ted boren archives
case study
Last week Cameron sent an e-mail to gather some ideas about how to succeed as an in-house designer. Aside from the more obvious (and individual) necessities of technical skill, graphical ability, and general smarts, how do you succeed in a team environment, where people have different ideas, biases, and approaches to meeting the team’s common goals?
posted by
ted
on Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
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5 comments
“It’s mostly a matter of attention span…”
Bea, commenting on the difference between a business analyst and an interaction designer. Or something like that. I stopped paying attention…
posted by
ted
on Tuesday, Jul 22, 2008
Webslug claims it can “help you measure the worldwide wait.” Cool tagline, but I’m skeptical.
The time I got back on one site was infinitesimally small (less than a twentieth of a second) when personal experience shows it takes around 10 seconds. Another site showed over 40 seconds when my experience has been around 20 seconds. And finally the site doesn’t answer the question, “How fast is it at a given connection speed?” It just gives seconds to load without the context of a data rate. (The Firefox Throttle Add-On does this nicely, but only on the Windows version.)
On the upside, it does let you compare two sites to each other and collects measurements of all the sites that get tested for public review. I like these ideas, but Webslug will have to fix those deficiencies before I come back often.
One final wishlist item, the value of which was demonstrated in a presentation by Aaron Barker recently, is being able to see the difference between “page appears” (something happens to show the user that the site is loading), “page is partially functional”, and “page is fully functional” (100% loaded). If a page takes too long to appear initially, the user may get impatient and hit Refresh—which will actually delay them further by restarting the whole process. So even if it’s not fully functional there is value to getting something up there quick, even if it’s not the full meal deal. But I’m not sure an automated tool could really do that… Someone prove me wrong please!
See Webslug for yourself.
Also check Yahoo’s best practices for increasing performance on the front end. (Thanks for all your recent help on this stuff Aaron!)
posted by
ted
on Thursday, Jul 10, 2008
“Web analytics is a dangerous game. If you measure the wrong thing, your metrics won’t just be weak — they’ll be directly misleading and might cause you to pursue an erroneous strategy that reduces your design’s business value.”
Jakob Nielsen on why Unique Visitors Must Die
posted by
ted
on Monday, Jul 07, 2008
Check out the Pew Internet & American Life Project for boatloads of data about who uses the internet and how. Example reports: Home Broadband 2008, Polling in the Age of Cell Phones, and The Internet and Consumer Choice. I will be returning soon…
posted by
ted
on Thursday, Jul 03, 2008
“theOneAndOnlyHotSpotIndicator”
ID applied to a div on maps.live.com . Holy Semantics Gone Haywire, Batman!
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Jul 02, 2008
Interesting interview of Dana Chisnell by Jared Spool on why recruiting for usability participants should not be driven by standard demographics, but instead be more focused on task familiarity, skills, and behavior. I think this applies to our design thinking too; demographics reinforce stereotypes and can obscure the real audience issues you should be focusing on.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Jul 02, 2008
“I’m not sure if there’s a cure for what ails me today. But if there is, I bet it’s downstairs and I bet it contains chocolate.”
Overheard on Marla Erwin’s Twitter feed while backtracking from Mint
posted by
ted
on Friday, Jun 27, 2008
UPDATE: Since this article was first written, Jason has implemented a very useful archive for Northtemple, including everything tagged with “accessibility”.
ORIGINAL POST: We have a lot of traffic coming to North Temple to read Aaron’s Accessibility Checklist (the one he vowed he’d never write). While you’re here you might check out some older accessibility posts (still working on that archive, right Jason?):
Plus a collection of short quotes and links:
(By the way, and totally unrelated to accessibility, Microsoft’s Live search helped me find all this stuff with their site search where Google failed… What’s up with that?)
posted by
ted
on Friday, Jun 20, 2008
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1 comment
“In a small company [the attitude] is, “Hey, let’s launch it and let’s see if the users like it.” There was a time a few years ago where Yahoo had more of that mentality. But as companies get bigger and bigger, many of them reach a point where they can’t do that as quickly.”
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo in a Businessweek article on recent management departures
posted by
ted
on Friday, Jun 20, 2008
LDS Media Talk : Sharing Technology Ideas for LDS Parents and Youth. A new joint effort by our CIO, Joel Dehlin; the Audiovisual Department’s Managing Director, David Nielsen; and LDS.org’s product manager, Larry Richman.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, Jun 11, 2008
“It is amazing what you can get a kid to do for an Otter Pop.”
My Wife
posted by
ted
on Tuesday, Jun 10, 2008
Scott Berkun will have his TV debut as an expert panelist in a series of 5 episodes on The Business of Innovation starting tonight. Scott’s a great speaker, design & usability advocate, and all-around good guy. Good luck as a talking head, Scott!
posted by
ted
on Monday, Jun 02, 2008
“Specialization can easily become a strait-jacket for designers, directing their mental processes towards a predefined goal. It is thus too easy for the architect to assume that the solution to a client’s problem is a new building. Often it is not!”
Bryan Lawson in How Designers Think
posted by
ted
on Thursday, May 29, 2008
“Vroom is not the word for Car, either.”
Aaron Cannon in his accessibility training today, explaining why some signs in ASL have no easily discernable connection to the things they represent. Did I mention again how cool the training is when you get to work here?
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Last August, my wife provided material for a post on little known facts about breaking your ankle. As implied in my recent post, where my 9-year old observed that his brother now
lives on the couch, my older son has provided us with additional bone-breaking insights:
- If you tell a doctor your son has probably broken his kneecap, they will nod indulgently, say, “That’s actually very difficult to do…” , examine the x-ray, and then say incredulously, “Well I’ll be…”
- You can break your kneecap without actually landing on it or even whacking it against something. It is enough to simply kick out really hard with the other leg in such a way that your whole body twists in just the wrong direction, wrenching your supporting leg’s patella from the front (where it belongs), to the side (where it does not).
- A dislocated patella can then snap back into place with such force that it actually breaks the bone into three or more pieces, most of them remaining on the wrong side of your leg from where they belong.
- You can get a lot of sympathy from 14 year old girls from telling a story like this.
- If you really really really want to miss a high adventure camp in June, breaking your kneecap in May will do the trick. You might even get cookies from your devoted Scout leader in the bargain!
- Ditto for final exams. (But they’ll be back… and without cookies.)
- You can sleepwalk with a broken kneecap and not realize it until you are sitting in a chair 10 feet from where you started, in excruciating pain.
- If your dad is asleep when you sleepwalk on your broken kneecap, he might not awake until you have been yelling for a good while. (You may think it’s been an hour, but probably not. Still…)
- The previous trick is a really good way to get extra ice cream, video game time, or whatever else you desire from your guilt-ridden father.
- After such an incident, a young man may still turn down codeine in favor of ibuprofin, because he “doesn’t like the way it makes him feel,” this spite of an anxious father’s urging. (I have many fears, but my son giving in to peer pressure on drugs is not one of them.)
Matthew is scheduled for surgery on Friday, so I will probably be missing Cameron and company’s all-day training on visual design. (Have we mentioned before the incredible internal training opportunities we’ve had, especially recently? One of the best things about working here.) I am really bummed about missing this, but what can you do? Father First (especially if you don’t hear your son screaming in pain in the middle of the night and you still need to earn back some points!)
posted by
ted
on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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2 comments
“Matthew broke his leg on Thursday. He broke it while he was fencing and he tripped. He lives on the couch now.”
My 9-year old’s description of his older brother’s current situation, as posted on his blog. This is his entire entry. I love it.
posted by
ted
on Sunday, May 25, 2008
From Gary Greenberg’s A Grain of Sand slideshow on Scientific American.
posted by
ted
on Thursday, May 15, 2008
The wbr tag saved my bacon today when a long email address was breaking a narrow column layout. This looks like another HTML tag I hadn’t ever used, but probably should have. I looked all around for a non-java-script CSS solution, but this little non-validating tag was the best I could do. See the linked Quirksmode article for a nice discussion of the “incompatibility soup” of solutions to this problem.
posted by
ted
on Wednesday, May 14, 2008