User Experience

The Sparrow Migration

March 5, 2012

I ditched an old friend last week. He’s been more than a friend to me, often a business partner, he’s brought me good things and bad, entertained me and helped me learn. We’ve been together a long time, but lately he’s been cramping my style. I’m talking, of course, about Mac Mail, that venerable mail [...]

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Alta Google?

January 18, 2012

Is Google about to topple from its perch as king of search? There’s a lot being written lately about how Google search results are being gamed to promote Google products and interests. What I’m seeing day to day is a general “junking up” of search results where the first page of search results are only [...]

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Research@Concordia

January 12, 2012

Imagine a world where researchers in completely different fields interacted with each other freely. Consider how unexpected connections between the humanities and the sciences might inform research projects in new and serendipitous ways. Now think about how college and university research departments so often function within a silo structure, rarely making meaningful cross-disciplinary connections. A [...]

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The Touchable Museum

December 20, 2011

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to elicit a sharp intake of breath by a museum curator or conservator, it’s the idea of having visitors handle artifacts. We’re used to seeing objects in museums either out of reach and from a distance or safely ensconced in cases. It’s an unfortunate necessity, this barrier between the [...]

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Scaling the Walled Garden

December 14, 2011

There’s a trend underway in personal computers that leaves me greatly conflicted. From a user experience perspective, it’s great that so many devices “just work.” Apple’s iOS devices are just short of magical in their simplicity and functionality — surely that’s a good thing, right? But there’s another aspect of user experience that’s been lost [...]

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What’s Next?

October 27, 2011

It was gratifying to see a user experience/interface horror that I had complained about in this space less than a month ago, solved in a highly elegant way by a completely new take on the problem. I’m referring, of course, to the Nest programmable thermostat developed by some ex-Apple Product Engineers. Twitter and the Blogosphere [...]

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Memorable Complexity

October 21, 2011

I’ve written before about the difficulty of distilling complex concepts into something simple. It’s a huge design challenge that can pay rich dividends in improved user/visitor experience, and often, it’s the difference between comprehension and incoherence or usability and frustration for your intended audience. If you believe in the benefits of simplicity the way I [...]

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Going Postal

October 5, 2011

I recently had one of the worst user experiences I think I’ve ever had online, courtesy of Canada Post. It was a simple change of address, but used the services of a credit bureau to verify identity. The questions I was asked to answer were invasive and disturbing, especially given what I was trying to [...]

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