Silicon Valley SIGGRAPH BayDUX Interaction Design Association Society for Technical Communication San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, ACM The Information Architecture Institute and quasi-related: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Category Archives: usability
Jason on software
More smart writing frm 37signals: Jason Fried on why good software is simple software: Less as a competitive advantage and why functional specs aren’t helpful.
best software talk ever?
At last month’s BayCHI meeting, Alan Cooper of Cooper gave the best talk I’ve seen on software development, Ending the Death March. Unlike the rest of the BayCHI talks, this one wasn’t recorded or podcast. (Aside: please email BayCHI and Alan and ask them to make this available.) However, Allison at BayCHI did take good …
guerilla usability: ice oasis hockey
For the past two years, I’ve been playing hockey at Ice Oasis. It’s a nice enough rink, but their web site is terrible. While they’ve since ditched the neon colours, the schedule page is pretty awful: you have to see all of the teams at once white text on a red background is hard to …
ui designers at large
From Membranophonist: a good fix for the iTunes CDDB dialog he then points out a vestigial modal dialog indicating something was succesfull. Lots of other good stuff there too. Next, ThinkMac rethinks the spotlight window. Their design is lacking a few things, like an “all” button. I’m not convinced. In a satire of iTunes 5, …
myspace == ghetto
Paul Scrivens (rightly) notes that MySpace sucks in terms of design: It’s also a designer’s and lover of design’s worst nightmare because the UI of the site is atrocious yet it boasts 17 million visitors a month (and rising) and was recently purchased for over $580 million by News Corp. … Trying to navigate the …
iTunes 5 from the perspective of anthropomorphized brushed metal
Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme: Brushed Metal: I’m the bad-ass theme. I’m the one who flouts the Human Interface Guidelines. Mike: This guy trashes the HIG the way Johnny Depp trashes a hotel room. He even sports a custom radius on his window …
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Canon Scanner driver sucks
I downloaded the Canon LIDE scanner software. The file was a StuffIt (.sit) file. After I decompressed that, I was faced with “CSToolbox_OSX_v4130X.app.” That installed … another installer. The “CanoScan Toolbox Installer” actually installs the software. Ideally, this would have been a drag install from a mounted disk image. They could have at least used …
some lessons on usability
after i launched my house concerts site, i sent out emails with customized RSVP links to everyone. the next day, i got a bug report that RSVPing “no” wasn’t working. well, it was — sort of. the problem was that even if you clicked “no,” you were still expected to enter the number of seats …
marketing sucks
Jeff Veen, asked to judge an interactive design competition, rails against those still not on the cluetrain: User-centered design vs. marketing and image Most sites had no sense whatsoever of how to engage a potential customer through the Web. Of all the consumer electronics sites I evaluated, for example, not one compared to sites like …