–Engage

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.” - Steve Jobs

Contextual buttons

I hav noticed a trend in virtual interfaces that exploits their ephemeral nature, where a single button is used today where two buttons used to be used in the past. The button label is used to both clear a state of the system and the action the button can do. ...

Functioning Form – Bringing Desktop Interactions Online

Luke W, writes about bringing desktop interactions to the online platform. I don't want to completely re-iterate the article. The juxt of what I got from it is that there are patterns of interaction that do not translate directly into the web space, but the goals of these interactions ...

Gmail’s new Web Clips feature

Recently, Gmail came out with a new interesting and for me unexpected feature. They call it Web Clips. It's a fairly basic piece of functionality whereby a user sets up a bunch of RSS feeds (subscriptions). Then whenever you view a list like your Inbox, or a conversation (a message) ...

Looking at Office 12 – context, posture, change

Recently Jensen Harris, Lead Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, gave a very excellent presentation to BayCHI (get it here). I have also been following closely Jensen's Office UI Blog with great interest. At this point though I have a few questions on a theoretcial level:

RIAs: The Technology Is Exciting, but They Really Do Help Users :: UXmatters

A few months ago I submitted an article to UXMatters.com. Today that article about RIAs is finally published. Take a look!

Functioning Form – Looks at Clustering of search results

Luke in one of his latest pieces talks about how Google is adding subtle clustering models to their results. I think it is all well and good, but what about the already good examples of clustering that are already out there? Clusty by Vivisimo Grokster

AJAX for Designers

PDF download (273kb) For some AJAX is marketing speak for something that has been around for years. For others, it is the salvation they have been looking for, for seemingly centuries. I would tell the former group that the latter group finally caught up, and you should revel in the growth ...

Ontology isn’t overrated and Tagging isn’t really anything new.

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky is a great article that describes the power of tagging, but it is not critical enough, nor does it separate blatant individualistic tagging from a more controlled universe of folksonomy. Thomas Vander Wal was a guest contributore on Ok-Cancel with ...

Why the ending matters (maybe more than the rest)? (contains movie spoiler)

Recently I had a movie experience, that left me feeling betrayed. The kind of betrayal that only an intimate relationship could create. Have you ever walked into a movie theatre with the utmost excitement and hope for a moving and exciting experience, to leave the theatre totally distraunt, and all you ...

“white space” of interaction?

I was reading a chapter in a graphic design book, as I was reminded of the important aspect of most presentation design disicplines--white space. What is white space? Simply put it is the empty areas of a formative design. Margins are a form of white space, but you can have ...

Functioning Form – Designed by Nature

Luke W. in his latest article, "Designed by Nature" looks at an example he recently found showing the extrapulation of a natural form into a design for a car. This is sometimes called Biomimicry, or some call it naturalist design. Mimicry is a bit more specific, as it implies a ...

How much can we take from desktop design for RIA/AJAX design

I have been following w/ zeal Luke Wroblewskis recent interest and thinking around AJAX-based applications, and the design implications that this new technology brings. He will be at an RIA event soon, so if you are in the Bay Area you should catch it. In his latest article, entitled ...

Speech to SMS – Samsung, what were you think?

Samsung has just introduced it's new phone, the P207. It's primary exciting feature is that you can talk into it, and it will create an SMS message for you (text). My question for the ages is, "WHY!!!!". First off, I think it is damn cool that Samsung has put really good ...

Now, I’ve seen it all … And truly believe that Lotus Notes sucks …

I am here today to give two SCREAMING examples of why Lotus Notes should be banned from the universe, or IBM should just practice what they preach for their own product-line. ... What have these people been smoking??????

Widgetology

I'm adding this concept of a widgetologist to my vocabulary. If Christina can create widgetopia, then i can be a widgetologist. I'll let people know how the term is received at my presentation later today.

Ok, maybe it isn’t the end of HTML afterall …

Jesse James Garrett, put together a great piece on HTML-based rich GUIs. he even gave it a name--Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). go to read the article on the Adaptive Path site.

mSpace: exploring the New Web

using UI Designer Blog aggregator I came across this site, mSpace. The tool is an early semantic web browser demonstration. It claims to combine the great navigation capabilities of tools like iTunes with the search engine capabilities of Google (link is to Google's "suggest" functionality). I like the idea a ...

Wow, that was so easy!!!!! How could I have missed that????

Ya ever have one of those moment when you are using software when you just tell yourself, "How could I have missed that??" You search and search for how to do something that you KNOW is possible, but you can't figure it out. Then ... when someone tells you how ...

Functioning Form – Web Application Form Layout

Luke recently posted an article about form widget layout. It talks about the placement of labels in relation to the form input elements. I think he's basically nailed it, but didn't take it to the next level. He is right by suggesting that left aligned labels are ideal for longer ...

What Makes a Design Seem ‘Intuitive’?

Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, wrote up a piece attempting to describe what makes something intuitive entitled, "What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'?". I think that this article is nice paired next to the one by Don Norman recently put up on UI Garden (a new English/Chinese bilingual e-zine) and ...

Why It’s Not Damning to Define the Thing

This was originally published by ACM Interactions magazine in their May-June, 2013 Edition as part of their Confessions column. I re-print it here with their permission as columns like these are not made available to the public as a whole. Thank you ACM for allowing me to do this. Why It's ...

Coordination vs. Collaboration

Recently I've been made aware of different ways of thinking about "collaboration". It kinda took me for surprise be specially given the geo-social contexts, but there is no ignoring it. What I learned as two completely different activities some use the same word for or more correctly use the term ...

Report from Up to All Of Us

I'm currently on a plane heading back home after a short weekend with a group of mostly instructional designers who are at a new type of unconference (something I've never experienced before). It felt more like a retreat than a conference due to the setting and the style of interaction ...
December 12th 2012
Tags: education, general thoughts One Comment

As Corona says, “Change your Latitude [Longitude]” – Travel is awesome.

Today I sparked a bit of a conversation after I tweeted: Everyone who is creative should move every 5-10 years; to minimally find a way to live somewhere else for a yr (sabbatical). http://twitter.com/daveixd/status/278919010391826432 Why do I put such importance on travel? What value does it give a creative person? And to the ...

Today Johnny Holland says Goodbye and I am sad & grateful

Today Johnny Holland, the amazing Interaction Design online magazine says goodbye. This news makes me feel both sad and grateful. Johnny Holland (JH) has been a rare place that allowed me to include my voice where other magazines rejected the types of topics I was interested in discussing: esoteric, foundational, semantic, ...

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