July 2010
2 posts
Best Place for Tabs
Yesterday I downloaded a beta build of Firefox so that I could play with Tab Candy. I am very impressed, and can’t wait until some of the other features that Aza Raskin showed in his demo video are implemented.
One side effect of using this version of FF is that the tabs are back at the top. (I use the Tree Style Tabs extension, which lets me stack the tabs at the side instead.) And...
Dusty Digital Albums
I was thinking about how we relate to our music. And specifically how this has changed with the move from physical media (vinyl, tapes, CDs) to digital music that has no physical manifestation.
In the old days (eight, ten years ago) you would have CDs on shelves. Maybe some old tapes and vinyl albums in a box somewhere too. Your CDs might have been organized alphabetically. Or maybe by genre....
June 2010
1 post
WatchGorgeous fake tilt-shift stop motion day in the life of NYC. (Watch in HD and full-screen.)
May 2010
5 posts
Divvy
Finally someone has created an application for Mac OS X that lets you manage windows properly.
Well worth the $14. (It’s just a shame that this sort of functionality isn’t baked into the OS.)
WatchThis is clever stuff.
/via @bruces
iPad: Maybe Usability Isn't Everything?
When I read about Jakob Nielsen’s usability test findings on the iPad, I can’t help but think of Fred Beecher’s article from last year for Johnny Holland, The iPhone is not easy to use: a new direction for UX Design.
In the article, Fred talks at length about the low usability and learnability of the iPhone and its apps. But he goes on to say that that doesn’t really...
UCD... in the bathroom
So we just moved into a new office building. A behavior I had noticed in the old building was guys wandering into the bathroom carrying laptops (on their way from one meeting to another, presumably) and looking around (in vain) for a dry horizontal surface on which to place their laptops.
In this new building, I notice that every bathroom has a shelf, which I assume is for putting your laptop on...
And Now I Shall Tweet about this Post
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April 2010
1 post
Modern Slavery, and What We Can Do about It
I just watched this TED talk and I am stunned and shocked. Appalled. Sickened. There are 27 million slaves in the world. Twice as many slaves as there are Jews. Think about that for a minute.
And it doesn’t take much to liberate someone from slavery—on average a hundred or so dollars. Go to Free the Slaves now to find out how you can help.
March 2010
4 posts
1 tag
Rockstars?
I think this whole design rockstars argument is a bit daft. I think we need both—people who will blaze trails (rockstars) and others who will follow them (most everybody else).
2 tags
Transitions and States
Wow! Buxton was right. The transitions are just as important as the states (if not more so).
As I play around with jQuery (+HTML + CSS, obviously) as a prototyping tool, I’m finding that I really need to play around with the details of the transitions to make it obvious what is happening (something that it is hard to do in my head, for me at least).
For example, in my prototype I have a...
Software companies should hire more user experience designers and less technical writers.
That way, they would need less tech writers, because the products would explain themselves. And the products would be better to boot.
February 2010
5 posts
WatchWow! I love the way they’ve used stop-motion to demonstrate their product. Nice one!
http://makedo.com.au/
1 tag
Shouldn't it be the other way round?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have floor 0 (ground floor) at the bottom instead of the top?
Flash Video vs HTML5 Video—An Experiment
I played the same YouTube video in Safari (on Mac OS X), first using YouTube’s HTML5 video player, then using their Flash player. This is what the CPU monitor looked like:
Feel free to draw your own conclusions :)
1 tag
Sugru—Looking Good So Far
My Sugru arrived yesterday. So this morning I set about fashioning some new feet for my aging PowerBook.
I used the smallest sachet, 5 grams, but the feet only needed about 1 gram. What to do with the rest?
I had a little scout around and found something that has been annoying me for ages—on my bike, my daughter’s bike seat is not attached at the back (and there’s no obvious...
January 2010
4 posts
iPhone and Nexus One
I’ve finally figured out why I like the iPhone better than the Nexus One. It’s because the iPhone is truly innovative, while the Nexus One is a me-too product.
Google is playing catch-up. They should be playing leapfrog.
Fitts's Law for Asymmetric Targets (Like Tabs)
(Originally posted on my old blog on June 29th, 2009)
Since I started putting together my entry for the Mozilla Labs “Reinventing Tabs” challenge, I have been thinking about Fitts’s Law. Here’s what I have been thinking: does the shape of the click target affect the ease of acquisition?
More simply put, is it easier or more difficult to acquire a rectangular target that is (say) three times...
WatchHere’s a quick example of stop-motion video that I created using Chris Neale’s excellent Animationizer.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work — Alain de...
December 2009
1 post
The Top Ten Essential Interaction Design Books—Dan... →
Dan Saffer shares his list of the top ten must-have books for interaction designers.
November 2009
10 posts
1 tag
Replication—Provide a Way for Users to Set up...
1 tag
Mozilla Design Challenge Entry
Brief
The brief of this design challenge was to find a creative solution to this question: “How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”.
Entries were to consist of a video (around three minutes) and images of the mockup.
First Steps
After reading Aza Raskin’s blog post about browser tabs, I quickly saw the advantages of...
About me
Interaction designer masquerading as a technical writer. Dad. Husband. Etc. Brit in Israel. Johnny TV dude.
Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flickr Delicious last.fm Huffduffer Google Reader shared items Google profile I live here
1 tag
Allocating Storage Resources to an Organizational...
Brief
To enable administrator users to assign storage resources (physical disks) to organizational units.
First Steps
This is not a complex problem that has never been solved by anyone else before (though there are a few wrinkles that need to be taken care of). So I looked to the available design patterns to see what would work best.
The interface was already in place for selecting an...
1 tag
Adding Filtering Functionality to a Data Grid
Brief
To enable users to filter the items that are displayed in a data grid by any criteria they choose.
First Steps
The first thing I did was to sit down and talk with the project’s lead developer. He said he wanted something like the search feature in the bug-tracking system that we use (which allows you to create and save complex boolean searches on multiple criteria). My initial...
Awesome New Israeli UX Site Launched →
Battling SVN
So I’ve got SVN set up on my Mac. I can check stuff out locally using file:///<repo_path>. svnserve seems to be running, but I can’t check stuff out using svn://localhost/<repo>.
WTF am I doing wrong?
UPDATE: It seems like I’ve got it working. The annoying thing is, I’m not sure why it works now. I changed something that shouldn’t have made any...
New Johnny TV Post →
I just posted Matt Webb’s Lift 09 talk, “Scientific Fiction” on Johnny Holland TV. I am actually quite excited about this. I admire Webb and his work, but more especially, his thinking. I think my next JHM article is going to be about this video.
Thanks to Mr Merlin Mann, I am posting this from a cute little Dashboard widget.
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/243861520/marco
New Site!
The computer that I was running my self-hosted site died, so for now I have pointed capcloud.com to my Tumblr account.
This means that none of the old content is available. If you’re one of the two or three people in the world that this affects — sorry.
May 2009
1 post
3 tags
WatchAn Internet Watered Down — John Pettengill
Audio from Boxes and Arrows.