Christmas is a good time for sitting around a fire and telling stories. Practice your storytelling this Christmas, and hone your interaction design skills for 2009. People love stories. But beyond that, stories are fundamental to the way we think as human beings. Salesmen tell persuasive stories about successful installations and satisfied customers. Social workers …
Author archives: Phil
Sideloading free content from the sneakernet
Mobile devices are the primary experience of personal computing for most people in emerging markets. Accessing content at prices these users can afford is all but impossible. But using sideloading and sneakernet, content can spread for free. I was lucky enough to watch a great talk by Gary Marsden at the recent SA UX meeting …
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Designing future happiness
Humans are not very good at predicting what will make us happy in the future. Designers need user centred design techniques to help them to overcome that limitation. We don’t know what’s good for us In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, describes recent research on “prospection” – the act of considering the …
Using the Microsoft Ribbon without anyone getting hurt
Designing an effective Microsoft Fluent/Ribbon toolbar is not for the faint of heart. You need to understand your users’ activity in detail and plan a consistent overall experience. I’m working on two WPF applications at the moment. For both, we have to decide whether to use traditional File/Edit/View menus or an MS-Office-style ribbon. It’s not …
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Our technologies shape us
As the world around us changes, we need new technology and improved interaction to help us. But what causes the world to change? The very technology that we introduce. I saw this quote stuck up on the wall of a furniture shop the other day. It set me thinking: if you replace “homes” with “technology” …
Apalling and astonishing
Two flowsters, Ofer Deshe and Simon Johnson, dug out these two fine blog posts and sent them to me. The five worst website designs in the world Ten futuristic user interfaces What I take from this: The web on a computer is old, flat and slow. But still incredibly useful. When you ask cutting edge …
New facebook design confirms a drift to the right (nav)
Facebook’s homepage moves more of the navigation to the right – a signal that the convention of left navigation bars is shifting. Facebook’s welcome page – lots of functionality has moved to the right. When I first saw a left hand navbar in 1995, I was amazed at the idea of dividing the page up …
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To-scale paper prototyping for the home
I’m iteratively prototyping my new room layout at full scale with newspaper. This is the second time I’ve tried this and it really works well. You stick sheets of newspaper together to represent the kitchen cabinets or the new sofa or whatever. Then you lay the sheets out in the room itself and see what …
Social design for Springleap
Cape Town’s new collaborative T-shirt design website is a really interesting piece of social design. A couple of weeks ago, Eric Edelstein, the CEO of Springleap asked me to pop by and chat about the user experience strategy for his site. The idea for the site is simple: Designers submit designs for t-shirts, the community …
What makes us productive and what makes us stupid
Your working environment has a big impact on your productivity, creativity and happiness. And good user experiences follow the same rules. The interruptions caused by email and other digital communications reduce your IQ by up to 10 points, and cost large corporations UD$1m in revenue per annum. They also make people unhappy. Among many corporations, …
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