Featured Posts
  • Why are our "smart devices" so dumb?

    There are some practical reasons, and some pragmatic ones.A "thinking" device is a device that is consuming power to think (to run the processor), and hardware and software designers have to keep a core user need in mind: battery life. The more the device "thinks" the lower the battery life. ...

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  • The absent corpse: How Hollywood is hiding us from death

    I watched Captain America last week, and as you may have noticed by my earlier review I enjoyed it - it was quite entertaining, but in one respect I was also a little troubled by it. I noticed that the energy weapons the Nazis... oh, sorry, they need to sell ...

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  • The death of the save button. Are files next?

    One of the really interesting trends I've observed over the past few years is something I call "the death of the save button." It started in the mobile space, where the operating systems persist data in the background as it is being set and so the information is "saved" without ...

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  • What are the qualities that distinguish great designers from the rest?

    Great question - I just did an "exit interview" with a senior UX designer who was consulting for my company and this very topic came up. Some insights from that conversation (and some of my own opinions) are as follows:An appreciation for good design and art is a key input ...

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  • Lessons in UX: The baseline is shifting

    I had a great meeting with my team this week discussing customer expectations and needs. As part of the discussion the Kano model, which I was only slightly familiar with, came up. Created in the 1980s, the Kano model explores how customers perceive aspects/features of a product or service. These ...

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  • What kind of technologies need to be invented to bring us up to speed with Star Trek?

    I'm actually quite involved and interested in this question, as my job is to design computer interfaces and support new opportunities in user experiences that I could not have even dreamt of even 5 years ago (I did mobile design then... for Nokia "candybar" phones.) There are a lot of technological ...

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  • What is the difference between user experience and user interface design?

    User experience is something we understand, support and design. User interfaces are small windows into the total experience. Here's a story/metaphor I think is useful to explain the difference: You are walking past a storefront, and you see an item in the store window that catches your interest. You stop, ...

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  • Saying goodbye to the UX echo chamber

    I've spoken at a number of UX design conferences in the past, though it's been a while. The past two years my proposals have been consistently rejected, the latest being a rejection of all three of my proposed panels by UX Australia. I've rationalized this rejection in various ways - ...

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  • Lessons in UX: Are addicting experiences good or bad for users?

    Farmville. Desktop Tower Defense. World of Warcraft. Twitter. All of the above have one thing in common: for many many users they are incredibly addictive experiences, sucking hours and hours of time away from them day after day. Updates from games like Farmville has become the only thing I see now when I go ...

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  • Making ‘Touch Banking’ Work for Customers

    Originally written for and published by BAI/Banking Strategies, December 22, 2010 Within the last year, tablet computers, led by the Apple iPad, have made a tremendous splash in the market. While only a handful of financial institutions are currently offering banking applications for tablets, the growing use of these devices merits ...

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