Unsung User Experience Heroes — Hide and Seek
One thing you constantly need to concern yourself with as a User Experience Designer is the “cognitive load” at every point in your experience. “Cognitive Load” is a fancy term for how much thinking the user has to do to parse through all the crap you’ve jammed onto the screen in front of them. “Less […]
Unsung User Experience Heroes — Visible Toll Free Tech Support Number
If you have a consumer software product and you charge money for it, you should have a visible, toll-free, tech support number on every page. I’m not sure how to state this more plainly. Your job in creating a great customer experience is to make the customer happy, not to lower your support costs. Lowering […]
Software Blasphemy — Doing Things Manually
The hallmark of the software professional is that they often see a world where technology has almost infinite capacity to improve our lives. Software can’t put food on a plate, but it can help calculate the most efficient way to grow and distribute the food. Software can’t give us a hug (yet), but it can […]
“I’ve got 99 problems, but one that customers actually run into ain’t one.” (Maybe.)
In the rush to ship your piece of software there is no shortage of opportunities to polish, refine, and smooth over rough edges. And yet, at some point, we must ship. How do we decide which problems to fix and which to save for later? Here’s how it works: When you’re trying to launch your […]
Speechless
Words aren’t enough to express how grateful we are to all 326 of our backers as well as the many more who helped us spread the word about our new book — Making Things Special. You have all made this experience quite special for us. For such a niche project we weren’t sure we could […]