Chance Bliss

Wow! My friend Graham Michael sent me this today. This was taken about 8 years ago around the time of the dot com boom, then bust. Good times.

chance_quits (.mov)

If you need to explain to a client or your company what User experience Design is, the best way is to explain what it’s not. Here’s a good list from Whitney Hess, a independent user experience design. The best point in the list is that UX is not rounded corners and pretty buttons, but the system as a whole. Everything from performance to page flow to error messaging is apart of the experience and should be addressed within the design process.

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

I’ve always struggled with the usability trade-offs of left, right and top aligning form labels. Left-alignment places the label too far away from the field causing the user to lost track of which line they are on. Right-alignment places the label right next to the field, but causes a ragging effect from line to line. Top-alignment is a good option, but it increases the height of the form. There is no one or right way because it depends upon the number and type of questions being asked.

There is another option that I haven’t mentioned which is to place the label within the field. From my experience, this option is seriously flawed because once the user clicks into the field the label disappears. If you become distracted or need to refer to some other piece of information, you often forget what you were trying to enter in the first place.

A prime example is the sign-up form for the iPhone 4 per-order. Because of the incredible volume both the AT&T and Apple sites, I fill this form out at least 7 times before giving up. Maybe I just dumb, but each time I keep forgetting what I was filling out and have to backspace to display the label again.

I haven’t posted anything in awhile. Crazy month topped off with getting laid off. In the interest of staying positive here is one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes: Prince of Space. I like it very much (inside joke).

To all CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and CMOs, this is how great software is developed. It’s not about Open Source vs. Proprietary. It’s not about .Net vs. PHP. It’s not about 3rd party tools, plugins or widgets.

It’s about a common vision of how to work.

They take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity….Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they’ve got a snowman. That’s how Apple builds its platforms. It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement—so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.

Full article (via Daring Fireball)

At it’s core, the iterative process is the basis of human learning. When I try to learn a new song on the guitar, I don’t try to learn every note from beginning to end. It’s too much for my brain. Instead I try to figure out the basic cords and rhythm of the song. Once I’ve polished that, then I dive down into the more complex sections, one at a time.

Software development is the same. You really don’t know what you’re building until you start working. Of course, this drives business folks insane. They want to know right up front, how many features its going to have, what it will cost, and dreaded, when is it going to launch. They want to place a bet on a sure thing. They want the reward without the risk.

You’ve probably heard of this or done it before, but I love seeing how randomly combined text and images can create a great album cover.

Here’s the instructions:

1. Go to Random Article on Wikipedia.org. Use the first article as the name of your band
2. Go to Random Quote on TheQuotationsPage.com. Use the last four or five words as the title of your album
3. Go to Explore Last 7 Days on Flickr. Use the third image as your album cover.
4. Put them all together and you get something like below.

They just got signed

Their bass player is amazing!

Opening Act: Hong Kong Productivity Council

Dolittle was a great album. It makes me actually miss the 80′s. After watching this video, it’s kind of heartbreaking that I never saw them live.

This beaver dam is massive. Twice the size of the Hoover Dam. It makes me feel good that those busy beavers are out there hard at work, paying no mind to us. (via kottke.org). Take that mankind!

While nobody knows if this is exactly it seems a trader accidentally enter a “B” for billion instead of “M” for million. The result was a massive panic which resulted in an 1000 point drop in the stock market yesterday.

That’s $16 million, NOT $16 billion: Possible trader goof may have sparked 1,000-point Dow swing

My question is why making a trade for a billion versus a million is only only designated by one letter of which is separated only by the letter “N”? This question also goes to one of my biggest pet peeves in pretty much all technical and business writing; abbreviations and acronyms. Unless it is a universal such as Mr. or USA, don’t use it, especially if it’s only pertains to a specific industry.