F**K CAPTCHA
Using a CAPTCHA is a way of announcing to the world that you’ve got a spam problem, that you don’t know how to deal with it, and that you’ve decided to offload the frustration of the problem onto your user-base. … Continue reading
Good Design
How tablet design can influence the potency of the Placebo effect
We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by Steve Silberman on wired.com (August ’09) discusses the psychology … Continue reading
Signup forms must die – here’s how we killed ours!
Here’s a short screencast demo of our new Lazy Registration system on the Madgex Job Board Platform. If you’ve read Luke Wrobleski’s book or ALA article ‘Sign up forms must die‘, this will probably be familiar territory, but if you’re … Continue reading
My Presentation on Out of Box Experience Design
Out of Box Experience (OOBE) design is a discipline that consists of designing the details of the first few moments of owning a product, from the point of peeling off the shrink-wrap to the point of powering it up and … Continue reading
Latest addition to the family
I usually hate it when people blog about their sprogs but suddenly I understand… My daughter Lilly was born on saturday afternoon, 7 pounds 14, a little bundle of joy. I’ll be fairly offline over the next two or three … Continue reading
The difference between good and bad writers.
A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing: “Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.” – Paraphrased from Lindsay Camp (2007)
Facebook vs Flickr image tagging
Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is? Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them … Continue reading
Microsoft Surface: standing on the shoulders of giants
Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find … Continue reading
How much is this phone?
. Another great deal from Three.
Funny story about the origin of the Office ribbon menu
According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was … Continue reading