Reply All is my favorite podcast. It bills itself as “a show about the internet.” The latest episode is about diversity in Silicon Valley, approached through the lens of a black engineer who recently quit his job at Twitter. It is fascinating and absolutely worth a listen. One of my favorite parts is an example […]
A couple weeks ago, Bates College was on The Simpsons. I found out on a Sunday evening via Facebook, where a friend mentioned he had just seen the show poking fun at Bates. Next, I checked Yik Yak, where some of our students were talking about seeing it as well. Because Simpsons episodes and clips […]
I was very sorry to learn that legendary font designer Adrian Frutiger passed away on September 10. After a somewhat painstaking process of research and testing, last month we finally switched to his “Neue Frutiger” as our sans serif font on bates.edu. The response has been very positive, and I love seeing it there every […]
I have been thinking about this phrase today. It comes to me from a lesson imparted to campers at the summer camp I attended as a boy and worked at into my twenties. Here’s how it is presented there: Be kind. Do at least one act of unbargaining service each day. I have always really […]
A few weeks ago — following four days of training in Washington, DC, on the heels of a fifth in New York the year prior — I completed a set of online tests and received my UX Certification from the Nielsen Norman Group. I’ve been exploring and learning about the field of User Experience for […]
We’ve all seen it by now: the ubiquitous three-lined icon known as “the hamburger” (or, to a jocular few, “Mr. Liney“). Increasingly, we are all coming to know what it means, too: click for menu. Usability studies continue to show that the hamburger image has still not crossed the familiarity tipping point, however. So gurus […]
At LaGuardia about to fly home from a day-long session on university websites from the Neilsen Norman Group in NYC. I have to say, there is no happier line in any airport anywhere than the one of folks getting ready to head to Portland, Maine. The conference was excellent. There is just no substitute for […]
The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov […]
What makes a particular design successful can be hard to define. Elegance and intuition can take a variety of forms, and all kinds of different interfaces can get the job done well. Plus, what works for one person may be totally inaccessible to another, which is why the process of iterative design and testing is […]
Our last crowdsourced endeavor was a real success — with dozens of people contributing over 80 examples of points of interaction between citizens and government — so why not push our luck and try another? With the election behind us, it’s time to focus on how government functions, and how that functioning can be improved […]