November 2011
0 posts
7 tags
7 tags
July 2011
2 posts
Breathe
Useful, tested and proven website hierarchy? That’s easily fixed!
Simply allow junior marketing access to the CMS, add half-baked deals and serve.
10 tags
May 2011
1 post
March 2011
0 posts
December 2010
1 post
9 tags
November 2010
1 post
4 tags
October 2010
1 post
May 2010
1 post
3 tags
March 2010
3 posts
8 tags
Corporate Rainforest Monkey Rape Killers, Nestle,...
Nestle’s Facebook Page … or is it Greenpeace’s?: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nestle/24287259392#!/pages/Nestle/24287259392?v=wall
What they should have done according to the experts (I like the low-fi content): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremiah_owyang/4459637381/sizes/l/
Full article by Jeremiah Owyang here:...
3 tags
13 tags
It's Been a Hard Day's Dark Side in its Right...
Pink Floyd just won a ruling to prevent their music being sold as individual tracks online. This is essentially the same reason The Beatles don’t appear on iTunes either.
I’m one of the fifty-nine billion people who own Dark Side of The Moon, and I could not tell you the name of any of the tracks other than Money (and that’s just a wild guess). As far as I’m concerned the...
February 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Dream Project Requirement #1 of 3
From a creative brief I received this week from a client, for a short tutorial video: “Keep cost within $10M” Oh, I think we can probably manage that, once I’ve included my fee, just sign here and we make this official.
8 tags
Design Crime: Social Media Usage Illustration
This is a nice little illustration with the intention of showing how people are sucked into the social media timewasting void on a daily basis.
The type, tone and style is refined and slick, but the data shown is complete bollocks.
So the top of the pyramid is 1 hour.
The next level down is clearly the size of about 3 hours, but is actually only representing 2 hours, and it gets worse from...
9 tags
Wired iPad Demo - The Rebirth of the Gratuituous...
Ironic that this Wired iPad demo is built in Flash… All the interesting UI whizzyness looks like custom UI design and animation based on print-originated design - and while this tickles the imagination and looks really slick and awesome in a promo video (ooh… 360 ads… wow), it’s still just the web underneath and I don’t see this level of richness being a sustainable...
January 2010
10 posts
9 tags
7 tags
Ultimate Committee Design, or the next step in... →
The guys at Wireframes, FluidIA, the open sourced UI design for Drupal 7 I spotlighted last year and now Wordpress are breaking ground in opening user experience design to the same open source processes as our less-goateed-more-bearded code brothers have been doing for years.
I’ve never quite understood how people find the time to gift such great work to the world, do they not need to eat?...
4 tags
1 tag
1 tag
Diversions
Mixer 2.0:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twHhcB4D-po
Remember Samorost?:
http://machinarium.net/demo/
A little like…
Little Wheel
Enjoy your week.
Vancouver Weather Icon
I think this weather symbol was designed for Vancouver - a solid grey block connecting the sky to the ground.
Grand Theft Surrealist Carrot
James Barnett creates painted compositions based on scenes found within computer games.
He says himself that he doesn’t get out much (to the countryside). I can understand that, given a city life. I’ve spent a few hours myself on the beaches of Riven.
Games will soon acheive the holy grail of photorealism and then perhaps will unleash something quite different and creative - maybe...
Social Media "Grey Goo" Destroys Internet
The Grey Goo theory goes that one day, some science lab somewhere will invent something nasty that replicates itself over and over until, well, there’s just a lot of goo.
If you set up enough social media havens and link them all together using the extraordinarily lax “give us all your personal info and we’ll re-post your stuff (and thanks for your entire life history, by the...
December 2009
4 posts
Swings and Roundabouts
Blew it in a tough pitch (probably). Killed it with a AR app pitch (almost). Kicked off our fundraiser: http://fcv.ca/foodbank Great week!
Playing with augmented reality concepts for two client projects. HUD UI fun.
Usability Testing Grandparents
“Eye-tracking however, I’ve never held much belief in. It doesn’t always work, and we found, doesn’t work at all when your test subject has a glass eye.”
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5031-q-a-matthew-curry-on-selling-to-older-folks-online
A humbling and informative read on designing for the really grey online generation (80+).
Easier to learn = more likely to buy
“Results show that visits to [several major book, music and travel] Web sites are best characterized by decreasing visit times and that this rate of learning is related to the probability of purchasing.”
HFI article here:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/nov09.asp#research
And continuing today’s theme the hard science behind the summary is here:
...
International Journal of Mobile HCI →
No top 10 lists included.
Interesting insights into Mobile user testing analysis and heuristics, and an in-depth look at text input methods.
November 2009
6 posts
October 2009
7 posts
Sometimes wish that my timesheets could be done by... →
Byline
Byline is great little Google Reader iPhone app, the best part is the offline syncing so if you do a fair bit of flying you can still catch up.
This guy did the diligence on the review:
http://www.blogherald.com/2008/10/09/byline-20-the-iphone-app-for-google-reader-freaks/
It’s a few $ more than others I’ve tried, but for the easy reading and offline syncing with zero hassle,...
It's all gone hexagon
During the quieter moments (yeah right), I’ve been working on a set of content diagrams to improve our project documentation at FCV, from pitch through to delivery:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcvtech/sets/72157622476134825/
Key Learnings:
Visio is not Illlustrator.
A good and inclusive visual description of the Agile project management process is a tough thing to create.
I must be a...
September 2009
2 posts
More CAPTCHA hate
I’m not alone.
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/captchas-tough-on-sales-common-way-to-test-user-tolerance/
One commenter nails it: Good idea, bad execution.
August 2009
8 posts
Google Wave, dev preview. Radical.
Social Experience Design 101
http://asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-09/AugSep09_Crumlish.html
Great article on Social Experience Design.
The Anti-Patterns section makes for amusing reading if you’ve ever built a social network from scratch for a client and then waited for the users to show up…
We’d never do that, right?
Oops.