When’s the last time you heard or read somebody discussing efficiency in software experience? Probably just about never, I’d wager. It’s not trendy. It’s not sexy. It’s certainly not easy… you can’t apply it with a Node.js library or an icon font. This is not the sound of a grumpy old lady waving her cane… Read more »
Everybody knows about The Placebo Effect™. That’s what happens when you think you’re taking a medicine that will help you, and it does help you—but it turns out that it was a sugar pill, not a medicine at all. It was discovered by a clever, desperate nurse during World War II. She was running out […]
Before the Redesign So you’ve got this product. So I’ve got this product. It’s totally unique, the only entry in its field, and everybody knows it. It’s a rookie entry into an extremely crowded (if not particularly well-differentiated) field. Almost nobody knows it exists. It’s a time tracking application, and it’s called Freckle Time Tracking. […]
Allow me to begin by saying that this is an opinion piece. I’m not doing research into the matter, but rather boiling down trends—the good and bad—as I see ’em. And they’re mostly bad. Otherwise it’d be boring. A Pattern Language Pattern obsession has come to user interface design by way of software architecture, by […]
The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to […]
Thinking is supposed to be a question mark. But most people treat it like a period. Headology vs First Sight, Second Thoughts Terry Pratchett’s always written about witches and, by extension, the essence of humanity. But his Wee Free Men trilogy is the best yet, and the most true to life. He names the fundamentals […]
In March, we built the ground-breaking SXSW Zeitgeist for Pepsico. It’s no longer running—SXSW is over, natch—but there are some videos, in case you didn’t see it. Pepsi wanted to “do something cool around Twitter/SXSW” and we delivered the concept, design and execution. (And boots-on-the-ground troubleshooting.) It was a big hit. It got mentioned in […]
You’ll have to forgive me, cuz I’m trying hard to find a way to wrap my head around a concept in my head so I can express it. The test everything trend in design bothers me. Or to make every decision based on the numbers. Or to focus on problem-solving. Or patterns. I’m trying to […]
But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than [blamelessness] for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent […]
This is the first in a series of 2 or 3 posts for the transcript of my Jelly! talk from SXSW. Jelly! talks are put on by Yahoo! and Jelly!, the casual coworking movement. This one was held in the lovely Austin coworking space of Conjunctured. Here’s a link to the video. My name is […]
