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On Risk and UI Design
Most designers and businesspeople are reticent to stir the pot when they’ve got a good thing going. When you’ve got thousands or even tens of thousands of people visiting your site each day, why take the risk of making a potentially shocking change? It makes little sense, right? Well, that certainly makes sense if you’re…
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The contenteditable HTML Attribute
Who needs form fields? Now that we have the contenteditable attribute, any element can be editable. Here’s all you have to do to make a field editable: <div contenteditable>This is editable content. Go ahead, change it.</div> Which acts just like this area (click the text to edit it): This is editable content. Go ahead, change…
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Generate Loooooots of Ideas
Sometimes people think there’s one obvious answer to seemingly vexing design questions. Plain and simple: this is wrong. Your gut instinct might be telling you that there’s only one way to go about solving a problem, but this is an incorrect assumption. When you try, and I mean really try, you’ll find many answers to…
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Please, Stop Sending Purposeless Emails
This afternoon, I received what one would think is an innocuous email: However, there are so many glaring mistakes in this email, it’s hard to choose where to start. How about this, I’ll start with two simple questions: Who sent this email? Why was this email sent? The first question is relatively hard to answer.…
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Ask Stupid Questions
Here’s some advice you wouldn’t expect. If you really want to know how a person understands something about the world, consider asking a “stupid” question. You know, a question that you surely should know the answer to. For example, if a user says that it would be great if your website were “faster”, you could…
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Am I the only one who gets lost at Target?
Every other weekend or so I take a trip to my local Target store to stock up on necessities. Let me start by saying this: I love Target. For the most part I have a wonderful experience there…well, except for one section: the toiletries area. For some reason, I can never find the things I’m…
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You should see my sketchbook
It is truly one of my favorite design “tools:” A good notebook. Personally, I like the full size Moleskine models, but whatever you can manage to carry around will work best. I carry mine everywhere with me, always with a pencil attached. Check out these notes, if you dare, which preceded my recent talk with…
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The Potential of Bathroom Air Dryers
It’s a really nice bathroom sign. It really is. But seriously, can we do something about the air dryers in this country? I appreciate the fact paper towels are a complete and total waste of resources, but the hand dryer situation is…well…out of hand. If those things could blow just 2 or 3 times harder,…
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Seeing fewer choices
Alternatively titled: On Covering Your Ass Check out that picture on the right. That’s from my credit card’s website. My favorite part is the red link on the bottom that proclaims, “See fewer choices.” You know what that option is? That’s a designer or usability person saying to the team, “Hello team, we have heard…
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Taxi-cab confessional
I almost missed my flight this evening. Nearly every Sunday for the past few months I’ve taken a flight to Raleigh, NC. This flight is preceded by a trip in a taxi from my house to the airport. Except tonight it didn’t go as planned. As routine turned to complacency, I wasn’t alarmed when the…