August 14, 2018Chapter 6: ArchitectureIn 1936, Herbert “Hib” Johnson — head of the S.C. Johnson company and grandson of its founder — hired the architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new headquarters for his company. Johnson wanted to "make our chosen life’s work fine, and more enjoyable," and to "eliminate the drabness and dullness we so often find in office buildings." In other words, he wanted a better work...
Over 1 million Webmentions will have been sent across the internet since the specification was made a full Recommendation by the W3C—the standards body that guides the direction of the web—in early January 2017. That number is rising rapidly, and in the last few weeks I’ve seen a growing volume of chatter on social media and the blogosphere about these new “mentions” and the people implementing them. So what are...
A few years ago, a former boss of mine emailed me out of the blue and asked for a resource that would help him and his colleagues organize information more effectively. Like a dutiful friend, I sent him links to a few articles and the names of some professional writing books. And I qualified my answer with that dreaded disclaimer: “Advice varies widely depending on the situation.” Implication: “You’ll just...
Email communication is an integral part of the user experience for nearly every web application that requires a login. It’s also one of the first interactions the user has after signing up. Yet too often both the content and context of these emails is treated as an afterthought (at best), with the critical parts that users see first—sender name and email, subject, and preheader—largely overlooked. Your users, and the great...
It started off as an honest problem with a brilliant solution. As the ways we use the web continue to grow and evolve, we, as its well-intentioned makers and stewards, needed something better than making simple collections of pages over and over again. Design patterns, component libraries, or even style guides have become the norm for organizations big and small. Having reusable chunks of UI aids consistency and usability for...
A note from the editors: It’s our pleasure to share this excerpt from Chapter 2 (“Pinning Down Touchpoints”) of Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity by Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum, available now from Rosenfeld Media.If you embrace the recommended collaborative approaches in your sense-making activities, you and your colleagues should build good momentum toward creating better and valuable end-to-end experiences. In fact, the urge to jump into solution mode...
‘Tis a gift to be simple. Increasingly, in our line of work, ‘tis a rare gift indeed. In an industry that extols innovation over customer satisfaction, and prefers algorithm to human judgement (forgetting that every algorithm has human bias in its DNA), perhaps it should not surprise us that toolchains have replaced know-how. Likewise, in a field where young straight white dudes take an overwhelming majority of the jobs (including...
May 24, 2018Defining Experience PrinciplesIf you embrace the recommended collaborative approaches in your sense-making activities, you and your colleagues should build good momentum toward creating better and valuable end-to-end experiences. In fact, the urge to jump into solution mode will be tempting. Take a deep breath: you have a little more work to do. To ensure that your new insights translate into the right actions, you must collectively define what...
What would you say if I told you I just read and analyzed over 350 articles from A List Apart in less than six weeks? “You’re crazy!” might have passed through your lips. In that case, what would you say if I was doing it for a grade? Well, you might say that makes sense. As a part of an Independent Research Study for my undergraduate degree, I wanted to...
My first full-time developer job was at a small company. We didn’t have BrowserStack, so we cobbled together a makeshift device lab. Viewing a site I’d been making on a busted first-generation iPad with an outdated version of Safari, I saw a distorted, failed mess. It brought home to me a quote from Douglas Crockford, who once deemed the web “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable.” The “works best...
