Capless Decimo
In the city of Ube in Japan there is a four story stationery store dedicated entirely to pens, paper, and all of the appropriate accoutrements. The act of writing is an art form there and they produce tools equal to the task.
I fell in love with these quality crafted artifacts while there and miss the plethora of readily available writing instruments since I left.
My coworker and I were discussing our love of good pens when we found jetpens.com. Browsing the scores of pens made new in my memory the feeling of writing with one of these pens. For a moment, I was back in Ube.
For the affluent reader, please note the item I have just added to my wishlist.
My good friend Mark Talbott has claimed a couple more covers with his photographic chops. Well done Mark!
Tango-style icon
As part of the library website redesign, I have employed icons from the Tango Desktop Project. They are a wonderful, versatile set of open-source icons that match well with the color scheme of the new site.
As part of the project, the authors included a style guide for creating icons to match the set. It is a well written and illustrated guide that gives clear instruction on how to create an icon that will mesh well with the set. Yesterday, I had a chance to use the style guide in the creation of an icon of my own. It was very helpful and I am happy with the results.
My interest in style guides has been piqued lately by the work of Kimberly Blessing. I see style guides as a way to preserve the good work that designers do and provide a framework for duplicating that quality ad infinitum. This test case with the Tango style guide and my icon are a good personal proof of concept. I am creating standards for the aforementioned site redesign so as the site moves forward, the invest I made in the initial design can be maintained and improved upon in an environment where each team member understands the bar that we are reaching for.
Silverback - Guerrilla Usability Testing
Right on the heels of the release of Silverback to the public, comes a poignant article from Jakob Nielsen regarding rapid fire usability testing.
To be honest, this is the first Nielsen article that I’ve actually read all the way through. And it’s because of Silverback. Usually, I read the summary at the top of the article, delete and immediately forget. But Silverback may just be the Holy Grail enabling this sort of usability testing.
The tool itself is not impressive. The interface is amazingly sparse. The functionality consists of thee things:
First: It groups usability sessions into projects. Organization is good.
Second: It sets a video of the user inside the video of the screen capture – thus greatly reducing the hardware requirements for usability testing (assuming you already own an iSight equipped MacBook). Also good.
Third: It adds small circles that emanate from the position of user clicks. (These only appear on the video afterwards, not during the session.) Useful for determining when the user actually clicks instead of just mousing over. Good, thank you.
So what would make me pay $50 to buy this app? The attribute that may make this tool successful as a product and as an industry altering meme is that it targets the designer/developer as usability researcher. These are the people that directly control the functionality and design of the site and therefore have the greatest influence over it’s success. As a designer, I want my work to resonate with the people that use it – this tool can help me do that.
That is, if a I can bring myself to get out of the cube and into the people space. Silverback’s failing is that it doesn’t come with a plugin to upgrade my personality from ‘hopeless recluse’ to ‘dynamic extrovert’. The hard work still sits squarely on my shoulders to motivate myself to do better, to be great.
So I’m interested in this little app. I will spin it’s wheels. I will try it out on our redesigned site. But most of all, I’ll work a little harder at reaching out to my users and applying my craft to meet their needs.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. John 12:24
I just returned from the Apple store. My replacement iPhone had a bad battery. They replaced it as quickly as they had before. I am very fortunate and am grateful to a company that has taken such good care of this customer. I hope I am equally concientious of my customers.
Last month I attended the An Event Apart web design conference in Boston. Here are my thoughts I sent in response to their follow-up survey:
I can say for sure that I probably won’t be attending in Boston again. That city rubbed me the wrong way. Half the people I interacted with were rude – these were people I was paying for their service! I was never sure where I was or where I was going. I’ll be attending in SF next year – there’s a city I like! Friendly people, lovely weather, plenty to do and see.
I did enjoy the conference however. I liked the food and snacks provided. I am always hungry so food paves a direct route to my heart. The speakers were knowledgeable and entertaining. I was looking forward to PPK’s presentation until I realized the subject matter was something I had already covered. Andy Budd’s presentation was brilliant. I appreciated Zeldman’s take on the lay of the web design land – higher education is not keeping pace with trends and technologies in web development, professional titles are all over the map, and Santa Maria’s presentation was inspirational. Zeldman’s website critique at the end was very good – clear direction on what was done well and how a site could be improved. Hard to do well. And harder to do well in front of a crowd of 1000+.
I think we need to see more on mobile development.
I would like to see how people establish corporate standards that successfully maintain a brand over time – even when the people change. Obviously, I’m speaking of the Kimberly Blessing type of standards – style guides, design review processes, etc. What doest it take to create and maintain a brand online? Are there specific examples from someone’s past that we can learn from? What rules apply to internal and external design teams? Where did I come from, why am I here and where will I go after this life? If you can answer that last, one I think you’ll have everyone’s attention. But if you can’t, at least answering the previous questions will garner the respect and admiration of this humble Web Hacker. (You can add that to the list of titles.)
Speaking of terrible titles, if someone could present on how to remove the word ‘webmaster’ from the human vocabulary forever, I would be eternally grateful.
The accommodations were lovely. I love Marriott Rewards points.
I like that the slides were available online after the event. Unfortunately, some slides varied between the book, the actual presentation and online. That made it hard to review sometimes.
So I recommend An Event Apart to all my web design friends and neighbors. Huzzah and thank you!
Happily, I can now post via iphone. I just found a bug, however. Sometimes the GUI buttons don’t show up. Luckily I can tap where the button should be and get the desired effect. Still, I’m happy to have the functionality and look forward to future updates.
