Archive for the 'Design' Category

You Sense It Or You Don’t

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

I enjoyed Joshua Topolsky’s rebuttal to the high-fives exchanged between John Gruber and MG Siegler about the Galaxy Nexus allegedly being less polished than iPhones are. I didn’t pick up on some of the cringe that Joshua pointed out, in particular the implication that rich people who have “nicer” stuff will always enjoy some impossible […]

Visual Design Proofmarking

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

I enjoyed Jason Fried’s “Quick little UI feedback tip” in which he alludes to his use of a graphical shorthand for providing feedback on user interfaces. I like the idea of something akin to literary proofreading marks for quickly conveying change suggestions in the design process. He describes the evolution of his own shorthand for […]

Windowless Skyscraper

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

One of the thrills of software development is how much power is placed into the hands, literally, of a single engineer. Software takes work, and lots of it. But thanks to frameworks of reusable code, individuals are consistently able to “outbuild” the work of our predecessors, while exerting the same or less effort. Consider the work […]

User Friendly Heuristics

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Wil Shipley writes about the compromised perfection we must strive for in order to provide users an experience that meets their human expectations: “Classic computer programming has largely failed, because it failed to copy nature. Nothing in nature works 100% of the time, but it sure works well MOST of the time – and when […]