I have long wondered why those taking addresses require you to give your city and state. Whether it’s over the phone or through a web-form, why not just ask for the zip code, allow the computer to look up the city and state, and then simply confirm the result with the user?
I was pleased to experience such purchasing my new AppleTV a few minutes ago from apple.com.
I just did a nice MySQL dump of about 10,000 spam comments, just from the last week here. Hundreds of them are getting through Akismet, and they’re dang smart, too.
So, we’ve axed ‘em. Went in and disabled all comments on all posts. I might have to build in a human check. Or we might leave comments off. We’ve loved interacting with all you people, but comments are a funny thing. I’m not sure any of us will miss them.
Some cool insight from Campaign Monitor on their new office space. This part was particularly interesting:
“After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you’re a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.” —Paul Graham, Great Hackers
Every company I have ever worked for uses offices in conjunction with rank (which is fine) but I can definitely see how having a place to concentrate is important. But I’d trade an office for some open spaces with big whiteboards, lounges, games, and food. It’s no coincidence that nearly all my ideas that I would consider innovative have come when I wasn’t in the office (or even working).
“Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.”
In helping a colleague prepare for a usability test, I found Jared Spool’s latest UIE Tips article timely and totally in synch with my own experience. Three questions NOT to ask during user research (paraphrased and embellished):
Don’t ask about the future. People don’t know what they would really do in hypothetical scenarios—even highly realistic ones.
Don’t ask how they’d design a feature. They either won’t know or won’t have good rationale. They know their process and to a degree they know their problems—focus on that, not their proposed solutions.
Don’t provide a (supposed) answer to your own question (“Did you do X because Y?”). Leading questions may be a staple of political pollsters, but they yield biased results. Don’t feed them reasons out of your own experience or assumptions—let them provide their own.
OXO’s angled measuring cup, via an article on Good Experience: “Customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How? Simply by observing the customer experience.”
(By the way—this brand appears to be sold at Kohl’s; Bed, Bath & Beyond; and Sears to name a few… so I might just drop in a buy there rather than pay shipping…)
“It’s no use spending time, money, or effort to entice people into a product or service if it just leads to a bad experience. Why? Because those people you carefully encouraged and nudged into your circle? They go right back into the cloud, spreading the news about their bad experience.”
Hear hear! Mark Hurst’s advice when clients want to spend time and money leveraging Facebook, Twitter, other social media, and advertising—before they have built a good experience for those masses they are trying to attract.
“For practicing User Experience Designers, one of the most important laws isn’t Fitts’s Law, which helps us understand how to design interactive elements. Nor is it Hick’s Law, which describes how long people take to make decisions.
It’s Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 99% of everything is crap.”
The pull-no-punches opening to Jared Spool’s article today on 5 indispensible skills for UX mastery, which he lists as: Sketching, Storytelling, Critiquing, Presenting, and Facilitating. I like that list.
Having just just wrapped up a re-design of the Church’s online store, which included much discussion of the importance of free shipping, I was interested in this article on The Power of FREE. We are all apparently irrational, “free thinkers”!
Clarification: Unlike traditional retailers, we’re not trying to “drive sales” by offering free shipping; we’re trying to remove barriers to people ordering materials that will help them learn and live the Gospel. If that includes leveraging this psychology, then fine!
I have long appreciated the ability to copy layer styles by option + dragging them from one layer to another. For those like me that have also longed for the ability to copy layer styles to multiple layers, you are in luck—there is a way. Dragging the style is a shortcut for the copy/paste layer style option in the layer contextual menu and allows for the application of styles to multiple selected layers.
Nice article on interviewing users by Jakob Nielsen—strengths and weaknesses, when and when not to interview. Fits in with what I’ve experienced with contextual inquiry, especially the importance of focusing interview questions on what users are doing right now.
“Self Design only works in those instances when you are the user and there’s a lot of users just like you.”
Closing quote from an interesting article by Jared Spool on the pros and cons of designing for yourself, using 37signals as a prime case. I find that most people believe—without any real evidence—that most people are “just like them.” There’s the rub, eh?
Working with a team of designers I’ve been getting this error a lot lately opening files in Photoshop. Digging through all the layers manually is a pain and on a few files I’ve not even been able to locate the offending text. Nic Johnson just made my day however pointing me towards the Replace All Missing Fonts feature under Type in the Layers menu.
In the next couple of days, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be releasing a new version of its missionary site, Mormon.org. This new site is meant to introduce the church to friends and family and to the world.
The new Mormon.org has been years in the making as I will share what has been our process and our experience. We hope that this post could benefit designers visiting our site. Honestly, this is motivation for me to record what has been done to make such a site.
“A lot of these guys take themselves a little bit too serious. Let’s see, a teacher, policeman, fireman, doctor, and somebody who’s in the service. I truly believe those are the only five real jobs in the world. Everybody else should just shut up and enjoy life. There’s five legitimate jobs in life.”
