Category: Work
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The Wisdom of Don Draper, Part 2: It’s Toasted!
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As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike. One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual…
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Quantity vs. Quality in a Design Process
The NeXT Cube and the Apple Mac Cube. Are they iterations? Discussing his upcoming biography of Steve Jobs, author Leander Kahney describes Apple’s prototyping process: It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes…
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OMMA Nom Nom Nom
I am going to be speaking today, June 17th, at the OMMA Publish conference here in New York City, on a panel entitled “Optimizing for Performance: Adding Value to Your Site”. OMMA is focused on online media marketing and advertising, publishing several trade magazines and sponsoring several conferences each year in these areas. My panel…
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Spring Ahead
Two months ago, I tweeted the following cry for help: Over the last several months I have made some tough choices about what to devote my time to. And “blogging”, unfortunately, didn’t make the cut. In short, I have been extremely busy doing things other than blogging. In the next week or two I will…
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Design Research is a Design Process
I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and…
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Design Rules to Live By
On the IxDA list this week, Lisa deBettencourt asks: What are your fundamental tenets of design; those little bulleted phrases on the Design Vision slide of your Powerpoint, the signatures on your email footer, the philosophies you work by as you design? A simple but interesting question. You can see all the answers here, but…
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Georges Seurat Dot Com
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It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times: “The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to…
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What I Learned in Art School (Is it Design Thinking?)
Like a fish who doesn’t know that he is wet, I have no idea what it is like to not be a design thinker. And I suppose that, conversely, a lot of people who talk about design thinking have no idea what designers are actually taught. Are we really taught different skills than our MBA…
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Back to Mac, Part 1: Why I am Leaving Windows and Getting a Mac
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As I was subtly hinting at in my last couple of posts, I have changed my Windowy ways. I have switched (back) to Mac. Finally. This is the first in an ad hoc series of articles documenting my experiences with this transition, looking at it from many perspectives: personal and cultural observations, usability and user…