Look it up.
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 [...]
I can’t be self-promotional all alone here, people. I need your help! Vote for meeeee! My proposal is up for voting right now on the South By Southwest Interactive Panel Picker. It’s a geek frenzy over there. Vote early and often. VOTE HERE (login required) Panel Proposal: Video Game Research: Failing Our Way to Victory [...]
This is causing great joy among our phone support people at work. New technology can be so troublesome!
A lovely fellow from The Austin Chronicle wrote to my fellow South by Southwest panelists asking for a definition of our enigmatically titled presentation. He wanted to know what a “Funologist” was, and rather than sadden him with the news that our moderator made it up, we all took a shot at defining it for [...]
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 [...]
If you are feeling early-adopter-y, you can hop over to mozilla.org and download the new Firefox 3 Beta build. It’s faster, slicker, and has OMG HOT new UI tools that should make your day better. Five Things I love about Firefox 3: Because this is a beta version, most of my extensions and themes don’t [...]
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. [...]
Photo by パックマン 10:40pm and I’m still at work. Science Magazine is publishing a blurb about our library of animal sounds on Thursday. We got an award for second-best “educational interactive”. Yay. Unfortunately, this means that a huge group of people are going to visit our site. And our site was, up to a few [...]