business. The one-two…
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Voter Intent / User Behavior
In Minnesota, they are currently recounting the ballots in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. As part of the process, they are re-analyzing thousands of ballots that were discarded during the initial optical-scan machine count due to problems with the ballots themselves — usually stray marks and incompletely-filled-in dots. Usually, a human…
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How Bad is Bad?
John Gruber invites public ridicule to the UI design of this file renaming application. And yes, it certainly looks terrible, like a stereotypical case study in haphazard, bloated, bad UI design. But is the UI design really that bad? I’m not so sure. As someone who has had to do all manner of complex and…
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Talking about Sketching about Interacting
If you’re in NYC this Thursday, you should come to see From Sketching to Experience, the first of Liz Danzico‘s Dot Dot Dot series of small, informal (and free) lectures. These lectures are the ramp-up to SVA’s new MFA in Interaction Design program. I’ll be one of the speakers this Thursday, and am also going…