Category: HCI topic

  • Happy CSS Naked Day!

    I’m celebrating by taking down the old stylesheets, and letting it all hang out. Happy CSS Naked Day everybody. Here’s to accessibility and an open web for everyone!

  • Banana = Design = Innovation = Vision

    Banana = Vision Love it or hate it, Bruce Nussbaum makes some great points in Are Designers the Enemy of Design? I think I buy most of it. Is Design a specialist activity? If it’s done well, generally yes. Is that likely to change? For the most part, I don’t think so. Will ‘the everyman’…

  • The Design of CruiseControl.rb

    If you’ve heard me talk about work lately, you have probably heard me talk about an Open Source project I’ve been working on with a handful of other folks at ThoughtWorks. Previous to now, it’s been “privately public,” existing on servers where people could get to it, but not so public that we were letting…

  • Songbird is sweet

    I’ve been playing with Songbird, the music player made by Mozilla. For those of you who don’t know, Mozilla is the brains behind Firefox & Thunderbird, for browsing and email, respectively. My experience so far with Songbird is that it is awesome, especially given the fact that it’s still in early beta. It already does…

  • The Devil’s in the Details: NYTimes.com edition

    Imagine the situation: you’re reading the newspaper online. Great article. It’s filling you in on the big story that everybody is talking about over at the water cooler. In a few seconds you’re going to go over to them and fill them in on this juicy new detail. But then – wait – what was…

  • On Iteration

    “It’s not an iteration if you only do it once!” – Fred Sampson, in the UPA Voice Developers & designers: Please, please don’t just implement your first idea. Think about it for a few minutes. Sketch it on paper a few times a few different ways. Nine times out of ten you’ll find that your…

  • Code Poetry

    What a brilliant poem. Read it for yourself: StubbornSoft & MammothSoft

  • Some advice from Don Norman

    Just when you’re looking for some inspiration, a quote from someone famous is bound to help: The most important consulting rule that I follow is: “Never solve the problem as stated.” Why? because it is invariably the wrong problem, usually being the symptom rather than the cause. Find the root cause and solve that, and…

  • Creating Visual Design Options

    One of the ideas that I try to progress when I join a new project is that much of my job will simply be about exploring options. If I do my job right, more than half of the options will end up in the trash bin, so that’s to be expected. Many people have a…

  • Evolution vs. Revolution in Digital Design

    iPhone presentation Originally uploaded by Dan_H. One distinction many people make when defining a design project is whether the design will be another evolution of an existing technique, set of tools, or technologies, or if it will be a revolutionary implementation. This decision is most often made implicitly, generally without any direct thought about revolutionary…