Posts in Making Things Special

How many times have I seen a user get into a screwed up state on their computing device only to immediately blame themselves for their predicament. The software industry has relied on this technological insecurity for decades now. Why bother making software that doesn’t screw over the user, when the user will never blame the […]

Take a moment and recall the last time you spent a lot of time working on a new feature for your piece of software. An app, a website, whatever. You spent a lot of time on it. Sweated. Bled. Argued. Fought. The feature is ready to go, and you’re ASBOLUTELY SURE that customers will love […]

Human beings learn with all their senses. When it comes to decoding a user experience, we can only really on sight, sound, and touch (which I’ll use as a proxy for interacting with the interface itself). But for some reason, many tech folks these days believe that if a user can’t understand your user interface […]

If you’re going to be an advocate of creating singular user experiences, it is important to have your bearings — know what came before you. Before the first Macintosh arrived in 1984, graphical user interfaces were in their fetal form. Text interfaces were the norm. And consistency was nowhere to be found. Arcane commands and […]

Sometimes it puzzles us how low the bar is among many software industry professionals. And while the current average quality of software experiences is an improvement over decades past, it seems that the highest aspiration for many software designers and technologists is to make their apps and web experiences… “usable”. Usable means many things including […]