A set of icons based on the visual language of Helvetica Bold. Roll over the area in the top right (the big “245″) to see the icon set preview. A very pleasant respite from the glossy, high-fidelity style of Apple-inspired icons.
Jul 9 2009
A Collection of Design Tools →
This pleasantly illustrated website, courtesy of Roberta Tassi’s thesis, catalogs a wide array of design ‘tools’ used in a design process. A tool in this case can be a ‘Use Case’, a ‘Customer Journey Map’ or ‘Group Sketching’. The nice thing about the organization, once you grok it, is that you can answer a question like: what design tools can I use to examine the interaction? Or, what can I do in the testing phase?
My favorite parts are the infographics found on the about page. For example, this one maps the tools in the context of a design process as well as the people’s capabilities required to use the tool. While this one displays the tools in the context of the disciplines that gave rise to them.
Jul 8 2009
Reid Hoffman on Launching
If you’re not embarrassed – in the consumer internet – by the first version of the product you launched, you’ve launched too late.
Jun 11 2009
The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection →
With the maturity of tools and availability of friendly sys admins, it’s easy to take for granted the many base technologies that power our applications. Adding HTTPS support to a site is very much a plug and play affair, which is why it’s refreshing to see Jeff Moser peel back a couple of layers to reveal what really happens in those first milliseconds between the browser and the server.
Jun 10 2009
On Everyday Apps
In his latest post, Joshua Porter riffs on the concept of ‘every-day apps’, something I’ve talked about in the past (although I used ‘destination sites’ to describe such properties). In my post, I made some base assumptions suggesting that our capacity to visit sites on a regular basis is finite. It was nice to see Joshua cite a study reaffirming my guess, demonstrating that most people regularly visit only about 10 sites.
I found this description of product design particularly poignant, mostly because I’ve made this same mistake:
In general, most people think they’re building an everyday app, but they’re not. When the actual use patterns are discovered, most apps will be used every few days or less.
The rest of the article is spent postulating on how LinkedIn could bridge their ambitions to be an everyday site. For me, the more interesting problem is acknowledging that you’re not an everday app while still positioning the product to succeed.
May 13 2009