Author Archives: Elizabeth
8 August 2009
Serendipitous juxtapositions of tweets
Every once in a while, two unrelated tweets appear next to each other in my Twitter stream and lead me to chortle or even guffaw at the accidental meaning that their juxtaposition creates. Here are some examples. (Note: The second tweet appears above the first.)
FaceFeatures
Now who would say that to a friend?
The objective
Never realized Alice [...]
31 July 2009
User Experience Tweeps
Note: This list has become too big for the blog, so I’ve moved it to the main site, under Resources. You’ll find it here: http://www.luminanze.com/resources/uxtweeps.html
posted by at 01:07 Tagged interaction designers, practitioners, Twitter, usability, user experience, ux, ux tweeps 5 Comments
14 July 2009
Lorem Ipsum, Anguish Languish — or realistic text?
“Hoe-cake, murder,” resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft.
Today I tweeted* the above quote from my favorite playful work on the English language: “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” , from Anguish Languish, the 1950s work by Howard L. Chace. That tweet generated brief Twitter conversations regarding the use of dummy text [...]
posted by at 06:07 Tagged Anguish Languish, dummy text, interaction design, interface design, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, Lorem Ipsum, wireframes 1 Comment
29 June 2009
My funniest moment in usability testing
As a consultant in interaction design and usability assessment, I conduct a fair amount of usability testing . The kind of testing I do generally involves preparing test scenarios in advance, because my clients and I want to make sure we test the aspects of greatest interest and concern, and that we test them the [...]
27 June 2009
The Unbearable Rightness of Catastrophizing
Most people think of catastrophizing as a way of thinking that healthy people avoid. The online dictionaries agree. Wiktionary, for example, defines the act as “to regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic”; Go-Dictionary has it as “to envisage a situation as being worse than it is”. Clearly they’re seeing it [...]
posted by at 01:06 Tagged expert review, usability assessment, usability evaluation, usability review, UX design 1 Comment
12 June 2009
Sharing your photos without losing control of them
I received my first camera for Christmas at age 12, got serious about photography at 24, and went digital in 2002. I’ve had a stock photography web site for over ten years, but it has turned out to be more a labor of love than of profit making. And with all the photo sharing going [...]
posted by at 07:06 Tagged copyright, Creative Commons, Flickr, photo sharing, photography Leave a comment
15 May 2009
In praise of online communities
How many online communities do you participate in? I have trouble counting mine, separating the technology or service (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email servers) from the communities that come together via those services. But no matter how I look at it, I count mine about a dozen. Some are personal, some are professional, and some (mainly [...]
posted by at 05:05 Tagged online communities, prostate cancer, social media, support groups Leave a comment
7 May 2009
Help eBay buyers find your other auctions
Do you sell on eBay? Do you ever put up two or more related items at the same time? If so, consider linking your items to each other. This will make it easier for buyers to find all of your items — much easier for them than clicking “View seller’s other items” when they have [...]
23 April 2009
Don’t ask why
Or,
Everything I know about guiding conversations I learned from psychotherapy
Conversations play a critical role throughout user-centered design, from requirements elicitation to usability test debriefing to issue resolution. And when our objective is to be objective — to avoid biasing the information we collect and the responses we receive — it behooves us to pay close [...]
15 September 2009
Submission to IxD10: (Re)Designing Researcher-Practitioner Interaction