J Patrick Hunt

This is a really terrific post by Brandon Walkin on Managing UI Complexity. This is what usable is all about.

But Brandon works as a UI designer at Marketcircle. Billings has an amazing simple and intuitive UI. Daylite, not so much. I’ve tried several times to integrate Daylite into my daily life, to no avail because of design issues (its too complex). Hopefully, the work he hints at in this post will result in a much more usable and therefore useful Daylite.

I’m not sure why I haven’t visited Konigi in so long. They have some of the best resources available for those of us interested in user experience design and usability. Today I downloaded the most recent version of two of their excellent tools: the OmniGraffle UX template and the OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils. I started a new project today and decided to revisit these tools. The new versions are far more advanced than the last time I downloaded them from Graffletopia (if memory serves), and they make creating new wireframes efficient and enjoyable.

Newspapers have been around a long time. And despite their current economic troubles, newspapers have gotten more than a few things right throughout their history. One of those things is the creation and adherence to a strong information hierarchy for text elements on the page. Headlines, sub-heads, bylines, captions, body text, and other elements are consistently applied throughout a newspaper. But there’s more to it than that. (more…)

I’ve recently moved more and more of my digital life to the cloud, and I find it hard to beat Google for much of what I need. Google has been my default search engine for years, all of my email accounts are hosted by Google (Gmail and Apps accounts), and its hard to beat AdSense and Analytics. Best of all, you can get an amazing amount of features and functionality for free! But its not all wine and rose when using Google. Here are a few observations about what is good, bad and ugly with some Google services. (more…)

Does every coffee maker on the planet suffer from the same poor usability design? It goes something like this:

• Make yourself a pot of coffee and enjoy.
• Wake up the next morning to repeat the process.
• Raise the lid.
• Condensation the formed on the inside of the lid pours down the back of the coffee maker and onto the countertop.

(more…)