Monthly Archives: November 2006
USPS.com uses Google
Looks like the USPS website uses the google search appliance. I was messing about with the search url and turned this up: Go to the search form and enter a search for a package. At the page this takes you too, go to your address bar and erase everything after ?q=######## where ####### is your [...]
Posted in Hacks Leave a comment
Design: Paradox of Choice
Here’s a simpler explanation of the usability design principle of avoiding choice. Joel from Joel On Software just wrote a great and simple explanation of the Paradox of Choice. It all centers on what is wrong with this picture. Why are there that many options to choose from when you want to shut down? Every [...]
Posted in Design, Dev, User Experience Leave a comment
Design: Wallet
I got a new wallet. It’s made out of Tyvek, the stuff that FedEx pouches are made out of. It’s waterproof and unrippable. It’s also paper thin and light and I love it. It looks like an Airmail envelope. Full, it is smaller than my old leather wallet is. Fits all the stuff I need, [...]
Posted in Design, Pals Leave a comment
Snow Trip: Crested Butte Colorado
Brian and I are looking for good folks to join us for a new years-ish trip to Crested Butte. Dates aren’t firm yet. If you are interested – get in touch.
Posted in Pals, Snowboarding Leave a comment
Concert: Marisa Monte
Tuesday night I went out with Nate and Claudia to go see Marisa Monte, a Brazilian singer-songwriter. I understood none of the songs, but it was very good music – chilled out stuff with lazy beats and happy melodies. The staging was sparse but very effective. A few lightboxes, a platform, a few lights on [...]
Posted in Design, Music, Pals Leave a comment
User Experience Principles: Avoid Choice but Allow It
Just had a long user experience discussion with coworker Marc about concurrency problems in settings. His argument: Everything on a screen should be atomic. My argument: Concurrency should be resolved as often as possible without forcing the user to make a choice. Alice opens up our settings application. Bob opens up our settings application. Alice [...]
Posted in Dev, User Experience Leave a comment
Great news for you – more work for me
I’ve made the switch to blogger beta, mainly because I love tags. The tags are up there on the upper left corner, and I’ll be going through the old posts and making sure things are tagged appropriately. Why is this good for you, my loyal handful of readers? As Jen W put it, I have [...]
Posted in Dev, Pals Leave a comment
UI Design
I’ve been assigned to do the User Interface design mock-ups for our settings by my boss because I’m the guy who gets all excited by well designed things and starts talking about user experiences and such. I’m the guy who reads Passionate Users, Infosthetics, Alex Barnett, Etc. I get hot for sparklines. Most applications are [...]
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The problem of spam
Been reading a lot about spam problems lately. It isn’t a problem for me, since I’m not a high value target for spam. The other reason is that I’ve raised the bar by a very tiny amount. CAPTCHAs (those type the letters in the picture tests) are designed to raise the bar for spammers, and [...]
Posted in Browsers, Captchas, Economics, Incentives, Spam Leave a comment
Prosper.com/Tools is here!