UX Blog
I have written some blog posts about what I have learned about UX over my career. The purpose of this section is to let you know that I know how to do the job.
Islands - Everything Is Under Control
This nightmare Might scare some of you And truth be told These dreams are coming true But Everything is under control Don't climb out From under your hole
OpenWill The Moon Explode?
"There's a message from the moon base, something strange is going on/ all the scientists are working overtime to find what's wrong... Will the moon explode? .... I don't know if I believe......that the moon will explode."
OpenCells at Work
No better time to visualize how powerful and deadly your powerful white blood cells are.
OpenOn Becoming A God In Central Florida
This is a brilliant show. Exciting. Funny. Well-acted. Well-written. Perfect show.
OpenHis Girl Friday
This is a good summary of one of my favorite movies. I named my cat Hildy after Hildy.
OpenWill The Moon Explode? by The 23rd Century
"There's a message from the moon base, something strange is going on/ all the scientists are working overtime to find what's wrong... Will the moon explode? .... I don't know if I believe......that the moon will explode."
OpenPaul McCartney's "Blackbird" sung in Mi'kmaq
To bring awareness to this important cause students at Allison Bernard Memorial High School in Eskasoni, Cape Breton recorded Paul McCartney's Blackbird in their native Mi'kmaq language.
OpenCast of Hadestown performing "Wait for Me" on TV
I saw this show on Broadway and loved it a lot. This is a really lovely rendition of this song.
Open"My Brother My Brother and Me" Celebrity Voicemail Impressions
One of my favorite podcasts. Funny as heck.
OpenCollecting every item in Untitled Goose Game
Oh yes, I had Untitled Goose Game fever the same weekend as everyone else.
OpenZoobilee Zoo
It's as close as a dream, and as bright as the brightest blue: Welcome to Zoobilee Zoo
OpenAlphaquest
Doorways up and down the halls, wonder what's behind them all! Doors that lead to anywhere, got to A-B-C what's there, Got to A-B-C-Decide, where's the door I haven't tried? A-B-C-D-East to west, going on an Alphaquest!
OpenOpening theme of the show "Cells at Work"
I watched this show on Netflix recently and really enjoyed it. The theme song is pretty catchy and fun.
OpenThat song about Corona Virus from Vietnam
You may have seen this on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight - he is right, I can confirm that the song does slap.
OpenA Talking Cat? By Louie Zong and the podcast "My Brother, My Brother, and Me"
A short funny story about a talking cat who wants to go to college.
OpenLadies of the cast of Hamilton singing "I'm not throwing away my shot"
If you like Hamilton this is pretty fun.
OpenHow to structure a hierarchy
In high school I had a social studies teacher who wasn't really respected by the other students due to his old-fashioned and gruff mannerisms and onerous homework assignments, like outlining chapters in the text book and visiting the grocery store to contribute to his personal longitudinal study on prices. But the opportunity to learn how to outline and organize information explicitly and rigorously has been priceless to me in my adult life and I will always be grateful to Mr. Packard for his single-minded dedication to this thankless but critically important undertaking. In this post I will describe how to properly structure a hierarchy based on those original lessons as well as what I have learned and practiced in the years since.
Continue reading →Guidelines for a good a user experience
These are some of the things I look for when designing and when evaluating a design.
Continue reading →How I structured my CMS
Webflow provides a flexible CMS database to which you can add any number of tables and connections between tables. Here is how I have employed user-centric design and database design best practices to tailor this database for my use.
Continue reading →Verisimilitude in the UX research and design process
The purpose of creating any kind of digital experience is to provide an interface for collecting some information so it can be processed and returned. The job of the UX professional is to ensure that this experience is at least able to be used, and at best, a pleasant experience that the user will return to. Like many other design professions, we create models to simulate this input and output of information to evaluate whether or not our design will meet those goals. However many common UX design tools don't allow for a realistic modeling of the experience being designed because they provide limited options for how we can simulate information going in and out. Therefore the information we gather from testing these models should be evaluated in terms of how realistic the simulation is and what information is lost from testing an inaccurate simulation.
Continue reading →How I critique
A critique is a detailed analysis or assessment of something. In UX critique is valuable because we want our work to resonate with as many other people as possible, and our teammates are often our first chance to assess that. When you make a critique, your teammate is asking for your help, and it's your job to help them. It's easy to say things that aren't helpful without that being your intention. In this post I describe my formula for delivering a critique.
Continue reading →Asking the right questions
Any project is just a series of questions that eventually get answers. In my work I have some questions that I am responsible for asking, some of which I get the answers from other people, and some of which I come up with the answers myself and then validate, depending on the project and who I'm working with. Here I have tried to list out some of those questions.
Continue reading →