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Learning from My UX Interviews

August 28, 2010
Thumbnail image for Learning from My UX Interviews

Some of you expressed some interest in what I learned from my experience interviewing, so I’m going to take a stab at that here. Sorry about the delay, but starting this new job has been both time- and mind-consuming, and has necessitated lots of other changes in my and my family’s lives that have kept [...]

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Apple iPad: an Antisocial Device

January 28, 2010
Apple iPad mocked up to show video chat

Unless you’ve been deep in a cave for all of last week, you probably heard that Apple announced their new product yesterday, the iPad. Opinions about the device, including mine, have been somewhat split. I’m going to leave the general pros/cons discussions for somewhere else, but I wanted to discuss one aspect I find particularly [...]

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Scratching an Alignment Itch

January 8, 2010
Toyota Avalon dash display with alignment issues

This is the LCD info display in the dashboard of my mom’s 2002 Toyota Avalon. (Please excuse the blurry iPhone photo.)

During my last visit, I think I spent too much time in the car, because that display really started to bug me. I just cannot for the life of me imagine a designer could look [...]

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UX Origin Stories

January 5, 2010
UX Origin Stories

In one month I will head off to Interaction 2010, a fantastic UX conference put together by IxDA. I was fortunate enough to go last year, and had an overwhelmingly educational and inspiring time. One of my favorite aspects, and something I am really looking forward to again this year, was simply being surrounded by [...]

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The Price of Baggage Fees

November 3, 2009
The Price of Baggage Fees

Two weekends ago I flew up to the Bay Area on Virgin America. I’ve flown VA quite a few times in the past, but I guess it had been a while since the last flight because I had no idea they had started charging baggage fees. At the airport my family was suddenly hit with [...]

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Search Suggestion Shortcuts

October 18, 2009
Search suggestion shortcuts

Or, What Wolfram Alpha Does Completely Wrong
In my last post, Three Types of Searches, I proposed that there are three distinct behaviors of search, and that each behavior has its own optimal results formatting. Understanding these different search behaviors and thinking specifically about existing search tools and implementations of search suggestions has led me to [...]

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Three Types of Searches

October 4, 2009
3 types of searches

I seem to have had the same discussion over and over lately here at Yahoo about site search. Yahoo has (or had, anyway) a high-profile web search technology and design team. So when we discuss these site-specific searches, talk always seems to circle back to the question, “How much should this site’s search resemble—or maybe [...]

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Wee-wee Watering

September 19, 2009
Dust bin in Bangalore, India

Back in April I took a business trip to the fascinating Indian city of Bengaluru, which is both very like and very unlike big cities in the US. One of the many things I found interesting was the empty decorative fountains littered around the central city — carcasses of a British city aesthetic that did [...]

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Silly user.

September 15, 2009
elevator stop switch

This red switch used to be a great feature of the elevator in my condo building. You used to be able to flip it to “Stop” once the doors were open, and it would hold the elevator stopped and the doors open until you flipped it back to “Run.” I used this switch a lot. [...]

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Wayfinding: Hacking Our Office

August 29, 2009
Hacked Office Map

The Problem
About two months ago my team got relocated to a new building. My desk is in a great spot, we have fun new neighbors, and the new building is pretty comparable to the old one, with one big exception.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to remember where the conference rooms are.
Contributing Factors
The floor plan seems to have [...]

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