State-of-the-Art Experience Design for Experience Nerds — Attending a Battlestar Galactica LARP
Let’s get this out of the way at the outset. LARP is an acronym that stands for Live Action Role Playing. Think Dungeons and Dragons, but running around in the woods in costumes and with fake swords. Or at least, that’s what I thought it was. But, it’s way more than that. It’s way more […]
Unsung User Experience Heroes — Stop Covering Your Ass
There is this common element in user interfaces on every device and on every platform. Here’s how it goes: You press a button or a link or some piece of UI that does “something”. The next thing you see is a small dialog box asking you “Are you sure you want to do [that something]?”. […]
Standing Out
It used to be enough that a piece of technology existed. It used to be enough that now we could do something we couldn’t do before. Whether it was adding up a column of numbers, or WYSIWYG editing of a document, or listening to music, or editing a movie, or the web! But creating new […]
Iterative Loops in User Experience Design (or the Death of the Written Software Specification)
We do this all the time in life. We start with a broad idea and make it more specific. It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s healthy. “Want to go out? Food or a movie? What type of food? Which restaurant? What night? What time? Where will we meet? What should we order? etc.” And yet, when […]
Less is more — and here’s why.
Less is more. Everyone says this. It’s now a cliche. OK. But it bears repeating, and understanding. One of the secret advantages of making software in these modern times is the ability to ship that software to real customers early and often. Those users are a treasure trove of explicit and implicit feedback helping you […]