Archive - User Experience

Trust and the “wisdom” of crowds

September 18 0 Comments Category: Thoughts, User Experience

I observed an interesting pattern at the train stop this morning. A message came up on the LED message board saying that the next inbound train to Boston would be arriving on the outbound track this morning. A few people noticed this and you could see the inner dialogs in their heads about whether they [...]

iPhone photo artifact

August 07 1 Comment Category: Photos, User Experience

I must have moved the camera at just the right time to get this interesting artifact from my iPhone. I wonder what this reveals about how the iPhone camera works…

The waves of Facebook

July 30 0 Comments Category: Thoughts, User Experience

I’ve been on Facebook for a long time – pretty much since it first started – and it’s been interesting to observe the evolution of my “friends” list. The first wave were people I met in college because that’s who Facebook was originally available to. Then they opened it up to high schools, but that [...]

The importance of context

July 15 0 Comments Category: User Experience

Anyone working in User Experience knows that it’s important to understand the context of your users’ environment and to design around that. For instance, an application designed for a busy police station where the users are constantly interrupted by unrelated tasks would take all those interruptions into consideration and help the users work around them. [...]

Come on, UIE, get your story straight

July 09 2 Comments Category: User Experience, Words

In an e-mail I got after registering for the UI13 conference (6/17/2008): “We will ship your Flip Camcorder no later than June 27, 2008.” On the UI13 website: “[W]e’ll mail you your camcorder in early July.” And finally, in an e-mail sent today: “We expect to ship your Flip no later than the week of [...]

Recommendations

June 18 0 Comments Category: Thoughts, User Experience

I take recommendations seriously. If I’m going to recommend something to someone, I have to be willing to accept the consequences if they end up not liking what I recommended. I usually worry that if someone doesn’t like what I recommend it means either a) I have bad taste, or b) I really don’t know [...]