9 of 10 Sites Agree Requiring Log-in is Whack
I’ve been thinking about log-in a lot lately. Yesterday it occurred to me to see what sites across the web were doing about it. Do they require log-in? Sure, almost all of these have user accounts, but can you use the core functionality of the site without one? The results were overwhelming, 87 of the...
How People *Think* Facebook Connect Log‑in and Log‑out Work
As part of my work on the Identity project at Mozilla, I’ve been taking a look into how the average person thinks about single sign-on. It’s a complex system, so not surprisingly, it’s most often misunderstood at a fundamental level. I ran an unmoderated user test with usertesting.com with five users. Their task was...
13 Signs Your Site Needs a UX Exorcism
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...
Simple: Getting users to pick strong, memorable passwords
Simple (a.k.a. Bank Simple) is doing a hell of a job with their password strength indicator. Here’s a sneak peak into their interface. Thanks to Ryan Snyder for getting me a super early invite.
Chief eXperience Officer at Mozilla in 2012
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...
Spaces shape creativity: Ziba project rooms
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...
My Android tablet is Kenneth Parcell
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...
UX of a Protest: Occupy Portland
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...
Ethnio + Usertesting.com for real-time unmoderated usability testing goodness
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...
Web typography: hyphenation & justification
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:...
UX Best Practices: login persistence
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...
Being “right” is not enough
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...
