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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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….