There gets a stage in every large company's lifecycle when there are too many people working on a single project. This usually manifests itself in strange internal struggles over the heart of a product as different teams compete for their "vision" to succeed. What often happens is that the user is forgotten and a manager, somewhere, has to make a compromise which sacrifices usability for intra-company harmony. Let's take, for example, Google Maps for Android. This is an app I use every day…
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One of the interesting aspects of privilege is how it lays bare our unconscious assumptions about the world. A male software developer may never consider that a user would want or need to change their name. Thus they would design a product which ignored the millions of women changing their names after marriage. It's very temping to see software as racist when, in reality, it's more likely to have a root cause of unconscious assumptions. Take, for example, GitHub. You can host all of your…
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For the last few months, I've been curating a Tumblr of a very specific annoyance. I'll let Aral Balkan take credit for inspiring me. Any modal message—full-screen or alert—that interrupts user flow to ask them to download your app suffers from #doorslam #ux antipattern. @aral First, a quick definition: In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or co…
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I hate the iPhone. Always have, probably always will. However, as a geek in the mobile industry, I have to try the full gamut of devices. So, this weekend, for testing purposes, I've been lumbered with an iPhone 4S. My aesthete friends are always complaining about how cobbled together Android is. Because there is no overall owner, the UI is full of unintuitive quirks. That's a fair criticism - some parts of Android are incredibly shonky. But, to hear those in the gilded cage speak, iOS…
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(Praying to Betteridge!) For the last few years, I've been using ergonomic computer input products such as the Microsoft 4000 keyboard and the Evoluent Vertical Mouse. I spend a lot of time on my computer - and I know how crippling the pain of RSI can be - especially for someone who relies on their laptop to earn a living. Recently, I've added a new tool - Oneko! Oneko is a little cat who follows your mouse around the desktop. Neko has a long and illustrious history. I remember using…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTEqKd92kcI Pop quiz: How many MB did you use watching that YouTube video? When dealing with data usage, a familiar cry in the telco world is “Customers just don’t understand what a MB is!” Is this true? The theory goes something like this… Some elements of a phone bill are easy to conceptualise. Customers understand how many minutes they’ve used, texts they’ve sent, etc. T…
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I've really enjoyed learning from Kathy Sierra's talk "Creating the minimum badass user". It's an hour long, but well worth your time. She covers many aspects of product design, but the quote which really resonated with me was this - Zoomed in - This seems so applicable to many "services" these days. Millions spent on TV adverts, positive reviews, and glossy websites - yet nothing spent on customer care, and the entire shebang is held together with yarn. Imagine if politicians had to…
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Annoyingly, FourSquare has started be be a source of spam for me. I get friend request from people who only like certain brands of stores, from recruitment consultants trying to work out who I'm visiting, and from cultists who are desperate for me to visit Scientology centres. I also get friend requests from people I've never met, including from Ahmed al-Najjar (احمد النجار). I've never met Ahmed and I've no wish to taint him as a spammer - I'm sure he's just misclicked in his friend request …
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My first QR code post of 2013! I'm a long term fan of QR codes. I know some people don't like the idea of augmenting reality with specific tags for computer vision - but I do. Some people prefer RFID/NFC. Others still prefer dedicated augmented video apps. As I've written many times before, QR codes have several substantial advantages over alternate technologies. QR is a free and open standard. Compatible with every phone with a camera. No need to build or use a dedicated…
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...or do I just need new glasses? I'm not a graphic designer. I find it hard to get into the mindset of excellence through beauty. I understand user flow, interactions, happy paths, delighting the user, humane design, and so on - but when it comes to the art of making something look nice I'm all at sea. I understand that, as Aral Balkan so perfectly puts it, design is not veneer - but that doesn't stop my confusion. This is a failing of mine - one which I'm trying to rectify - but recently…
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After an entertaining discussion at BarCamp Berkshire about video games, I decided to treat myself to an Xbox 360. After several happy years with a Nintendo Wii, I was keen to see what the new state of the art was. I picked the current top pick console and, I must say, while the games are great the console is somewhat of a disappointment. I picked the limited edition Xbox 360 320GB Star Wars Kinect Console with Kinect Star Wars - Limited Edition (Xbox 360). Yay! Star Wars! Hardware It…
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I love Android, I really do. I'm chuffed to bits with the Galaxy Nexus I won recently. I've had a dozen Android phones before that - stretching all the way back to the HTC Magic. But it's getting obvious that Android has a serious design problem - even with the gorgeous new "Holo" theme for ICS. The issue is one of consistency. Users have limited cognitive surplus and often rely on muscle memory to perform tasks. So anything which forces applications to behave in a similar way is often…
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