Categories
management mobile Usability

Creating the Productive Tension

When I joined the mobile team at Automattic, we had one designer – Matt Miklic, who wrote about the explerience of leading that team. However one thing I was reminded of following some of the current discussions around product development is how we thought about and approached design at the centre of the team, and […]

Categories
art mobile Usability

What Does a Good Media Experience Look Like?

One of the things I wanted to do more of this year is explore photography. Sometimes I worry that creating a photo editing app and writing a book chapter about creating image filters sucked some of the joy from photography for me. I wanted to do more with my pictures for their own sake, rather than […]

Categories
mobile Presentation Usability

Speaker Notes: How To Be Invisible

Speaker notes from a talk I gave earlier this year at Try!Swift, and 360iDev. There was an article I read last September that profoundly affected my thinking. It was by Sarah Tavel, and is called “Times have changed — going after dollars vs minutes”. She breaks products down into minutes – which I think of as attention […]

Categories
art Usability

Lasers and Practical Skills

I first “met” Dan a year ago, right after GHC last year. He reached out to me because of the stuff I’d been writing about men and male allies. We became twitter friends, and so I got to read a preview of his book – which is great, because I’d realized that Dan was someone I […]

Categories
art Usability

Oredev: Deconstructing Her

My notes from Chris Noessel‘s talk “Deconstructing Her” at Oredev. Movie is about a lovelorn fellow going through painful divorce at the same time he decides to upgrade his computer. Begins a relationship with the AI. Begins professionally, gets romantic. Try to consummate through a surrogate (awkward!) Eventually self-rapture to a new plane of existence. It’s […]

Categories
mobile Usability

#iOSDevUK: Maxim Cramer – Users Don’t Bite

First thing learned when starting to make apps. Was making an app about beauty products. Went looking for people who would purchase beauty products (Oxford Street!) started in Starbucks. Asked for 5 minutes. People were really nice, if it wasn’t for them wouldn’t have discovered how hard it was for people to get to the […]

Categories
mobile Presentation Usability

#iOSDevUK: Hacking Health

My notes from the talk Emily gave at iOSDevUK. What are health apps? Step counters Fitness trackers Diabetes apps Heart rate monitors Bluetooth enabled medical devices Apple and Google have decided this is where the future is. Gone in. Apple, Healthkit. Google, GFit. Standardized APIs getting information with defined types, centralised storage. Enables gathering data […]

Categories
email mobile Usability

There’s An App For That is Not A Mobile Strategy

People throw the word “mobile” around a lot, and my observation is – they all mean different things, but think they are talking about the same thing. When I talk about mobile, I want to talk about how everything changes when everyone has a device this powerful on them, all the time. “An app for […]

Categories
mobile Usability

Your Users On Mobile

I think I first rode the tube in London about 10 years ago. Now I ride the tube a bunch, and sometimes I see people doing something I find really weird. Reading a physical book. Sometimes – especially odd – a large, hardback book. Who carries such a thing around with them, when you can […]

Categories
Programming Usability

My Theory of User Happiness and the Enterprise Application

Enterprise applications are (usually) the applications that people have to use, whereas consumer applications are (usually) those that they choose to use, and so I would argue they are where you can have the biggest effect on user-happiness. Gains in user happiness on consumer applications are mostly incremental – the standard is pretty high, it has to […]