Internet O'Clock

Mushroom + Mossy rock

, originally uploaded by alexbain.

scarlet cup mushroom

scarlet cup mushroom, originally uploaded by alexbain.

Strap Coral mushroom

Strap Coral mushroom, originally uploaded by alexbain.

Copycat Design - 52 Weeks of UX

[...] copying design is a horrible idea. Here’s why:

• You don’t know why a design element is the way it is. Every design element is in the throes of its own evolution. What state an element is in right now is as much an artifact of how it got there as anything…politics, culture, how good the coffee was that morning…all these things effect how a design element turns out. When you copy a design element you’re missing all of these things…you’re simply copying its current state. Without knowing the history of an element, you can’t know if it’s actually doing the job it’s supposed to do.
• You’re always behind. Playing catchup by copying other people’s designs means that you’re never innovating. You’re never pushing the boundaries for your customers. They probably won’t notice…and that’s a bad thing. Instead, you want them to notice that you’re improving things all the time based on their feedback.
• You’re outsourcing your most important decisions. When design teams are on top of their decisions they produce much better work. They’re actively listening to customers and thinking two or three steps ahead. When you outsource your design decisions, you’re stifling this.
• You’re putting up another barrier between you and your customers. By not responding directly to the needs of your customers you are erecting yet another barrier between you and them.
• You’re rewarding the wrong behavior. Not only is copying design bad for business, but it’s also detrimental to the psychology of your design team. When the accepted behavior is to copy from others, then you devalue the decisions of your own designers. You might not see negative effects right away, but you will a month or two down the line.
• You’re devaluing your own data. This is probably the biggest problem with copycat design. By outsourcing your design to others, you’re devaluing the insights you can gain from your own data. This means that you’ll investigate less, test less, do less user testing, talk less to your own customers. Pretty soon your culture becomes a full-blown copycat culture, with no innovation in sight.

via 52weeksofux.com

This article contains a really great summary of why blindly copying another site's design / feature is unlikely to do much besides devalue your product, dampen team motivation, and distance yourself from your customers.

Remember: It doesn't necessarily matter that competitor X has feature Y. What does matters is that the actions you're taking today maximize the utility your customers gain from using your product.

Yosemite Vista

Yosemite Vista, originally uploaded by alexbain.

Blue-bead lily (Clintonia borealis)

Blue-bead lily (Clintonia borealis), originally uploaded by alexbain.

Red Tail Hawk atop San Bruno Mountain

Red Tail Hawk atop San Bruno Mountain, originally uploaded by alexbain.

JSPerf.com - [this is good]

JSPerf.com is a site designed to aid in benchmarking JavaScript snippets to help determine which solution is the most efficient. The results can kind of eye opening. As an example, I picked a random test that was written to test the speed of various frameworks' selection engines. Results are below:

Note that IE7 errored out on two of the tests, making this a little less useful.

Note the numbers of operations a second - each lookup is genuinely expensive in IE7.

IE8 performs much better here (note the ~56x improvement for frameworks).

In addition, look at the speed of querySelectorAll (not supported in IE7). So Fast!

Firefox, as expected, performed admirably.

It is interesting to note, however, that the native solutions were faster.

Safari really blew Firefox out of the water.

3x improvement for frameworks, 11x improvement for native.

Chrome placed between Firefox and Safari.

 

Morale of the story: JavaScript performance cannot be trivilialized for older browsers.

Waves to Wine Training Ride: 57.4mi, 5300ft elevation

 

This is one of my absolute favorite rides to do in the South Bay.

Stats:

• Saddle time: 5:07:12
• Average: 11.1mph
• Max: 40.3mph

Moar Farmer's Market Photos

Reward the Passionates - 52 Weeks of UX

What’s the best way to bring in new customers? That question is posed by almost everyone at one point or another, no matter what product or service they’re offering. The common way to attack this problem is to go out and advertise…to redirect attention to your offering and convince people that yours is better than what else is out there.

But in an age of empowered consumers with tools to share their opinion at every turn, the best way to bring in new customers might not be to advertise, but to reward your current customers instead. 

via 52weeksofux.com

A short article describing why incentives offered to your existing users for referring a friend can be a great way to build a happy customer base.

70 Billion Pixels Budapest - The largest photo on Earth - created by 360world.eu

via 70gigapixel.cloudapp.net

A 70 gigapixel image of Budapest. Wow.

Rethinking form validation

via www.jankoatwarpspeed.com

Janko at Warp Speed discusses the idea of letting users submit web forms while missing 'required' fields and letting them know they will need to enter them later to finish processing the request.

While this idea won't work for all web forms.. for some, it makes quite a lot of sense. He uses the example of a leasing application where the form a data entry person is using doesn't have all the required fields on it but should still be saved in a 'draft' state until it does.

Neat idea.

Waves to Wine Training Ride Summary: 72mi

 

Here is the summary from the cycling training ride my girlfriend and I did on Sunday, July 18th 2010.

On September 25 - 26, 2010, I'm joining more than a thousand cyclists for the Bike MS: Waves to Wine Ride. This two-day bike ride isn't a race, but it does raise money in the race to find the cure for multiple sclerosis.

Last year, cyclists raised over $1.5 Million to help the 20,000 Northern Californians living with MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Researchers are making progress, but the cause and cure are still over the horizon. And that's why I saddle up to ride.

With this journey, I'm helping the National Multiple Sclerosis Society fund research to find the cause, cure and treatment of MS. My participation also helps support services for people affected by MS. My fundraising supports the ride's 2009 goal of $1.75 million.

Please help people living with MS in our community by making a one-time, tax-deductible donation. Click on the link at the bottom of this message to visit my personal page to make a donation. Any amount you feel comfortable giving is deeply appreciated.

With your support, we can make a positive impact today in the lives of 20,000 men, women and children with multiple sclerosis.

Thank you!

I'm an awesome person and would love to donate to your ride, Alex!

Apple Retina Display - Analysis from a retinal neuroscientist

By now it seems that most people on the planet have heard of Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 4 which was released today.  One of the many compelling features of the new phone is the Retina Display.  When Steve Jobs first invoked this term at the WWDC, my eyebrows were raised.  Being a retinal scientist, I was immediately skeptical of just what he meant by “retinal display”.  My mind immediately raced and I wondered if it might have been some of the interesting technology I got to see on my last visit to one of Apple’s technology development labs.  I will not say anything about that visit, but this Retina Display, a super high resolution display was new technology that I had not seen before.  Essentially it is an LED backlit LCD display with a *326* pixel per inch (960×640) display (John Gruber of Daring Fireball called this resolution display back in March) where each pixel measures a scant 78μm.    Though as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, these pixels are not square.  Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78μm, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102μm.  I am including images below of the iPhone 1G, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4G and the iPad to show some perspective on pixel sizes.  The scale bar and my measurements are approximate as I was having a tough time in the lab tonight finding an appropriate calibration.  Nevertheless, this should serve as a useful metric for examining the relative pixel sizes and for making the point of whether Apple’s Retina Display is marketing speak and hyperbole or if in fact, Apple’s claims have merit.

via prometheus.med.utah.edu

This article is a short but sweet analysis of the iPhone / iPad displays and whether the iPhone 4 holds up to the bold claim that it's screen surpasses the resolution of the human retina.

The short answer is that yes, it does, which is a marvelous accomplishment. Read the article if you want the longer answer, it's a great read.

Candlelight Vigil

Candlelight Vigil, originally uploaded by alexbain.

Taken at a "No on 8" rally in 2008.

Water in Plant

Water in Plant
Originally uploaded by alexbain

This is a photo. From Flickr.

Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design

Three Levels of Happiness in UX Design

...

Mindfulness in design is about a pleasing awareness. In relationships, it can mean infatuation. It's knowing that this is good, that this makes me happy. It's satisfying. You feel it in your body. As Norman suggests, it's visceral. You trust that things are moving the direction you want them to go. As the user of the design, there's the feeling you're being paid attention to, that the designer is anticipating your needs and being considerate of your wants. As the designer, you demonstrate that you have the user in mind and you understand her goals.

Flow is from work done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his book, Flow, Csikszentmihalyi describes a state that people enter when they are fully focused in which they experience immersion in a task or activity to the point where they lost track of time. There's no time between tool time and goal time. Brown talks about transformation; I think that applies here, too. Sagmeister uses words like contentment and joy. As the user, you sense no friction between you and the design on the way to reaching your goal. You may even spend more time than you planned because you're having fun, or being productive, or both. As the designer, you incorporate psychological cues, language, social cues, and reinforcement to subtly motivate users to keep working or playing longer than they might without those design cues.

Meaning comes from a feeling of fellowship, contributing, and making the world a better place. It's about harmony and, as Norman says, reflectiveness—because good things happen to you, you want to do good for others. As a user, you reach your goal quickly, easily, and happily, but you realize you're involved in something bigger than yourself, that your involvement is making a positive difference in others' lives. As a designer, help users know where they fit in and what their effect is by thinking through exactly what you want the emotional and behavioral effects to be of using your design. You demonstrate intention (in the yogic sense) through clarity, simplicity, funneling, modeling outcomes.

via uxmag.com

The concept of emotional design seems relatively new but holds great potential.

By focusing on what makes people happy (see above) and incorporating those concepts into your designs and interactions you stand a much better chance of creating usable products that customers enjoy using.

Cognitive Science + Design!

Commander's Intent - 52 Weeks of UX

Commander’s Intent is a simple goal made at the beginning of an engagement that holds throughout, no matter if the situation changes.

[...]

You arrive at a Commander’s Intent by asking a simple question: “If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must…”.

[...]

It turns out that asking this question of each screen we design is extremely valuable. “If this screen does nothing else, it must…”. This can help designers focus completely on the most important action the screen is designed to support, even as design conditions change as the result of user testing and feedback.

[...]

• If you don’t know what the one purpose of the screen is, then get rid of the screen. 
• If you think a screen has two primary purposes, you can probably break it into two screens. 
• If something on the screen doesn’t support the one purpose, get rid of it. 
• If the one purpose does not add to a positive user experience, then get rid of the screen. 

In most cases bad screen design is caused by a lack of prioritization on the part of the design team. Commander’s Intent came out of a completely different world, but can nonetheless help designers ruthlessly prioritize the decisions they have to make. 

via 52weeksofux.com

This article describes an interesting interpretation of the military term "Comamnder's Intent" as it applies to user interaction and web usability. I've shortened it a bit, so check out the full article if the concept seems interesting.