Monthly Archives: February 2007

My kitchen: An exercise in task-based organization

In my kitchen, I have my cookware, dinnerware, and cutlery organized in cupboards and drawers. I’ve organized the items by type and determined their location by accessibility, frequency of use, and proximity to utilities or tools they’re most likely to be used with (e.g. mugs above the coffee machine, saucepan by the stove top, etc.).
A [...]

UE & Presentations

Ben and I recently attended an Adaptive Path conference in San Francisco about managing user experiences, and it rocked. I plan on blogging about the conference shortly, but I thought I would first write about something related to the conference: the user experience of sitting through presentations.
Most people hate giving presentations. Fair enough. Standing in [...]

Kids Know Best!

A few months ago I facilitated a design discovery workshop with one of the local school districts. A group of internal stakeholders responded to our initial design questionnaire, and from these responses I put together a digital scrapbook. The idea was to narrow down our options and come to a unified concept for our design [...]

Fangs: the Screen Reader Emulator for Firefox

I want to add another tool to Mark’s post on accessibility.
Fangs is a Firefox extension that emulates the output of a screen reader in plain text.
Why would you want to use this instead of an actual screen reader?
Screen readers by their very nature are linear. Testing sites with lots of content would take ages; you [...]

Fun Times at Web Directions North 07

Well, it was so much fun at WDN07 that it’s taken me this many days to recover! No seriously, being my first conference, I was struck by how friendly everyone was, not to mention their passion for the industry. Web standards, fine art design, and clever coding to name only a few of the excellent [...]