More than a year ago I very proudly announced that Boxee, the much-loved social media center software company, had hired me as the user experience designer for their beta. In the five months that I worked with them, I conducted user interviews and usability testing to identify people’s needs, behaviors and frustrations, and redesigned the [Keep Reading…]
What the customer actually wanted
A few weeks ago Orian sent me a hilarious but sad cartoon on the all-too-familiar process of cumulative error and product dilution during a project life cycle: customer request -> finance -> engineering -> manufacturing -> marketing -> delivery. Not only do we fail to deliver on what was proposed, but what the customer said [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 6
Thank you so much to the 41 people who showed up for the sixth week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. I really appreciate everyone’s flexibility in moving over to Ustream at the [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 4
Thank you so much to the 25 or so folks who showed up for the fourth week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Join me next week on Sunday, August 30, 9-10pm Eastern [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 3
Thank you so much to the 20 or so folks who showed up for the third week of Whit Hour — my weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Sorry for the last-minute day change. I was stuck in [Keep Reading…]
Whit Hour – Week 2
Thank you so much to the 20 or so folks who showed up for the second week of Whit Hour — my new weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Join me next week on Sunday, August 16, 9-10pm [Keep Reading…]
User Centered Design is now closed
Last year at IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool declared that it was time for us to retire the dogma of user-centered design, citing that the most effective design teams don’t follow a specific methodology, but instead have a whole toolbox of techniques and tricks to use when the time is right. Flip through his slides [Keep Reading…]
Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity Applied to Building Your Personal Brand
I’ve been thinking a lot about acts of giving lately. It’s been an incredible year for me and so many people have given me so much. It seems impossible to give back. In Judaism, it’s common to follow Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Tzedakah (the Hebrew word for charity or justice). The aim is to give [Keep Reading…]
Redesigning the boxee experience
It’s been a few weeks in the making, but today boxee announced that they’ve hired me to help redesign their user experience from the ground up. If you haven’t heard of boxee, where have you been hiding? They’ve been in the top 10 trending topics on Twitter for the past month. They’re blowing up the [Keep Reading…]
“Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy” webinar with Indi Young
Do you know about the new webinar series co-produced by Rosenfeld Media and Smart Experience called Future Practice? It’s a great new series with some of the best voices in user experience talking about how they see best practices turning into next practices. The first webinar was “Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski” and [Keep Reading…]
