User Experience

30 Oct 2009 1003H

30 second review in iTunes

Whoever designed this bit of interaction is worth their weight in gold. The feature — new to iTunes 9? — lets you reverse 30 seconds, an extremely helpful feature for audiobooks particularly. May have been one of these things you learn only by observing users.

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28 Oct 2009 1429H

On great user interfaces

Great UI work can’t be done after the fact. Great UI can’t be a patch to things. It can only happen as a result of deep understanding of user needs and user testing. Once the product is rolled out, it’ll take a revolution to change what’s in place.

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01 Sep 2009 1616H

So, what have you been up to?

Sit down, kiddies . . . listen to your ol’ Uncle Gene tell you a story. A little over a year ago, I stopped freelancing at Sears Online Services, where I’d been working for a beta service that Sears was looking at growing called MyGofer.com. We — meaning a team of about three IAs and [...]

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28 Apr 2009 1844H

Doing no harm

Interestingly — I may have said this on another blog — “do no harm” appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath. It is believed that the words stem from the Epidemics of Hippocrates:
“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two [...]

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04 Mar 2009 2254H

Wow, what a difference a few months makes. . .

Long story short, work and non-work are conspiring to take time away from the blog and quite a few other things I used to do to while away the lonely hours alone. The big thing is that I recently took a trip to Germany to visit the HQ and learn about their UX practices, and [...]

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10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s [...]

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06 Feb 2009 0740H

Wait. RED? Really?

That’s what this New York Times article said alright: Red backgrounds for detail work, blue backgrounds for creative work.

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20 Jan 2009 2224H

My experience working in Windows apps

Working in Windows apps is a bit different from working on the web. We deal more with modes and modelessness than the web does, and the kinds of widgets or controls we can apply is a bit more diverse, but the tools and general rules of thumb remain the same. 
The details are not important but [...]

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16 Jan 2009 1307H

Circuit City throws in the towel

Sad to hear. While at Sears online services, round 2, we admired the work they’d done there. They did some great things there in my opinion to try and salvage the brand: in-store pickup worked like a charm; the website user experience was top notch. In the end nothing could help solve drastic market conditions [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not [...]

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