Catty Catalogers
Let’s talk for a moment about why I misfiled my tax extension. Melty Jello brain aside, bad software design almost cost my little family $2,500. Background: When I’m not wrestling a one-year-old into tiny shoes, I’m a User Experience Designer. This means I work with software companies to create easy-to-understand interfaces. It also means that [...]
Yesterday I tweeted: The Kaiser Permanente site is pretty, but someone organized it using their butt. I had just spent an hour on their member website trying to set my daughter’s primary care doctor. The links I followed did not lead to useful content. I was frustrated. I wrote: I officially volunteer to redesign the [...]
Greetings from an ethnic librarian working in the games industry! I’m posting this review of my experience last year at GDC (the Game Developers Conference) held every year here in San Francisco. It was originally part of a letter to my team here at Linden Lab, but I thought you librarians might be interested/amused, considering [...]
Happy news! I was invited to be a panelist at the South by Southwest Interactive conference next month, as part of their ScreenBurn track. I’m on a panel called “Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research.” I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those [...]
I’m using a Firefox plugin called Scribefire to post this. Apparently I’m too lazy to fire up WordPress and write something for you guys, but if the text box is sitting at the bottom of my browser screen, I’m happy to start writing. Usability. Go figure. I spend every day trying to figure out little [...]
Want $40? Got 90 minutes or so? Want to get paid to check out a 3-D virtual world? My employer and I are looking for local San Francisco people with NO experience using Second Life to help us evaluate some possible changes, tweaks, and/or new features to our software and support portal. Interested? At a [...]
Got me a portfolio. It’s just screenshots right now. I’ll continue working on it tonight. Suggestions welcome. I haven’t even checked it out on non-OS X/Firefox machines yet…
Guess who drank too much last night? Everyone! It’s hangover day here at South by Southwest. The panels are slow and attendance is low. This morning I went to a panel debating the merits of ignoring users. It matched my mood nicely. User profiles are taking a beating this year. Guess who was the only [...]
I tried out Cornell Library’s book-delivery service this week. A nice stack of David Foster Wallace books quickly appeared at my workplace yesterday afternoon, and I got a friendly call when they arrived. If you are a Cornell student or staff, you can have library books delivered to any library-location of your choice for free. [...]
Eat my educational interactives baby! The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology project I designed won second place in Science magazine’s 2006 Visualization Challenge. Plus, we were on the front page of Der Spiegel last week, so Germans love us! What does this mean for you? It means you can now go online and visit the [...]