sans comic sans » The horror. The horror.

Printing from Outlook: odd or even?

Matt — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:24:38 +0000

Imagine the scenario…

BOSS: Worker, I sent you a very important email. We need to discuss part – but not all – of this email in our 12 pm meeting.
WORKER: Understood. I will print every other page of the email and bring it to our meeting.

…which led to this feature:

I like this dialog box a lot. By focusing on the scenario of use, Outlook’s design team was able to eliminate unnecessary controls like “Print range.”

Because, after all, no one wants to print only a single page of a 10 mile long email chain.

Three reasons why the iTunes updrage process is an awful user experience

Matt — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:44:22 +0000

It requires a system restart.

Really? I have to stop what I’m doing for iTunes? Adobe-esque.
It makes me create a new Quick Launch icon.

This is incredibly dumb software, in the About Face sense of the word.
It clutters my desktop without asking.

Is this 1999? Are we still putting shit on users’ desktops without asking?

Maybe Hulu should have been more selective with their private beta invites

Matt — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:27:10 +0000

I’m no marketing expert. But if the goal is to build positive buzz for a product many feel is doomed to fail, perhaps you should only invite people who, oh, I don’t know, are able to use your product.

Episode 9 of House, available nowhere.

I can has an contexual inquiry? ^_^

Robert — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:08:15 +0000

Everything you ever wanted to know about contextual inquiry packaged into meme ready sound bites.

Bad:

Planning a contextual inquiry means to make sure that you can interview with the right users and that they are not entirely negative being interviewed with. In traditional interviews it is sometimes difficult to get interviewees to interview with, because they claim that they do not have got the time.

Badder:

When at the interview with the interviewee it is very important to have a focus, a focus can be seen as a number of assumptions and beliefs concerning what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it (short example: “We’re building a system to handle customer inquiries. It is a straight-forward process. Should manage 100 customer inquiries a day”).

How about: When writing overviews of contextual inquiry, it’s important to make sure your sentences have focus.

Open letter to the espn.com editors

Matt — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:14:25 +0000

Link swiped from 37signals:

To the editors of ESPN.com, I simply request that you (a) kill the pop-up ads, (b) tear the home page apart, (c) take a look at what the NYT has been up to in terms of integrating textual and multimedia content, and (d) don’t try to cram every conceivable product onto the homepage.

–March (information) madness, Doug LeMoine

Clearly, the marketers are running the show over there. I haven’t looked at any ESPN page in many months now, probably since baseball season last year. When I left it, I felt like there was a perfect storm of bad user experiences brewing: 1) quality of the content sucked; 2) there was a rapidly diminishing set of free articles to read (also, see 1); and 3) the site itself was annoying and sluggish to navigate.