Web Usability panel
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 Posted in Design, Usability | No Comments »I just got home from a presentation organised by WebGuild which was a panel discussion on web usability. Met lots of interesting people of course, but the highlight for me was of course hearing Tom Chi, Jeremy Ashley, and David ...
“Social layer” vs “Social network”
Friday, June 20th, 2008 Posted in Design, Usability | 1 Comment »This afternoon we (Trovix) released Trovix Connect, the new version of our Trovix job portal. (incidentally, we've been using that as internal name well before Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect!) I feel like we've kind of jumped on the bandwagon ...
The curse of updates
Saturday, May 31st, 2008 Posted in Design | No Comments »One of the worst things about the ubiquity of the internet is the crutch of automatic updates. Who cares if our code isn't feature complete? So what if there are bugs galore? It works okay - let's ship and just ...
Picasa photo tuning
Saturday, May 10th, 2008 Posted in Design, Miscellaneous, Usability | 1 Comment »This is a continuation of Part 1 of my Picasa discussion. I am continually surprised by how powerful the relatively simple photo tuning tools of Picasa are. Take for example this photo my wife snapped while flying from Seattle to ...
Picasa as an example of great design
Saturday, May 10th, 2008 Posted in Design, Usability | 1 Comment »I've been a long-time fan of Picasa, and it ultimately comes down to several reasons: It's fast. Very fast. It has a great UI. Functionality. Integration. Fast Picasa has been optimized to very quickly load, to handle large libraries of photos, and to allow very quick ...
Real World Ubiquitous Computing – Nike Plus
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 Posted in Design, Gadgets, Ubiquitous computing | No Comments »For all the doom and gloom about the lack of real world ubiquitous computing (even I was guilty of it in my thesis), if you look around there are devices that support ubiquitous computing ideals. And I'm not talking ...
Ubiquitous computing done right
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 Posted in Design, Gadgets, Ubiquitous computing | No Comments »I was happily surprised when I saw this video. I was sent it by Miles, and I think it is an outstanding example of ubiquitous computing. Amazingly it's also several years old now, and part of Johnny Lee's work at ...
Turn your iPhone into a wifi Skype phone
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 Posted in Design, Gadgets, Startups, Usability | 1 Comment »There has been a lot of buzz on the intertubes today about Fring. They're an Israeli startup who released a fairly popular mobile chat client. That's simplifying things - in addition to supporting every major IM client, Fring automatically logs ...
37Signals disagrees with usability guru Norman, or, what is usability?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008 Posted in Design | No Comments »There was a thought-provoking rebuttal from 37Signals to criticisms levelled by Don Norman regarding their product. (side note: did anyone else think 37Signals was using svn to version control their blog postings based on the URL?) Don's original post is titled "Why ...
People power versus algorithms
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 Posted in Design, Tech issues | 1 Comment »Very interesting article from Wired. This is something I have struggled with personally. Is it worth investing the time to automate a process, or is it just cheaper to outsource the smarts of up-and-coming countries? Ultimately I've found that not ...
