“Do not pray for tasks equal to your abilities, but pray for abilities equal to your tasks. Then the performance of your tasks will be no miracle, but you will be the miracle.”
““Good” beats “Innovative” nearly every time. An obsession with innovation leads executives down the wrong path. Just trying to be good would be a smarter focus.”
Former colleague Scott Berkun in a recent Business Week article. Before objecting, read the whole article; innovation will happen, but not if that is the primary goal. The primary goal should be to produce Something Good. If innovation is required to get there—great! But if there are tried and true solutions, all the better.
“I have to admit something strange: I’m amused by poorly designed websites. The worse the better. Much like some people “love to hate” movie villains, I get a peculiar satisfaction from finding myself completely lost in an ill-conceived, over-designed, steaming pile of a website. ... I think I have to enjoy it on some level, given my role as a customer experience consultant; otherwise work would be pretty difficult (see also: doctors who can’t stand the sight of blood).”
“The world needs more UX. Without the knitting that UX performs for organizations and their customers, we’ll likely end up with continued wanton proliferation of technology rather than the thoughtful, iterative progress and leaps of innovation that good UX practice nurtures.”
This one hits home for me today. From Chris Baum in the latest Boxes and Arrows email newsletter. (I looked for a specific link on their site for a specific web page to cite, but couldn’t find one.)
Some useful design tips for comparison shopping interfaces from Get Elastic. Brings me back to my Carpoint days at Microsoft… It’s tough to put a lot of data across multiple products into tight columns, but it can be done well. Have you seen some good examples?
Sculpture at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle. Re-posted from last year, in honor of the holiday and the man.
When we lived in Seattle, we would usually go to this park on Martin Luther King Day to honor this great man and talk to our kids about what he stood for. I Have Dream must stand as one of the greatest and most inspiring speeches ever.
“Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.”
Jakob Nielsen, effectively treading the fine line between easing fears of Big Usability and talking people out of hiring his firm. From a good article on striking the right balance on usability.
“It’s not about the quality of the sketching, but the variety and exploration of the idea that matters.”
Leah Buley, quoted by Jared Spool in a new article on exploring design options and making decisions about them. Good article and very applicable to my current project, where we are starting to develop a set of layout alternatives and visual design options for an online catalog. Especially liked the point about purposely looking at extremes to help sharpen your thinking.
I had a hard time believing this was not a spoof… but from all I can tell Burger King is selling Windows 7 Whoppers in Japan—a normal Whopper stacked with 7 patties. Now… who thought that was a good idea? Check out the comments in the link above for just a taste of the comic putdown possibilities. My favorite: “Introducing … Windows 7’s first killer app.”
Also thought it was pretty funny that whenever I tried to upload a pic of this monstrosity to post here—surprise! It crashed my browser :-)
“I don’t believe that a bohemian HTML5 interpretation is similar-to-but-better than strict XHTML for exactly the same reason that I don’t believe that an optional ordering of amino acids in my DNA chain will somehow not affect my personality.”
From “Wired Earp” in a comment at HTML5 Doctor, a resource that Nic pointed out to us at a recent training session. Funny quote that I mostly understand on the topic of loosened standards for required tags, closing of tags, etc. in HTML5.
“Too many CIOs get lost in the thicket of what platforms are hot today, what buzzwords are ascendant, what tool got the reviews here, or there, and never take time to sit down with a user and observe, and listen, and talk.”
From Mark Hurst on Good Experience. Helpful quote as I prepare to host a training session on conducting customer interviews next week. Good dialog illustrating why it’s important for management to buy in to user-centered principles.
In a recent team meeting, we talked about how our circle of influence is different—wider—than our circle of responsibility. This reminded me of something I posted three years ago almost to the day, so I decided to re-post it here, to remind myself to “speak up” outside my role—but to do so appropriately.
Great interview from Mark Hurst with Brian King on the re-design of Courtyard by Marriott. A great case study on segmentation, observation, user-centered design, branding, and prototyping. Fun to see these familiar concepts applied in a domain that’s less familiar (to me anyway). I loved the description of business travelers being invited to a life-size prototype of the new lobby, built out of foam core to see how they would react to Marriott’s innovations.
Nick Usborne’s summary of how to improve conversion of browsers into buyers. From Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction, a great article that still wears well, 3 years later. The trouble is getting the marketing wing of your organization to buy into it…
From research reported in The Mediocre Multitasker, in the NY Times, via Facebook friend, Susan Dray.
Researchers said, “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
I find this 100% true in my own life. I do my best work when I can shut out everything else but the task at hand. Now… what was I doing?
“There’s a common misconception that visual design’s role is only to
provide a pleasing veneer on the page. In fact, visual design’s big
role is to boost overall communication.”
From Jared Spool’s recent article on the interplay between good visual design, IA, and content design. He also argues that to really succeed, it is better to have people who are strong in all three areas, not just specialists who are good at just one of them. I think I agree.
“Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time.”
Another notable quote from Nielsen’s message on Twitter postings, noting that compared to email advertising, which continues to generate clicks for several days, Twitter “shows a drastically steeper decay function: lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none.” This means, among other things, that Tweets are impacted far more negatively than email by differences in timezone…
Jakob Nielsen recently ran a Twitter post through 5 rounds of iterative design to get the impact he wanted. At first blush I was thinking, “That sounds like a lot of effort to optimize a Tweet!” But if you are using twitter as a marketing medium, I guess it makes sense. (Far as I can tell, these were just design rounds; he wasn’t running a user study or anything.)
See his article for lessons learned in each round, from concision to focus, impact, and re-tweetability. (There, I’m making up new words right and left.)
He finishes the article with a notable quote: “Text is a UI. It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. ... In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”
