Golden Krishna is a Visual Designer at Cooper. He has previously been a guest writer for the now archived SpeakUp. Find Golden at his website, goldenkrishna.com, and on at Twitter at @goldenkrishna.
And so they arrived at Cooper this week, a smiling, laughing mass of foam-hats and face-sized sunglasses celebrating the youth culture of Spring Break 1974 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Oh, the days of 10 cent beers and lobster tans.
You didn't expect an innovative design firm in San Francisco to have fun with "Friday jeans," do you?
The correct response to this question from our "Legends of Cooper Jeopardy!" lunch: "What is IBM?"
And like the nerdy kids who studied over Spring Break and had perfect attendance, there were plenty of Cooperistas out there changing the world. Take, Chris Noessel, and his delivery of "500 to 1: A Cooper Case Study" at IA Summit:
Some startups of Rock Health, looking to join the fun, and gain some wisdom from the Seniors dropped by for some advise on all things UI, software, interaction, apps and apps.
We've also been going around to other campuses, in search of some future Spring Breakers. Faith Bolliger and Karen Lemen are recruiting over at IIT in Illinois, and Peter Duyan and Stefan Klocek are recruiting at CMU in Pittsburgh.
Faith and Karen in the bubble.
Stefan considering the cloud.
Before you go, while we dream about what might be next for Amazon's warehouses...
...we thought we'd ask you to join in the fun of our Spring Break fun with a few of the "Legends of Cooper Jeopardy!" questions.
It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”
Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.
Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?
Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:
Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.
Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:
Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.
Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.
Not to be oops-outdone by Google, Microsoft’s XBox website includes the word, “Oops!” twice in an error message, first in the header and then as the first word to explain the header. Obviously, after frustrating someone, the best thing to do is say “Oops!” over and over again.
Sure, I’ll “like” that page.
And if you thought the non-profit Mozilla Foundation avoided this kind of creepy, cutesy error messaging in their Firefox browser, you thought wrong.
The legoman is sorry that you can’t load your favorite TV show.
In times like this, there’s always YouTube, right? Millions of fun videos to help us laugh at times of stress.
The hip company Plaxo — your address book for life — has not only embraced the “oops” but entered another level of creepy. Shhh…this error is just “our little secret.”
You know, not too long ago, whenever something in software was confusing to users, software-makers had a brilliant, can’t fail, simple solution: add a how-to in the help section. Instead of spending hours making strange features straightforward, software companies passed the buck to the user: “Um, we can’t figure out how to make it easy to do, so just read the manual.”
Now it seems like there is another, new kind of awful simple solution for glitches and errors that infuriate people: a cutesy smiley face. After all, no one cares if you ruin their life as long as you do it with a smile, right?
In 1925, a New Yorker cartoon caption is credited with being the first published instance of “Whoopsie Daisy!” But the real root of the “oops” phenomenon in software might be pointed to the Linux operating system.
This is your fault, Penguin. Please stop looking at me like that.
Upon “a bug in the kernel” Linux kicks back an OOPS error message. First developed in 1991, Linux’s code for error messages may have crept into the developer’s subconscious eventually leading to today’s proliferation of “oops.” Here’s an example:
But now that they are a publicly traded, 186 billion dollar company that we rely on for important business communications, which could make or break jobs, their cute error messages are about as cute as a Bill Gates tossing floppy disks. In other words, just plain creepy.
But today’s insulting cutesy error message writers have swung the pendulum too far. A common recommendation to use natural language to turn an incomprehensible “Error: Stack Overflow” has not turned into something polite and understandable, but instead an insulting “Oops! Aw, snap!”
What we need to do is dial it down from 11 on the friendly meter…11 is just too creepy. There is a happy middle ground where developers can apologize and software can provide the user polite guidance about what to do next. Website, app, software, you screwed up; help the user get their desired task completed ASAP.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart, oops is not the four letter word I would have chosen.
Earlier this year, city officials in Boulder, Colorado discovered an unusual form of vandalism. A graffiti artist had altered the entrance sign to The Boulder County Justice Center utilizing a tool in typographic communication that has become a trend in our digital world: the scare quote.
Typing with our thumbs has added to our text-based communication chatspeak, emoticons and a plethora of new abbreviations. But its most interesting contribution to contemporary typography might be bringing the scare quote into the mainstream.
You may not be familiar with the label for the Digital Age’s favorite typographic marks, but odds are you’ve seen them used to add playful emphasis to words and phrases in all corners of your everyday life.
Liquor store signage, Berkeley, CA, October 2010.
Ford Escort, New York City, NY, November 2010 (Tim McCoy)
Amazon.com product review, January 2007. (Amazon.com)
They’ve gotten so popular, professional copywriters and journalists are using them for mainstream audiences. Design-conscious Target is using them for deals that are “Unbelievable!” and just downright “Surprising!”; The Washington Post Style section has used them to describe Jon Stewart; and global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi is using them in their new Toyota Highlander ad campaign.
Some teens text far more than they talk on cellphones. (See full infographic at Flowtown)
But unlike a basic word processor, cellphones use unformatted, plain text, text messaging. (Status updates on Facebook and Twitter are also exclusively plain text). That means lots of communication occurs without rich text options like bold and italics for emphasis. So when we need to tell our friends Justin Bieber is “so hot” in his latest video, scare quotes are not only useful, but might be the best typographic option.
Sarcasm
The human voice is an incredible method of communication capable of a wide range of expression. Sadly, the more we communicate via text message and email, the more of that amazing ability we lose in conversation.
A SNL skit that might best be transcribed with scare quotes. (YouTube)
In walks scare quotes. Whether you’re quoting someone or not, seeing quotation marks makes the reader “think” someone is saying a particular word or phrase. And in a cold, digital world, vocal expressions like sarcasm might only be possible with a faux human voice, via scare quotes.
Sensitivity
Students and professors frequently discuss complex and sensitive topics. Whether it’s class stratification, AIDS or gender roles, it would be easy to offend others by misusing particular words and phrases.
So, academia turns to scare quotes. The glyph allows them to express doubt and create distance from delicate subjects in collegiate essays.
There are provocative blogs and intelligent comments, but read enough politically-slanted ones, and you might think we’re a nation of clueless “elites” or angry members of the “Party of No.” This “misinformation” is fueled by scare quotes.
Scare quotes let your gut do the talking. (Colbert Report)
Scare quotes can allow factual information to seem unfounded, and give ironic nicknames weight to the extreme base of a political party.
“FauxNews” is apparently “reporting” on “weapons of mass destruction.” “ObamaCareLess” was not “born” in the United States.
Scare quotists seem to have taken a cue from the rich history of hand-painted signage and advertisements. The beautiful art of sign painting once gave a handwritten, human quality to the billboards that are a part of city life.
As sign painting technique for slogans, quotation marks effortlessly added a human voice to advertisements.
Iowa, 1940. (Library of Congress)
Today, there are some artists that focus on incredible, expressive lettering like Jessica Hische, Seb Lester, John Downer and Jim Parkinson. For today’s masses, it might be said that there is an easier way to refer to the human quality of hand-painted signage in text messages and emails: scare quotes.
A retrospective of Jim Parkinson’s amazing career. (Vimeo)
Greengrocer’s Apostrophe
In the late 1950s, an interesting and alternative usage of the apostrophe appeared around Liverpool, England. At greengrocers — fruit and vegetable stands — a reportedly mostly foreign-born contingent of workers made an apostrophe mistake over possessives and plurals commonplace.
Instead of putting “Apples” on sale, for example, the shopkeepers over-corrected their grammar and put signs up for “Apple's.” So there weren't “oranges,” but rather “orange's,” and the idea was further extended to change phrases like “please do not feed the birds” to “please do not feed the bird's.”
Those that originally drew what we call “quotation marks,” might be puzzled by the criticism surrounding the marks being used for emphasis. Afterall, that’s probably why the forms were drawn in the first place.
A diple is a historical punctuation mark that was used for emphasis. In the early 1500s, one style was drawn in the shape of what we call “quotation marks” today.
Printed work from 1521. “The diple (represented by double commas) has been placed in the margin to draw attention to the comments...it has not been used to indicate quotations from the King himself, not quotations from Scripture or patristic authorities.” (Pause and Effect, p. 221)
Punctuation historian Malcom Parkes writes that a diple “…like italic type, was employed for emphasis even where there was no quotation. In 1526, it was used by Nicolaus Hausmann of Zwickau in the margins of a letter to Stephen Roth, against lines that contained material he wishes to emphasize.” (Pause and Effect, p.59) According to Robert Bringhurst, the notion of quotation marks “did not come into routine typographic use until the late sixteenth century.” (Elements of Typographic Style, p.64)
So, you've decided to forgo Robert Bringhurst’s wisdom that “many unprofessional writers overuse quotation marks,” and chosen to embrace scare quotes. Soon, you'll simultaneously travel a down a path of great expression, humor and potential embarrassment. To guide you on your journey, here are a few, fun ways you might consider using scare quotes:
Since there is visual ambiguity between quotation marks and scare quotes typographically, other glyphs are sometimes used instead of scare quotes. Among the more popular options:
Asterisk: surrounds a word or phrase for emphasis.
I'm *so* over him.
Winky: follows a lighthearted sentence, can be interpreted as flirtatious.
You must be tired, 'cause you've been running through my mind all day. ;)
These alternates can be fun, and might make for a good classroom exercise, but lack the effectiveness of scare quotes. Afterall, the power of scare quotes is largely ambiguity, so to reduce that fuzziness feels like the wrong typographic choice.
HTML
Given their heavy usage online, there has been some tongue in cheek interest in establishing a HTML tag for scare quotes. Quotation-marks.com suggests using the rarely implemented <q> tag to create distinction between scare quotes and regular ones. Some utilize the fictitious <sarcasm> tag for sarcasm in forums and comments. The W3C does not approve “<sarcasm>.”
Standardistas like their sarcasm without tags. (ImageShack, Reddit)
“Unnecessary” Quotations
Quotation marks are used beyond their standard purposes all around us. Known as “scare quotes,” they are fueled by the need for emphasis in plain text, sarcasm, sensitivity and talking from the gut. They can be fun, and we’ve seen similar “mistakes” before, but if you hop on the typographic trend of the Digital Age, beware: they’re not accepted by everyone.
At Cooper, we spend thousands of hours designing systems around the goals and motivations of the people that will use them. We travel across the country, continent and world to have conversations with real users to ensure that we understand their needs and that our design decisions will make their everyday tasks easier and more intuitive to accomplish.
But perhaps we can improve our methods by considering an inverse approach: What if our intent was to frustrate, rather than ease? What if we intentionally made things subtly challenging and unintuitive?
Aside from simply malicious design, is there anything that intentionally facilitates a bad experience? Why would someone do that to other people? For what reasons might something be made to suck?
Making walking suck (for strength)
I was first thinking about this a few months ago when I was with my brother who just had his first kid (making me a first-time uncle). We were at Target to buy some diapers when a woman in her thirties walked by wearing a pair of shoes that were anything but ordinary.
Take the typical athletic shoe company: In general, they've probably been trying to make the shoe experience better by iterating designs and materials in an attempt to make it easier to walk, run or jump.
The woman at Target was wearing a pair of shoes that had, well, a different goal. Despite being sold in the same retail space as shoes that boast comfort and support, the shoes didn’t make walking better; they made it worse. In fact, the intent of the shoes was to make walking suck.
The shoes are called “Shape Ups.” Because walking in them is more difficult, wearing them is considered “exercise.” And a thirty-something mother in the diaper section at Target might figure she doesn't have the time to exercise anymore, so she made walking suck in an attempt to get fit.
Making everyday experiences more difficult is actually common in exercise equipment. Lifting weights, for example, adds resistance to common arm and leg movements. Shape Ups just apply this principle to walking. They make walking suck so that their users can become stronger doing everyday activities.
Making you feel sick (for fun)
In sixth grade, those of us nerdy enough to be a part of Safety Patrol—the early risers who helped classmates cross the street—took a field trip to Adventureland, a theme park in our home state of Iowa. It was a reward for a year of hard work.
One of my good friends got on a popular ride called the Silly Silo. To participate is simple: Stand inside a silo while it spins around and around at a quicker and quicker rate.
While many products aim directly at making you feel good, the Silly Silo is designed to make you feel horrible. Participants exit feeling dizzy and motion sickness. For my friend, the result was puking into the nearest trash can.
If a piece of business software caused you to feel dizzy, motion sickness or induce vomiting, it'd be a disaster. But in the world of amusement, engaging our body's natural gag reaction can be a great thing. Rides like the Silly Silo, those that drop you thirty stories, or roller coasters that flip you upside down are among the many common amusement park attractions that generate fun out of the rush a horrible feeling provides.
Making ugly websites (for good business)
A local store in the Silicon Valley asked me to create a website for them a few years ago. I jumped at the chance. I loved the owner's vision, his dedication to the community and his desire to create it with beautiful design. But something felt strange about creating such a professional site for a small shop.
Around that time, in 2006, Luke Wroblewski wrote a blog post titled “Make it Ugly” in which he described clients that wanted ugly websites so that the sites would feel more “genuine.” Luke made an argument against the idea, but desiring ugly in search of authenticity isn’t an unusual thought. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, Ellen Lupton wrote “Low and High” in Eye Magazine, which discussed the history of graphic designers exploring low-brow aesthetics.
Nothing says local like Comic Sans. (Flickr by marblegravy)
I didn't make the store's website suck. But after they closed their doors—a year after I designed their site—maybe I should have. After all, littering your store with Papyrus, Comic Sans menus or having a dated website screams to the visitor, among other things, "Hey, I'm local. I’m the real deal." Conversely, professional typography, an elegant color palette, and rock-solid IA might communicate, "I'm a chain. I’m corporate." Making these elements suck a little might have better communicated the store’s local, personal approach.
Making airport seats suck (for prevention)
In 2008, I was sitting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport exhausted, depressed and trying to fall asleep. I had run through an airport in Colorado, faced a long-delayed flight in California and, by the end of the night, had been re-routed across the country to Chicago in hopes of catching an early morning flight to make the funeral of a close friend that had died days earlier in Iowa.
Despite being emotionally and physically drained, I couldn’t fall asleep on the seats at O’Hare. I tried resting my legs on my bag, sleeping sideways in a corner, extending myself across two rows of seats and just about every possible other position to get some sleep. None of them worked. Even though O’Hare has a history of Eames design, the Chicago airport's oddly shaped seats and large armrests made it impossible for me to get comfortable. Of the hundreds of things that are frustrating with air travel, why would anyone be cruel enough to top it all off with terrible seating?
Air travelers in Paris attempt to sleep. (Flickr by Pinelife)
A few weeks before my experience in Chicago, Chris Noessel, a co-worker at Cooper, posted on this blog about slanty design (or what some Cooperistas call “design friction.”) The idea of “slanty design” came from an article by Russell Beale in which he described slanted reading tables at the Library of Congress that prevent visitors from setting down drinks and risking spills. Since the tables suck to eat on, they discourage visitors from bringing food that might ruin the library’s collection. (Beale’s article has a few more examples if you’re curious.)
The Library of Congress didn’t actually design their reading tables to prevent visitors from eating food, it just works out that way. But the chairs that I couldn’t sleep on at O’Hare were designed to prevent sleeping. The large armrests in-between each seat are intended to make sleeping suck so that people don’t sleep at airports.
There are plenty of other examples of design intended to prevent behavior. Speed bumps, for example, discourage speeding. Or, similar to the airport seats, some bus benches have ridges to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. These things make a particular behavior suck to prevent it from happening.
Why it's made to suck
Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage.
I'm excited. In the first week of my summer internship at Cooper, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a test project for a PDA system. And when starting on my first team project for a new piece of software, my Cooper mentor, Nick Myers, had to warn others that he was about "to let the lion out of his cage."
To a young graphic designer, the world of screen-based, interactive work is mouth-watering. The relatively new, ever-expanding and extremely relevant world of web, touch screen and software design allows for seemingly limitless visual exploration. Like early nautical explorers (viz., the title of this post), graphic designers must confront various barriers as they reckon with the unknown.
Uncharted Territory
Books, branding and posters have a long and celebrated history in graphic design. But designing for screen-based, interactive products is relatively uncharted territory.
For example, the latest edition of Meggs' History of Graphic Design, considered the authoritative source of graphic design history, doesn't mention "The Digital Revolution" until page 488. (The book ends on page 530).
Say I was designing a book and considering a subtle element: page numbers. Over the past few hundred years, page numbers have seen thousands of different visual treatments. Among these, there are likely a few hundred brilliantly effective ways of guiding a reader through a book.
Now, say I was designing software and considering an important element: buttons. On-screen buttons have been designed since the early days of GUI development, but the degree in which the important element has been explored is miniscule in comparison to the variation of subtle elements of, say, publication design. As a result, only a few combinations of button size, shape and shading are currently used to usher users through the seemingly infinite digital interfaces that exist on the web and elsewhere. Hundreds of solutions that would create a better user experience likely remain undiscovered.
From top to bottom, a set of companies with very different user goals, but nearly identical solutions: the Nintendo Wii, Apple Leopard OS and Windows Vista. Like fashion, certain styles are going to be dominant, but perhaps, among other things, these buttons could better inform users of what might happen upon clicking them rather than just be generic visual solutions. Better solutions certainly await to be discovered.
Good branding firms sometimes assign clients a set of attributes to guide their visual goals. These adjectives are usually traits like friendly, dependable or knowledgeable (see: enthusiastic and diverse or speed and precision). It's a good process that allows the designer and client to remain on the same page.
Nothing is new about this practice. It's been done for so long that designers are challenged with making unique solutions for the same visual problems that others have faced before. Current fashion, new typefaces, special types of paper and new printing techniques are tools sometimes used to make new solutions to old problems.
Branding firm Siegal+Gale found that at the Four Seasons the golden rule is to "build relationships" and that "guests are not merely attended to; they are cared for and understood." Hence, they designed the luxury hotel's materials with forms and colors that express caring and understanding. (PDF: Siegal+Gale case study)
In creating interactive products, the same experience attribute process is sometimes used by design firms to maintain a client's branding (see: approachable and fun icons). Like in the print world, certain shapes, colors and forms have long been associated with certain experiences.
However, interactive products give graphic designers a new playground. Hover states, links, selected states and other, similar actions are new grounds for discovery. What happens in a knowledgeable hover state? What's a dependable link? We're only just beginning to explore good answers to these relatively uncharted visual problems.
A New World of Typography
Due to its relatively recent inception, screen-based interface design hasn't been explored as extensively as other, older forms of graphic design. Despite the ubiquity of the internet, even screen-specific typefaces like the one this essay is set in are in their infancy.
For hundreds of years typographers have designed type for a wide range of things, including signage, newspapers, magazines and books, but rarely for screen. Relatively few professional attempts, the most well-known being Matthew Carter's Verdana and Georgia in the mid-1990s, have been made to tackle screen-based typography. And new high resolution, small screens on smart phones have opened up even more doors for new discovery.
To have international consistency between online and print materials, one company, IKEA, has even taken the extreme step of switching all its materials to a screen-based typeface, Verdana. IKEA's decision is strange because Verdana was designed for the screen, but the idea of having consistent branding is not. Type families containing separate styles for screen and print uses seem like an inevitable yet rarely explored next step.
In 2010, expanded families for Verdana and Georgia are expected to be released. Although still intended for the screen, the new families reportedly will consider some print use, which will certainly ease some criticism surrounding IKEA's decision to use Verdana. The release will also include more styles, expanding each family from their current four styles (regular, italic, bold and bold italic) to 20 styles (variations of light, regular, semibold, bold and black). While many type families designed for print have long offered a variety of styles, that same choice has not existed in screen-based typography. Multiple weights for Verdana or Georgia may set precedent for a new world of screen-based typography that breaks designers free from the currently rigid set of four styles: regular, bold, italic and bold italic.
There's a lot of talk about services like Typekit and Fontdeck that will soon allow web designers to rent typefaces from foundries. But unfortunately, many of today's popular foundries currently design typography almost exclusively for print. On screen, type designed for print tends to lose its visual quality when set smaller than 16-point or rendered in a gray value. Good typography for the screen remains a relatively new world.
This illustration from the Ascender Coporation's website shows how characters un-tuned for the screen are muddled and difficult to read while characters that are designed for screens consider pixel legability and are appropriately tuned or hinted.
Barriers to Discovery
This is an exciting time to be a young graphic designer in the interactive world, but certain barriers seem to be inhibiting new discoveries. Among them, teaching methodologies and platforms to showcase interactive products seem to be significant inhibitors to finding better visual solutions.
Walk into a design school typography class and you'll likely hear about conceptual ideas like spacing and the connotative meaning of letterforms. Walk into a web design class, on the other hand, and you'll likely witness the perfunctory execution of programs like Dreamweaver and Flash.
Even an introductory typography course would never be primarily focused on teaching InDesign, and likewise, interactive classes for designers shouldn't primarily focus on teaching software. Knowing InDesign is a necessary skill, but it's understanding typographic theory that makes designers good typographers. Similarly, understanding what makes a good painting, not understanding paintbrushes, makes a great painter. If interactive courses for graphic designers focused on theories, rather than tools, to designing better interactive products, it would greatly enhance future explorations instead of making graduates produce bland, all-too-familiar work as masters of a particular suite of software.
While theory-based books like The Elements of Typographic Style are considered staples of type courses, tool-based books are staples of web design courses.
Unexpected barriers are also faced when platforms created to run interactive experiences don't allow for the implementation of basic visual solutions that have been used by graphic designers for generations. Touch screen hardware, operating systems and browsers still often restrict the use of basic design solutions that have sometimes been in use for hundreds of years.
I recently spent an hour chatting with Firefox developers trying to convince them that their browser should properly display the thin space character. The thin space, used by typesetters long before computers, can enhance the readability between words and typographic elements like ampersands or em dashes, or it can be used to improve spacing between words in oddly fitting lines of justified text. Since kerning is not a real option for body text on the web, a thin space has even more importance in web design.
When given the HTML entity for a thin space ( ), Firefox 3.0 for Mac not only displays the thin space incorrectly, but also uses a visually worse and unexpected wider space (Firefox 3.0 also uses its own font-smoothing technique that makes the typeface appear bold).
The thin space works on some browsers in some versions, but did not work on my Mac version of Firefox. At the end of our conversation, the developers conceded that my version of Firefox failed to accurately display the thin space, but maintained that this particular age-old typographic detail, well, didn't matter because they couldn't wrap their minds around what it might be used for.
An excerpt from The History of Printing, published in 1855, guiding typesetters about the use of a thin space. It's one element of a wide variety of old visual solutions unavailable for implementation in some cases, inhibiting the discovery of better visual design.
Discussing a valid W3C character with developers of a standards-compliant browser seemed like a good idea with a simple fix, but the thin space is only a smaller tool of a larger and more robust typographic toolkit unavailable in browsers. In an A List Apart article posted earlier this year, The Font Bureau's David Berlow commented on the typographic shortcomings of css and web browsers. Berlow, who has been somewhat vocal about typography on the web, said that type at the CSS Zen Garden is not "treated beyond a fourth-grader’s crayoning abilities" and that he hoped platforms for interactive experiences could aim for at least "the initial capabilities of Adobe Illustrator 1.0," software that was released 22 years ago.
Bon Voyage
Barriers aside, there is a community of people trying to better our visual experiences. In fact, this blog post might be used as an excuse to experiment and find better visual solutions for our users. In the infant world of interactive, screen-based design there is much to explore and discover in creating visually great user experiences. Roar!
Technology is getting better at doing things on behalf of its users. "Don't worry about that," it says, "Tell me what you want, and I'll do the rest." (Read more about how tech is shifting users from task-doers to flow-managers at Treating users (Like a Boss.))
This trend is great because it saves users tedious work that computers are better at [...] Continue...
Cooper is excited to announce a partnership with WEA, the Women's Earth Alliance, for our upcoming UX Bootcamp in late July. WEA is a Berkeley-based non-profit who partners internationally with grassroots organizations to provide financial resources, training, advocacy and peer support for women leaders who are addressing acute environmental and climate challenges in their communities.
"Women — caretakers, mothers, community leaders, [...] Continue...
Spring Break, Fort Lauderdale (Sun-Sentinel)
Spring Break, Fort Lauderdale (Sun-Sentinel)
Faith and Karen in the bubble.
Stefan considering the cloud.
For example, the latest edition of 
From top to bottom, a set of companies with very different user goals, but nearly identical solutions: the Nintendo Wii, Apple Leopard OS and Windows Vista. Like fashion, certain styles are going to be dominant, but perhaps, among other things, these buttons could better inform users of what might happen upon clicking them rather than just be generic visual solutions. Better solutions certainly await to be discovered.
