These are posts from the User Experience category.
Click on any title to read an entire post.

What’s the point of handing out name badges if nobody can read them?

There is a simple lesson that all conferences should learn from TED. It’s not to charge thousands of dollars. It’s not to bring celebrities to your conference. And it’s not to only have one speaker at a time. Those may or may not be good things to emulate, but they’re not the most important lesson [...]

Posted on March 15th, 2009 in Design, Industry, User Experience  —  2 Comments »

Open Letter to Dell Customer Service

Hi Dell folks:
I have a monitor I purchased from you awhile ago. The power button is busted. All my other Dell products perform admirably, so while this is irritating, I wasn’t too upset. However, after dealing with your customer service organization for the last hour I am on the verge of killing myself. A [...]

Posted on November 25th, 2008 in Random, User Experience  —  16 Comments »

Details Matter

One of the designers of Magic the card game recently got married. He blogs about it in awesome detail. Wouldn’t you know that he and his bride decided to have a super detailed themed wedding. Their theme? Games and puzzles. Whether their theme resonates with you or not you can’t help but love the amount [...]

Posted on October 27th, 2008 in Design, User Experience  —  No Comments »

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

I admit it. This weekend I attended the 2008 BrickCon conference targeted at Adult Lego Hobbyists (ALHs). The conference lasted for essentially three full days from Friday to Sunday. I even took off work on Friday. Super nerdy? Yes. But before you judge… hear my story.
I always loved Lego as a kid. What’s not to [...]

Posted on October 6th, 2008 in Behind the Scenes, Design, Random, User Experience  —  1 Comment »

More Freelance UI Opinions

Yesterday I posted a link to my “review” of a really crappy website for the folks at imediaconnection. My original writeup lauded an app I use all the time. While they were looking for criticism, I think my original post is worth publishing as the folks at Less Accounting are doing a great job. Here [...]

Posted on August 26th, 2008 in Companies We Admire, Design, User Experience  —  1 Comment »

Freelance UI Ranting

The folks at imediaconection were nice enough to ask me for a writeup of my impressions of a financial site. After first writing up a positive post, they sent some choices that had a lot more “potential” for criticism. And by “potential” I mean, they sucked.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
“The mortgage crisis has affected people in [...]

Posted on August 25th, 2008 in User Experience  —  No Comments »

Which is more complicated?

Which is more complicated — using a personal computer or driving a car? For driving, we give you lessons and make you take a test to confirm you know how not to get yourself (or others) in trouble. While the repercussions of using a personal computer improperly are not as dire, we dump you in, [...]

Posted on June 10th, 2008 in User Experience  —  No Comments »

How to Piss Off Your Users

Last year, when we finished building They’re Beautiful! we started thinking about what to build next. I don’t know how many software projects are started out of anger, but Invitastic was definitely one of them. We all shared a deep dislike for eVite. And the focusing moment for us was the e-mail reminder eVite sends [...]

Posted on April 7th, 2008 in User Experience  —  5 Comments »

Job Security (Does the photo sharing site I want exist?)

My first reaction to this situation is that most folks who make software for a living will have steady employment for a long long time.
Here’s the situation. I am looking for a website to use to share my photos with my family. I have the following preferences:

I want to background sync my files up [...]

Posted on April 3rd, 2008 in Industry, User Experience  —  13 Comments »

Just In Case You Thought Software was “Over”

This game is called Crayon Physics Deluxe. I can’t describe it better than Austin Grossman did on (excellent new Gawker site) i09. It’s essentially a “magic book”. Watch all the way through. Every new scenario continues to amaze.

With stuff like this still being invented we haven’t even scratched the surface of what kind of interesting [...]

Posted on February 25th, 2008 in Design, Industry, User Experience, Video Games  —  1 Comment »

Why Web Apps Still Suck

I attended the first Java One conference back in 1995. Anyone who was in the industry at the time will remember the excited throngs (at the conference and in the industry) getting all lathered up over all things Java. (They gave out super cool mini Leatherman knives with the Java logo. The TSA now owns [...]

Posted on February 11th, 2008 in Industry, User Experience  —  14 Comments »

Adorable Devices

I don’t know what it is that stopped me from getting a Nabaztag cause despite it’s non-obvious usefulness I could use an internet connected customizable plastic rabbit that can “sniff” RFID tags. (Note to readers, be careful searching for “rabbit internet device”. The first Google ad is not a nabaztag.) In fact, I’m psyched for [...]

Posted on November 4th, 2007 in User Experience  —  1 Comment »

More Music Trials and Travails

Awhile ago I wrote about the music service I would love (but doesn’t exist). It still doesn’t but I was reading about lala.com and realized it might just do the trick.
Lala claims to:

let you upload your whole catalog of mp3s
let you listen to your music anywhere there’s a web browser
sync the music you uploaded with [...]

Posted on October 31st, 2007 in Industry, User Experience  —  2 Comments »

The Face of Amazon

I know that everyone’s a critic. And I also know that it’s very hard for successful pieces of software to fundamentally change their user interface. That said, I can’t help but feel that Amazon’s new homepage and main navigation user interface is a step backwards. I have no doubt they’ve tested it endlessly, and triple [...]

Posted on October 25th, 2007 in User Experience  —  1 Comment »

Previous Entries? Next Entries? I’m confused.

A common feature on every blog you see is a pair of links at the bottom of the page that let you move forward and backward in the stream of posts. Typically on the first page it’s just one link to previous entries. But on the second page there is a link for previous entries [...]

Posted on October 24th, 2007 in User Experience  —  5 Comments »

Screw the A380. I want to fly on this.

Posted on October 17th, 2007 in Design, User Experience  —  No Comments »

Firefox and Internet Explorer

I’m a pretty regular user of both Firefox and IE on Vista. It helps to run both so I can test the results produced my meager CSS skills. I’ve noticed that there’s a few things I’d really like each browser to steal from the other.
Firefox please copy the fact that IE:

creates new tabs to the [...]

Posted on October 11th, 2007 in User Experience  —  9 Comments »

The Details of Character Creation

I love to learn about all the little things that go into creative pieces that you may not realize are there. When it comes to high quality creative expression I have found that there’s always more that goes into it than most people realize. Fans and connoisseurs are usually the folks who take the time [...]

Posted on October 10th, 2007 in Art, Design, User Experience  —  No Comments »

Privately Owned Museums and Micro Theme Park Experiences

Check out the Spy Museum — a privately owned museum in DC. The museum is cool because, well, it’s filled with spy stuff. What’s interesting about it is that it’s privately owned.

“The Malrite Company, developer of the International Spy Museum, is the successor to Malrite Communications Group Inc. founded in 1956. For more than 40 [...]

Posted on October 2nd, 2007 in Industry, User Experience  —  No Comments »

Copywriters Getting a Little Too Smug

I recently got the following mail from the folks at starwarsshop.com:
Dear Hillel,
As you have likely heard, the title to the highly anticipated Indiana Jones IV movie has been unveiled: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. As with Indiana Jones movie titles in the past, this one has generated a lot hype and [...]

Posted on September 27th, 2007 in User Experience  —  No Comments »

Is this really necessary?

How many ways do I need to navigate through an article on the Boston Globe’s website? Apparently at least three according to the folks at Boston.com.

Never mind the point that these artificial page breaks serve no purpose other than to generate more page views which don’t really benefit advertisers, and just pad the Globe’s numbers. [...]

Posted on September 24th, 2007 in User Experience  —  No Comments »

Princess Power

Photo by Randy Stewart.
You may think this is a horrible reinforcement of gender-specific stereotypes. You may think this is a horrible waste of money. You may think it’s great. I’m not saying that we’re flying our four-year-old princess-crazed daughter across the country to do this stuff, but I am fascinated by the entire enterprise. [...]

Posted on September 18th, 2007 in Industry, User Experience  —  No Comments »

Perrier is Definitely Crazier

My friend Steve pointed me this morning to a site brought to you by the nice folks at Perrier called Show Me Sexier. You get to the site and there’s this cute animated cartoon about a guy choosing an aftershave (I thought people stopped doing that in the 70’s) and sprinkling himself with Perrier and [...]

Posted on September 11th, 2007 in Branded Software, User Experience  —  No Comments »

Release Date for Next Version of MovieOS Pushed Out

Just saw the third installment of the Bourne series. Aside from some nauseating camerawork early on, and some moments where the lead character walks away unhurt from crashes that invite disbelief even from an eager action movie audience, the movie was good.

What was lacking though was the user interfaces presented in the movie. Usually these [...]

Posted on September 4th, 2007 in Design, User Experience  —  1 Comment »

Programming for Kids (and Rolling Your Own Videogame)

As with most parents I have a strong sense of responsibility for making sure my kids are exposed to as many cool things as possible so as they get older the world is their oyster and not overwhelming, scary, and unknown. Giving them music lessons (my six-year-old son plays the drums, and my four-year-old daughter [...]

Posted on August 28th, 2007 in Companies We Admire, User Experience, Video Games  —  10 Comments »

A Tree Grows in Tafiti

We’re happy to see Tafiti getting such a nice reception across the net. In general there are lots of good comments as well as excellent suggestions on how to make it even better. One thing in particular that we noticed was people commenting on the tree view. The comments have ranged from the “wow” variety [...]

Posted on August 22nd, 2007 in Behind the Scenes, User Experience  —  4 Comments »

A New Search Experience

In addition to working on our own offerings, periodically we work with key partners to help them deliver new software experiences. When we work with partners we look for opportunities where we can inject some of our particular brand of user experience value as well as our technical expertise. We’re kind of picky and ultimately [...]

Posted on August 21st, 2007 in Behind the Scenes, User Experience  —  12 Comments »

Providing the Workaround

Unfortunately, there are some products we use that have holes in them that their maker simply can’t fill (for business or technological reasons). Right now the music subscription services are in that situation. In comparing them recently I found that Rhapsody and Napster both claim over 3 million songs in their libraries but both have [...]

Posted on July 5th, 2007 in User Experience  —  1 Comment »

Marketing IS User Experience

In so many (though not all) of my past work experiences there was always this weird dividing line between the people that made the product and the people that told the world about the product. I never understood it. To me the customer’s experience with our company and our software always started at seeing the [...]

Posted on June 29th, 2007 in Books, User Experience  —  No Comments »

folders.live.com

Before our start here at Jackson Fish Market, we all worked together across the lake. And the team that Walter and I were on has gone on to work on some cool stuff. We’re clearly incapable of fairness in describing their new offering because frankly, the people on the team are rock stars, and great [...]

Posted on June 28th, 2007 in User Experience  —  2 Comments »