Category Archives: User Experience
Sweat the Small Stuff
Sweat the Small Stuff : The importance of page-level content and your style guide. I published this article in March. It addresses how thinking about essential issues in content design and adhering to a style guide helps ensure your content is both correct and consistent.
5 Rules For Writing Great UI Copy
From Google Ventures: 5 Rules For Writing Great Interface Copy is a good article that discusses 5 good things to keep in mind when writing UI copy. I like “Headlines and buttons are the pillars of our products. See, there’s a good chance you’ve been writing product pillars this whole time, and didn’t even know…
Calling Out Crappy Design
Here’s a Reddit site on Calling out crappy design. It’s a largely humorous site where you can check out others’ submissions of poor designs and submit your own. It’s is easily to get lost and spend way too much time here.
Deconstructing Minimalist Landing Pages
Here is a great article that discuses the trend of websites losing all superfluous and confusing imagery, text, navigation, etc. in favor of going completely minimalist on their landing pages. Such pages have a few things in common. Generally, they:
A Little Logo Fun
So, a few months ago, I came across this video of a 5-yr-old’s perspective of some famous logos. It is, of course, very cute, and some logos she knows or mentally connects with person events. However, it got me thinking about how That video lead me to
Come to the Dark Patterns
Dark patterns are intentional content and design decisions in UX that tend to employ deceptive practices to trick you into taking some action. There’s actually quite a bit of psychology that goes into such design decisions. I recently came across this website and presentation that details what dark patterns are and how to use them. While…
Don’t Confuse Engagement with User Experience
Substantially more Android phones are sold than are iPhones (about 5:1 in 2012). However, iPhone users do much more shopping, browsing, and app-downloading. So, what gives? This Harvard Business Review article, by Michael Schrage, discusses it. The key point is:
Everything you know about Steve Jobs and design is wrong, according to one man who should know
Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design (the company responsible for Apple’s sweet, simple designs), is retiring and has just published his memoir, Keep It Simple – The Early Design Years of Apple, which is partly an insider’s account of the origins of Apple’s iconic products and brand. Basically, he wants to set the record straight about the…
The User is Drunk
Here is a great video that talks about a method of User Experience design that suggests that we should design for the user AS IF (s)he is blind drunk (she’s probably not actually drunk). High points: Great UI isn’t there UI should generally be as effective when it is blurry as when it is not…