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
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 »
Time to read: 2 minutes A friend of a friend needs a website. She’s an award-winning theatre director and professor in the USA, so her website needs to convey her experience and vision. I asked her why she does what she does, why she has chosen to direct, and she said that she loves telling stories, showing relationships about people, […] continue reading »
Time to read: 5 minutes If I am stuck with a budget of next-to-nothing, can I still design for the web at the level I normally deliver? Can, ultimately, web design be free? “adobe” is web-design for “wealthy” I have been fortunate enough to work on Adobe products for most of my web designing life, so creating lovely interactive buttons, […] continue reading »
Time to read: 2 minutes At work, we have a regular "broadcast" and want a consistent look So I'm testing out setting up a pre-fabricated html-with-css container for a newsletter sort of thing that is broadcast on a regular basis. I have created a container which you can copy from lower down on this post. If you paste its contents […] continue reading »
Time to read: 2 minutes So you have a spare Raspberry pi? No? Still waiting for yours? Yeah… a friend of mine ordered his from RS, and they were taking forever. So he found another supplier who had some in stock… so he ordered it! And eventually he’ll receive the RS one as well which means he’ll have a spare. […] continue reading »
Time to read: < 1 minute It’s been a short while that I discovered that two of my WordPress installs had gone, shall we say, tits up. You could visit the site, you could log into them using the WordPress app, but the damn thing refused to let you log into the dashboard. Something about update.php not existing? Very strange behaviour […] continue reading »
Time to read: 3 minutes My friend Peter Warwick-Mahoney, web developer extraordinaire (and a fairly awesome human, too) just tweeted about how a lot of his work starts on the back of an envelope, challenging the twittersphere to reply “how do _you_ work?”. I love learning about how people get things done, and quite fancied writing a reply longer than […] continue reading »
Time to read: 2 minutes One of the strongest features of powerpoint is also one of its weaknesses. Slide masters. The ability to set up a consistent layout and format goes to pot when that format cannot be edited from its context of use. Ever tried fixing alignment on a slide when you can’t see the content? Then you haven’t […] continue reading »
Time to read: < 1 minute This isn’t a rant… It’s a design observation. The BBC news site has a lovely section with “future” posts. I clicked on the heading to read one of them, because it was interesting… Only to be told that it wasn’t accessible from the country I was in – the UK… Given that cookies are used […] continue reading »
Time to read: < 1 minute I’m sure you’ve heard of Prezi. If you hadn’t until this week, then perhaps this lovely one about the US elections will have caught your eye. Election Results Prezi on Prezi What makes prezi cool Nice flow to items shown, making it incredibly refreshing compared to slide decks, a legacy of the sixties Easy to […] continue reading »