Over at From Chaos, Brian Hochhalter wrote a very thoughtful review of the interview I did with Dan Brown: Growing documents Brown begins by suggesting that designers start documents with a basic nucleus of necessary information then adding detail in layers. He also put forward the idea that ideal documentation should be able to give [...]

Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

Back in 2006, I wrote an article called The Elements of a Design Pattern which has proven to be very popular. The interesting thing about popular articles is they regularly get good comments, long after they were written. Fast forward three years and today we get a comment from Tessie asking: I am currently designing [...]

Over at Semantic Foundry, designer extraordinaire, Will Evans, has a wonderful essay explaining how he uses wireframing as both a problem setting and a problem solving approach. I pick my primary audience and the one activity which allows them to solve one goal quickly, effortlessly, elegantly. In this case, the primary audience wants to easily [...]

We’ve been working with a ton of teams in transition to an Agile development process lately and we’ve been trying to understand why many of them are frustrated by the change. They’re struggling with how to adapt their existing user experience practices into this new method of development and I think we know why. In [...]

When shooting the movie, the director doesn’t necessary film the scenes in the order they’ll appear once edited. Instead, the filmmakers shoot the pieces according to other constraints, such as the availability of actors or locations, or accommodating variability in the weather. It’s not unusual for the movie’s final climax to be among the first [...]