User Driven Change

I am seeing a disturbing trend in web design blogs: the belief that the fold is an obsolete concept. While Paddy Donnelly creates a graphically compelling story line it is ultimately flawed. You cannot presume that you have compelling content; the vast majority of content isn't inherently engaging. I'm going to be blunt. If you believe that the fold doesn't exist you are a lazy designer. Lazy in that you are not following up ...

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Most of my recent blog attempts have died on the vine so I am going to share with you some of my favorite new and long time resources: Steve Krug presentation on super-cheap usability. I suggest listening to it twice once today and once next week. If you haven't capitalized on at least one of his suggestions in that week you should hire a professional. A wire frame of the ...

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Yesterday I attended a lunch presentation on Social Media one of the speakers, Kevin Urie of Social Media Club Seattle, said something that rubs me the wrong way. "I don't follow people [on Twitter] that don't have an @-reply on the first page of their account. Twitter isn't supposed to be a broadcast medium." (For those that don't know you use the @ symbol and the persons username to indicate you are responding to someone. So, ...

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Carlos and I were discussing qualitative data last week.  Specifically using qualitative data to determine where you rate amongst your vertical.  My opinion is this: I love and trust data, I do not love and trust polling thus I am quite skeptical of a good portion of qualitative data.  Yes there are many different types of qualitative companies where you can get good info to back up your data.   I just ...

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Planned obsolescence has made many people rich. Computers, cars, and television in particular are things that we all happily update on a regular basis. We just know that something better is coming out; it is only a matter of time. The same for the Internet. New design styles (a move from shiny to grunge), new services (a move from Facebook to Twitter), or new goals (making house payments to finding a member of AIG and ...

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