My bus ride home trippled in time last night because of some construction so I had the opportunity to watch this TED talk. This really drove home the power of defaults in user interface choices and how it is the responsibility of good designers to default to the right behaviour, especially when the options are [...]

I like to look at this painting every so often to remind myself how things can go so wrong even when they seem like they are going right. If you haven’t seen this image before, the description of the project is amazing.  An effort to find the “People’s Choice” art award a market survey queried [...]

Spent some downtime Sunday reading Getting Things Done (GTD) after previously talking about it I picked up a copy a couple weeks ago and have been running through it in my spare time.  I probably talk about the book too much already and am boring everyone with my fascination over the classic email overload problem. [...]

I am often inspired by Timbuk2. I’m a proud owner of one of their laptop bags and oddly hope that one day it will break just so I can design a new one of my own. Of course I’ve had this thing for almost 4 years now and it’s not wearing through at any points [...]

In the web world every browser needs a refresh button because the main protocol (http) doesn’t allow for the web browser client to know if there were changes made on the remote end. Lots of MacGyver like fixes using AJAX are built to accommodate the fact that the web is stateless and yet we use [...]

With the help of several other people (a group design!) from this years Boston GNOME Summit.  I was finally able to rework one of the important dialogs many update applications suffer from.  I think the end result is more fun, intuitive, and thus probably more secure. I’ve got a bunch more made up as well [...]

I’ve been looking over the comments from the earlier Web Browser Homepage post and there were certainly a large number of people who said they were using about:blank, mostly for speed reasons as well as the distraction reason. And some other interesting situations / use cases that people mentioned happening, here’s a quick breakdown. Persistent [...]

I wasn’t there, but read the slides from Dan Benjamin’s Railsconf 2007 presentation. In his slides he takes some time to talk about The Fold. This is a really important element in designing interfaces, it’s been a part of newspaper layout forever and often web designers don’t include this aspect in their designs. The lines [...]

I really like using firebug for iterating web mockup ideas. I’m not developing HTML or CSS, but if I want to try out adding something here or there to mugshot I can just open up firebug on it, inspect the element I want to look at, then edit the area. You’ll get all the Javascript [...]

Lots of good comments on my post about informed choices and real security, it would be nice to see some good open source solutions out there. And I’m glad I didn’t bump into david on the street that day, he has more good ideas about the issues of phishing and SSL certs. To follow up [...]

David makes an excellent point about choices in a user interface. What David assumes in his post is that I think people shouldn’t be able to make informed choices in their Desktop interface. Well that’s not true, what’s missing my my previous post is that I don’t want to take away peoples ability to make [...]

I get tired of these dialogs. I see them as the point at which the development crew just gave up on me and their application. Make a decision in your software! Be Bold! Be Brave! Don’t lay the impetus on me (the user) to understand certificates, SSL, file version incompatibilities, and other computer bull shit. [...]

I recently switched over to wordpress, as much as I loved pybloxsom I wanted blog comments and web access to writing new entries. I could have done that all with pybloxsom, but I was moving hosting providers and I’m lazy and knew that wordpress has those things in by default. Sorry Will! So I’ve been [...]

Sales are in a slump at the clarkbw cafepress store so I’ve been looking into how I can improve the current markets that I’m in or expand into new market segments. Let’s examine the product breakdown first, currently we’re mostly a custom t-shirt with some other novelty gifts. Web Browser T-Shirt has done ok, but [...]

Is we don’t talk about GNOME Design Team (johnny asked about GDT yesterday and I don’t want to have to repeat myself )

I posted this to the usability list I was about to reply to a bug [1] regarding this, but it doesn’t make sense to keep it in a bug comment compared to actually responding to this thread. First I want to say that I think these toolbar grips are a pretty lousy idea for most [...]