Category: Interface Design
-
Why do Executives use Blackberrys?
Who’s the boss? The only people I ever see actually using Blackberrys tend to be high-level executives. Why is this? It’s simple: Because they can get away with it. Only the boss can sit in a conference room twiddling around with a Blackberry, their attention a thousand miles away, while everyone else is working on…
-
Google Desktop and Full-Focus States
Version 4 of Google’s awesome Desktop Search came out a few weeks ago. It’s great in a lot of ways, but I wanted to focus on one interesting new(ish) feature: Quick Search. (The Quick Search feature has been around since version 3, but since verison 3 only came out in March, I imagine some people…
-
My New “Sketchbook”
—
by
The WordPress blog admin “Dashboard”, where I am currently typing these words. If you look closely, maybe you can see what kinds of things I might be posting here in the future. I have what I fancy to be interesting ideas just about all the time, and usually when this happens I like to start…
-
Avoiding Distractions with “The Exorcist”
Khoi just posted a great idea for a desktop application, which he calls Blockwriter: It’s a lean and mean text-writing app that (a) hides all other applications, and (b) allows you to disable email and even all network connectivity completely. The idea is to help people focus on writing tasks by blocking access to all…
-
The Scope Creep
“Scope Creep”, also known as “Feature Creep” and “Creeping Featuritis“, is the tendency of development teams to constantly find opportunities to add new features to a product. It is widely considered to be deadly: It’s obviously destructive to project schedules, but adding new features also has an enormous impact on much more than just the…
-
IA Summit 2006: You’re *both* right!
Information architects reaching a sound compromise. One of the most potent themes emerging from the 2006 IA Summit is that on many issues of IA debate it’s possible for both sides to be correct. That is, that you can combine or connect two or more seemingly different design strategies or technolgoies to form a final,…
-
IA Summit 2006: Wireframes I & II
Even as we develop more robust wireframing systems, flat printable wireframes are still easy to draft quickly, and easy for clients to consume. Two wireframe sessions in a row were scheduled on Saturday. It’s hard for me to say much about these panels because I have some pretty strong ideas about how to improve the…
-
SXSW Confidential, Part 2: They Write Books
Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect. I’m reading all…
-
Time to Switch? (Shame and Inspiration)
(UPDATE 8/29/2007: Dude, I got a Mac!) I was the butt of many jokes at South by Southwest this year, and the majority of them revolved around one thing: I was consistently the only one in any conversation who was a bona fide Windows user. I kid you not, the ribbing was relentless. I simply…