Victor
Professionally: UI developer, usability practitioner and web designer. Personally: Father, photographer, cyclist, hiker.
Author Archives: Victor
My new favorite user experience quote
September 10, 2008 – 10:57
Okay… so it’s not new…
Donald Norman’s rule for bad design:
“Look for posted instructions, they can only serve to provide poor impressions.”
Google Chrome
September 3, 2008 – 08:36
I installed Google Chrome on both my work PC and my home PC to play around. It’s extremely high the the geek factor because it’s a multi-threaded app with “tab protection”, meaning each tab runs as a separate process on the PC, so if one tab were to crash, or to get bogged down because of say, javascript hanging, or other browser funkiness, you can continue on your merry way. No hiccups, not stalls, no killing processes in the task manager. More as I play around it with…
Visio UX Stencils
August 21, 2008 – 13:55
If you do wire-frames for UX, these stencils are indispensable!
From The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break — http://www.guuui.com/issues/02_07.php
The tire swing – a usability classic!
August 19, 2008 – 10:54
This one is a classic. I found it while going through a flash drive… for full effect, click on the image to see a larger version.
UI Style Guides
August 18, 2008 – 16:09
I found a terrific collection of UI style guides on ExperienceDynamics.com. They have everything from Apple, Microsoft, Sun, etc…
http://experiencedynamics.com/science-of-usability/style-guides
Animal Planet Expo
August 3, 2008 – 22:37
The Animal Planet Expo was in San Jose so I decided to bring my son there. Mostly, I was interested in getting an autograph from Jeff Corwin but got nixed from the line… like the person in front of me got to get a Corwin autograph… oh well, them’s the breaks. So we both decided to wander around and came across the Planet Green exhibit. Mostly county fair stuff… but we got a cool/cheesey photo of a bunch of people on a couch with us badly Photoshop-ed in… can you find us? We’re really hard to miss…
New Pet Peeve
August 2, 2008 – 17:06
I’m slightly annoyed at the Comcast tech right now. When he installed our cable modem, he also installed some crap on my system that replaced my default search engine. I don’t install software from vendors, unless I choose to. Given that I’m running Vista (and yes, I do like it), it also gives me more control over security by know exactly what is installed. Plus that, I don’t want my system secretly sending stuff, whether for monitoring the network, or collecting information outside of network activity itself.
BTW… I also dislike the new trend of installing browser toolbars.
User Experience Resources
August 2, 2008 – 08:51
Here are a couple of user experience resources I’ve come across in the past and figured I’d put them here. They are for 3 companies that have shaped computing as we know it today.
While Apple wasn’t the first company to have done a user interface guide, nearly 20 years ago, they were the closest thing to what user experience designers call patterns.
I haven’t sat to compare and constrast the differences, but it might be a fun bit of analysis.
- Apple User Experience
- IBM (User Centered Design) (they’ve got an entire area dedicated to research as well. You can find that here.)
- UI Design from Microsoft’s MSDN
First post using Windows Live Writer
July 27, 2008 – 22:53
I’m experimenting with using Windows Live Writer to publish to my blog from my Vista notebook (yes, I have a PC). This is my first post. Interestingly enough, despite coming from Microsoft, it works with a variety of blogging services and installations.
In this case, I’m wrote this to publish to my personal installation of WordPress. Kinda cool.
The nice thing about it is I can write and delay publishing until I have a network connection. Yeah, I know, I could always write it in a text editor or MS Word or something. This is nice because it’s kind of light weight and does everything I might want to do!
What’s kind of nice is that it allows you to import photos and apply different types of treatments and effects. The image below has a photo border with a dropshadow, all compliments of Live Writer.
The cool part is that it supports multiple blogs! The only word of caution is to be certain that the correct blog is selected prior to publishing. I might be using this application more!
To learn more about it, visit the Windows Live Writer site.
Bit of a hiccup
July 27, 2008 – 00:56
Ran into a bit of a hiccup. I’ve moved the site from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal is overkill for what I needed, where I would use only 5% of what it has to offer.
I’m still working on moving my portfolio over to this site — until then, you can still access it at d2982402.u29.securedc.com.
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