I’ve been sitting in the Enterprise space as a UX mercenary for probably around 5+ years. In every team, sales meeting and brainstorming session I’ve always encountered resistance around “maturity” in terms of design. The more money that is being spent on the software, the more “serious” the design should be. This line of thinking…
I stumbled upon this YouTube clip of Avicii giving the camera (folks at home) an insight into his creative process. I have a theory that humans and software aren’t as incompatible as a lot of people in the role of “user experience” preach. All to often I hear the word “usability” that is commonly used…
I can’t believe i’m about to defend Microsoft Design outloud like this. It’s not something I would normally do, however when it comes to the Jakob Nielsen Windows 8 review I just can’t stand to let it slide. Personally I think that entire company is still stuck in the past and has consistently failed to…
The past two days I had quite a positive experience at this year’s UX Australia and I cannot recommend how important that everyone next year attend. This is not your normal conference; I mean I have been to many conferences ranging from your barcamps, webjams, adobe maxs, techeds, techreadies, sxsw, mix, wwdc and so on….
Today I wanted to search for Word 2013 in Windows 8. At first, I hit START+W and began typing “Word”, and then of course nothing came up. Confused, I closed it down and went START+Z then found it the hard way via ALL APPS. My immediate thought was “hmm my Search experience is broken,…
Visual Studio team have put out some UI updates to the vNext release. The thing that struck a chord with this update is how flat and grey it’s become, that is they’ve taken pretty much all colors out of the tool and pushed it back to a grey based palette. Here are my thoughts: On…
Software today is definitely getting more and more user experience focused, that is to say we are preoccupied with getting the minimal designs into the hands of adults for task driven operations. We pride ourselves on knowing how the human mind works through various blog based theories on how one is to design the user…
Last night I was sitting in a child psychologist office watching my son undergo a whole heap of cognitive testing (given he has a rare condition called Trisomy 8 Mosaicism) and in that moment I had what others would call a “flash” or “epiphany” (i.e. theory is we get ideas based on a network of…
I am working on a secret squirrel application. Can’t say much suffice to say I had a situation where a bunch of clients connect to a network – like most apps I guess. In this situation, I needed to inject a listening app to the overall network in that it needed to keep a pulse…
1. Stop making bottleneck software Technically you could write most software today as one big mega-class with loads of switch / if&else statements. If you did that, not only would every other developer you come across immediately punch you in the nose but it would also become hard to maintain over time. We agree that…