Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.
January 11, 2013
A small difference in the way a goal is phrased can drastically change the tasks that are necessary to accomplish that goal. Successful designers understand users’ goals before trying to design user tasks.
January 11, 2013
design / research / usability-testing / user experience
And so we come to the crucial step, the one that most teams skip over and the reason why they end up in the “what ifs” and opinion wars: analysis. I’m not talking about group therapy, though some teams I’ve worked with could use some. Rather, the team now looks at the strength of the data to support design decisions. Without this step, it is far too easy to choose the wrong inference to direct the design decisions. You’re working from the gut, and the gut can be wrong.
January 10, 2013
The value then of a college degree comes down to two questions: What important things change slowly that are worth learning? Can a college degree give them to you?
January 7, 2013
The current state of CSS gradients, and their syntax.
December 26, 2012
design / research / user experience
Biased responses can compromise our findings—both within a participant’s answers and in our handling of them. In this article I’ll explain how to identify, allow for, and better understand bias when performing UX research.
December 26, 2012
accessibility / design / user experience
One of the things that I love (I’m serious, I love this) is how the simplest concepts in web accessibility span design, development and content creation.
December 26, 2012
design / interaction design / user experience
Brilliant method for improving a user experience: imagine the site as a person.
“Imagine those web apps and sites as human beings with whom you are trying to have a civil conversation. You’ll find that most of them are rather … inhumane!”
December 20, 2012
Ways to replicate some native app functionality around distances and directions to destinations within web apps.
December 19, 2012
I decided to undertake a different approach to kickoff meetings, applying design thinking, constraints, and interactive exercises to develop a kickoff framework that was more similar to a playbook of activities I could pull from to begin to define and begin to solve problems for clients. I am in the business of creating experiences for the web, and although these exercises are designed to support that type of process, you might find them useful in putting together kickoffs for other kinds of projects as well.
December 16, 2012
design / performance / responsive design
A great examination of the bad performance issues with responsive design these days, with some good solutions to try.