Blog

  • KPI vs Engagement

    Earlier this week I was discussing with my friend, Tom Graber, about the problem with metrics and I thought I would jot down a summary of the conversation.  It all started with a discussion about social game companies focusing on metrics to determine whether or not they were successful with their game. I was asked in an interview how I would know something was successful. While I can say that with some of my projects I know I have been successful because we increased engagement. Say for example, CBSNews.com with the redesign we had an increase of 40% on traffic across the site and 60% with...

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  • Going Native: The Anthropology of Mobile App Design by Josh Clark (@globalmoxie)

    Going Native: The Anthropology of Mobile App Design by Josh Clark (@globalmoxie). Notes below. ———————– We’re just starting to discover what they can do and what they can offer. Symbian and Windows were 80% of the market in 2008 but in the coming months it’ll be 10 OS’s. It’s goog to follow what latin america, africans, and young people are doign with their phones. If it’s all about reach and what’s most popular then we’d all be using Nokia (Symbian platforms) Within the world. But it’s BB that holds the lead i...

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  • The Power of Gaming

    Last night I went to the City Arts talk, The Power of Gaming with Jane McGonigal. You may or may not already be familiar with her.  She did the TED talk about how gaming can make a better world.  This later spawned, Gameful, which is the online headquarters for people who want to make a better world. Gameful came from the idea that people consider gamers playful.  However, gamers are serious when they are playing games.  They are strategic and focused so playful as a word to describe gamers doesn’t work. Thus Gameful was born. Last night’s talk was a follow up of her ongoing wo...

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  • [Experiment] Illustrating Characters

    I had always admired my friend, Miki Pierre, and her ability to illustrate characters of any variety.  Take a look at her work on her site and you can see it for yourself.  Recently, I’ve decided to start trying my hand at doing some of my illustration.  I’m fairly new to this so I went to Google and started with searching for tutorials on how to create my own characters. I found a list of tutorials and this one from Vector Tuts on creating a web site mascot. In the end I took the overview from one tutorial about creating a sketch of your character and then tracing it in Illus...

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  • [Repost] 2011 in Review: Patents Misused to Stifle Innovation

    2011 in Review: Patents Misused to Stifle Innovation (via EFF) patent,patent troll,Federal Circuit,patentable subject,app developers,bad patents,subject matter,Supreme Court,predatory patent trolls,business method patents,patentable subject matter,abstract subject matter,robust new procedures,breast cancer gene,ongoing lodsys litigation,innovation,patent reform,major trends,patent issues,free expression,urgent need,fee-setting authority,fair use,actual lawsuits,America Invents,digital rights,big changes,separate rulings,pressing problems,in-app purchasing,biggest problems,InnovationPatentsInt...

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  • If Travel Worked Like Health Care

    This video beautifully illustrates the importance of designing a service from end to end with the end user (ie customer) in mind.

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  • [REPOST] Jobs & Leadership in the Valley

    Utilizing a new tool, Repost.us to repost articles of interest. This one comes from “Silicon Valley Watcher”. It highlights some great quotes from Steve Jobs and puts out a call to the new leaders of the valley to step up.

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  • How I landed in UX: My defining moment

    I wrote most of this back in April. I returned to it today and thought I’d finish it out. This weekend I am buried in a seminar on how to be a more engaging public speaker. Most of us fear public speaking. We fear being embarrassed in front of crowds or not being seen as credible in what we are talking about. I too have those fears, which is why I am in the seminar. Our homework tonight was to write our defining moment, a story about why we are talking about what we’re talking about, so here’s mine: Having started my career as a visual designer, I was quite happy just deali...

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  • Why Steve Jobs Quitting Will Spark a Sell Off

    Let me start this post with a caveat, I am not a financial advisor. That said, both Mashable & Techcrunch (amongst others at time of this writing) have recently announced that Steve Jobs has resigned. This has sent shock waves through the social web as people one by one found out that the “Oracle” has left Apple. So you may wonder why I am speculating on the stock when I am focused on user experience for a living. I am actually basing my thoughts on human behavior which directly relates to what I do and what I have learned from working with Fearless Wealth, who has spent th...

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  • Big D: Mobile Design at the Speed of Thought

    Another live blogging post from the Big Design Conference. We don’t think about it as it’s second to what we do. I design something then I create this document then it’s huge and I have to condense it and then the client has to extract it then there might be problems and he has to go through all these troubles then gets Two most effective ways of communicating is talking and drawing. Drawing it out on the white board But how would I communicate differently if I were right next to the client. I would probably just reach over the wall and talk to him. Create insights on a list and post ...

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