13 Signs Your UX Needs an Exorcism View more presentations from Crystal Beasley. Making simple, elegant solutions is HARD and often invisible. These are some of the most common things I hear when heading for a bad UX decision. And before any veteran designers go ripping me a new one, these are rules of thumb...
Yes, this is a post about Mozilla, but you can generalize to any open-source software project. At every conference I hear the same refrain, “Why is design so hard in open source?” It’s so hard because *drumroll please* it’s not made a priority. None of the top decision-makers are designers. Period. The End. You...
I visited Ziba on a sunny, crisp fall day. (Yes, we do have them at least once a decade here in Portland.) One of their talented creative directors, Kai Halsinger, was generous enough to show me around the studio and talk about what makes it all work. Specifically on my mind was how their physical...
You know Kenneth. From 30 Rock. The one who’s well-meaning, goofy, clumsy, sweet and… charming? Or something not quite like that. His earnestness makes you want it all to work out for him, but you know it won’t. My Android tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, is Kenneth. Its helpfulness is enraging. There’s a bright little...
There aren’t many things more viscerally experienced than a protest. It’s got all the right components: big crowds, a common purpose you’re passionate about, defiance of authority and the accompanying tinge of danger. For me, that danger was foremost in my mind. A funny but serious post went up on the weekly rag, The Portland...
I was intrigued to use Ethnio to grab live recruits in real time. Usertesting.com has been proved itself to be a fast, cheap way to get videos of people using your site. Put them together? Magic! Like a well-executed magic trick, this combo requires finesse to make it appear effortless. My goal was to grab...
Post in collaboration with Bram Pitoyo, Digital Design Strategist & Typographer at Wieden+Kennedy. Firefox joined Safari in supporting hyphenation. Despite CSS coming out 14 years ago in 1996, we’re just now getting some of the fine-grained controls necessary for beautiful typography. Details of the proposed spec at Mozilla Developer Network. -webkit-hyphens: auto; -moz-hyphens: auto; hyphens:...
Login persistence has to be one of my top three UX annoyances. I see it everywhere, on tons of sites, big and small. Login friction is a huge problem and yet so many get it wrong. I have a couple of theories about why this is. Login persistence seems like a minor issue and it’s...
Do your team meetings to discuss what/how/when to build XYZ new hot thing feel a little too much like a session of the United Nations Security Council? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had those headsets that translated designspeak to devspeak and vice versa? I’ll be speaking at WordCampSF this Saturday, Aug 13th about communication...
The dress shoppe down the way has a dirty little trick to make you come out of the fitting room… the mirrors are all on the outside. If the garment fits at all, you’re forced to come out of your safe little room into the hall to see yourself. As soon as I stepped out...
Even though I’d been using Firefox for a half a dozen years and have been working in tech for a decade, there was a lot I didn’t know about Mozilla until recently. Judging from the questions I’ve been fielding since I accepted the position, you don’t know either. Mozilla is a non-profit. Unlike Google and...
Since we got some noms.in press lately with kinds words about the design, Ryan Snyder asked me to write up a few words about some of my design decisions. My first reaction is, there’s nothing to the design. I didn’t do much. I just kept it clean and let the images speak for themselves. But,...
Simple: Getting users to pick strong, memorable passwords
Jan 14, 2012
Chief eXperience Officer at Mozilla in 2012
Jan 3, 2012
Spaces shape creativity: Ziba project rooms
Nov 8, 2011
My Android tablet is Kenneth Parcell
Nov 4, 2011
UX of a Protest: Occupy Portland
Oct 6, 2011
Ethnio + Usertesting.com for real-time unmoderated usability testing goodness
Aug 31, 2011
Web typography: hyphenation & justification
Aug 17, 2011