Time to read: 3 minutes This week, I didn’t blog. I have 16 drafts sitting in my “drafts” folder, and I’m unwilling to publish any of them. I’ve come to Medium to make amends. […] continue reading »
Why I’m hiding out from my blog on Medium
Category: UX & Design
User eXperience and Design. Tips, tricks, or just snippets of my online finds, both praise for a job well done and gripes for shameful behaviour.
I discovered UX (User eXperience) as a discipline in 2002. I had been working with its principles in mind for more than ten years already, and it was a revelation to be told “look, there are books for how you think!”. Since then, I have been constantly learning, working, and expanding on the topic of UX in every aspect of work and life
7 ways to improve error messages
Time to read: 4 minutes It’s 2013, and we should no longer be seeing unhelpful error messages. Some common mistakes and practices, with examples of how to make them better. […] continue reading »
If you’re a designer, you have got to read this book!
Time to read: 2 minutes “An engineer cannot be caught writing poetry.” I was hooked. Artist, Designer and Inventor Bruno Munari wrote one of the most inspiring books on Design. Read it. Really. […] continue reading »
don’t say my name: when sales techniques backfire
Time to read: 3 minutes When a sales person calls me for a decision 15 hours after a visit during which every fourth word was “Sophia”… I run… for the nearest alternative. […] continue reading »
Make them beautiful! Make them free! Publishers, the reading paradigm is shifting!
Time to read: 4 minutes This week, a good friend of mine is releasing a new book. I am dying to read it, and he’s already got a copy for me, which is amazing. Thing is… I’ll never carry a hardcover around now that I have a kindle to read from. And I don’t want to pay double for books […] continue reading »
show them the post-its!
Time to read: 2 minutes Most designers are perfectionists, and will continue working on something until it’s “just right”. This means we often use up all the time allocated and risk making something completely off the mark, to boot! Show them the post its, I say! Or, in this example, the labels… […] continue reading »
my ideal todo list would have 4 dimensions
Time to read: 2 minutes I wrote recently about time-boxing, and that got me to thinking that productivity isn’t just about shoving things into a calendar. It’s also about making the most of the time you’ve got, limiting context-switching, and remembering what needs to get done. After quite a bit of pondering, I concluded that my ideal todo list would […] continue reading »
Five things a business can do that make me smile
Time to read: 2 minutes Want to build a good brand? These are my top five suggestions for getting it right. If you know there will be an outage in service, warn your affected users, tell them when service will resume. And apologise. It sets expectations, demonstrates you are in control (even if that’s not true), and makes them feel […] continue reading »
timeboxing tomatoes – or what is timeboxing and why is it good?
Time to read: 3 minutes timeboxing tomatoes The pomodoro “italian for tomato” technique had me giggling for a bit, before I read on – thank you wikipedia :Pomodoro technique – and found out it was a desperate student cramming for exams who decided to focus his attention using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. “Let the first stone be cast…”. So we’ve […] continue reading »
The UX of 21st century tv series
Time to read: 3 minutes I love stories. And television series are lovely little drip-fed stories with the same characters, new gags, amusing plot twists, that go on and on for 12 hours each season… but are released on an arbitrary weekly schedule and time! They’re the television equivalent of Harry Potter, Kushiel’s Dart triple-trilogy, the classic The Three Musketeers […] continue reading »