BlogSat

A post on Isaac 's blog was a reminder for me to pick up a book I'd meant to read for a while: Alan Cooper 's The Inmates are running the asylum . If you're interested in building software, I can't recommend the book highly enough. Cooper makes an incredibly compelling case for how and why so many software products are terribly broken. He goes over how the software process prevents us from building awesome products even when smart people are well-intentioned, how attention to interaction design pays off in the long run, why engineers are often exactly the wrong people to make interaction decisions, and how the introduction of a design function in the product development cycle would actually work. I was characteristically skeptical of a few things before I started on the book, but I quickly lost count of the number of times I shook my head with "oh yeah, I remember when that's happened." I'm going to avoid a typical review and summarize the points...

I finished Steve's Krug "Don't Make Me Think" a few weeks ago. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in usability; most reactions when I told folks I'd finished it were off the "you haven't read it already?" and "you realize when that book was written!" variety. :) There are a bunch of great ideas in there. The most important one for me was really just the title of the book, i.e. when users get to websites, apps, anything really etc., they're typically looking to do something specific so: they skim; they don't really read and process everything you might put there so using minimal design and familiar patterns is critical to usability i.e. make sure they don't need to think much. But a few days later, a conversation at work reminded me of another great idea in the book, i.e. "make sure you're measuring for and optimizing for the right metric." For websites and web forms in particular for example, ...

I found this great preso on "Seductive Interactions" over at NoteandPoint . The style is great, and so is a lot of the content. The preso reminds us about the basic tendencies of users (Slide 71) e.g., users are curious users are lazy users like to be guided users respond to organization ...etc etc. It also talks about some basic psychological tools that designers have to influence their users (Slide 138) including social proof reciprocity imagery ...etc. etc. The key is recognizing which of the tools you can use to influence human behavior to achieve the goals you have (Slide 140.)

I stumbled on to this article  thanks to GigaOm It was a very timely reminder. A few months ago while trying to sketch some scenarios, instead of doing the standard "User does X; then does Y" ,  after some encouragement by a more senior Googler, I spent a little bit of time thinking about who the user was and wove stories around each use case (admittedly what I was working on lent itself to that.) I told a story about how Bob would use a certain product, why he was interested in it, and how it fit perfectly with what he did in the morning, and how his daugher would use it as well and how they'd pay for it...etc., etc. Two things happened: Firstly, it was just a lot more fun for me to work on! I like story-telling. :) Secondly, I thought it helped the product definition quite a bit. True marketing professoinals (especially in CPG) do this really well, and there's a lot to learn there. They create detailed profiles of their end users and think about them obsessively (l...

I saw two examples in good design today: HP Retail site. When a product makes it much easier for you to do something than you expected (in the process delighting you!) that's good design! Simple lesson from HPs retail site: When I went back to the site, I did think about checking out a printer I'd seen earlier and right there (well-placed on the right towards the middle of the screen) the site made it easier for me to do so. Good for business; good for the user. Gilt Groupe. The illusion of scarcity is a great way to make people feel like they're getting something special. Today when I wanted to test this retail site, they made me sign up and get on a wait list. Tastefully, getting back to me a letting me know within a day (just quick enough so that I don't lose interest) that I'd been "selected" to join. In general I'd have expected to be annoyed by the pretentiousness, but given the positioning of the site (secret discounts on high-end retail) my...

Caveat emptor 1: Though, I work on YouTube I haven't really chatted about this with anyone that currently works on this feature. This just stuff coming out of my empty mind. Caveat emport 2: It is also based on how I use a certain product feature, and my usage patterns. For all I know, I may be in the minority. I've been favoriting a lot of vid eos lately, but I realized I'm probably not doing what the designer of the feature intended me to do. Let me start at the beginning. If I designed a feature to "Favorite": essentially a list of videos that I allowed the user to mark as ones she liked, I'd assume that the primary intention of this list was to allow me to save videos that I can come to visit later. Other benefits would be sharing this with others on YouTube, as well as implicitly ranking this video so that it can be considered for YouTube honors and in lists. However, I find that when I favorite something, my real intention is that it gets up by my Fri...

I got the reminder to install a bunch of stuff from Apple on my machine from their Software Update  Tool (iTunes etc.) So I did. It went as planned. So what's the point of this post?  After the installer runs, what does it do? It shows me the dialog again. I know, its a minor thingy, but still: I needed something to complain about today.:) Don't ask me if I want to run something after I just ran it! C'mon