Five Sketches™

This week, I’m attending a few days of training in agile software development, in an Innovel course titled Lean, Agile and Scrum for Project Managers and IT Leadership.
My first exposure to agile was in Desiree Sy’s 2005 presentation, Strategy and Tactics for Agile Design: A design case study, to the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) annual conference […]

A simple and good design can last and last. Consider the qualities of a BC Telephones operator’s chair from the 1930s:

Environmentally defensible. It is made primarily of a renewable resource—wood—and is so durable that, after decades, it still withstands daily use.
Functional. Originally, at BC Tel, this chair fit a small space, swivelled so the operator […]

When designing the user experience of software, UX- and Development teams often focus on how the user interface supports user performance, because that’s within their locus of control. Once the product is in the wild, environmental factors may reduce user performance despite the team’s best product-design efforts. But I believe it’s possible for a UX team to […]

For professional reasons, I like to mess around with software. It’s a form of training, because some of the messing around leads to frustration, confusion, and inefficiency. And that’s good.
My hope is that my experiences will help me to better understand what I put various groups of software users through when they use the software […]

Many people are bad at estimating how often and how long they’re on the phone. Interestingly, you can predict who will overestimate and who will underestimate their phone usage, according to the 2009 study, “Factors influencing self-report of mobile phone use” by Dr Lada Timotijevic et al. For this study, a self-reported estimate is considered  accurate […]

My television lets me step through the channels. To do this, I use the remote control’s CH button. Similarly, my television lets me page through the list of programs, five channels at a time. To do this, I use the remote control’s PG button. In fact, it’s one button for the stepping and paging functions.

The programs in […]

Three weeks ago, a client called me. They had just completed release 1.0 of a new Web application that will replace their current flagship product. The client was asking about summative usability testing to evaluate how well the product performs in the hands of users, because they want their customers to succeed.
Since the product is an […]

Last year I worked with a team most of whose members were on a different continent. Since my job as a usability analyst and interaction designer often requires me to influence, motivate, and give feedback about work already completed, I quickly adopted online video—mainly Skype—in order to see the non-verbal communication cues of my teammates.
In the […]

The more choices people have, the more likely they’ll choose something utilitarian over something hedonistic.

In an experiment by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, and Wendy Liu, 20% of 121 participants chose low-fat ice cream when given a simple choice of two, but 37% chose low-fat ice cream when given a choice of ten. In this case, low-fat […]

In the context of UI design, I’ve come across numerous references to gestalt principles in the past few years, but not to 2D-design principles. When you design a user interface, you can apply both sets of principles to ensure users “intuitively” figure things out without any mental, or cognitive, effort.
Gestalt principles
There are plenty of websites that […]