in which Sarah attempts to be less snarky and more complex
On a recent Tuesday morning at UI16 Kevin Hoffman, from Happy Cog, gave a talk on strategies for successful discovery meetings (not as boring as it sounds). As an example, he referenced the work his team recently did for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He described the many meetings they facilitated, which [...]
In a recent interview with author Jennifer Egan, Tom Ashbrook, host of On Point on NPR, asked the question, Are we living curated lives? With so much of our lives happening in real time, on social media channels that may or may not include privacy walls, are we being our honest selves or are we [...]
During Luke W’s talk at UI16 this week in Boston, he spoke a lot about location-aware services on mobile devices. Changes in technology make building handheld devices faster, better, and cheaper. Luke explained that technology has advanced so far that it’s cheaper to include than leave out wifi antennae in these devices. As a result, [...]
The other night, Mr. Snarky risked invoking my wrath by explaining to me, “You can train yourself…” Before he got any farther, I demanded, “Did you just say, ‘that’s a training issue’?” His immediate reply, “Of course not. I’m not stupid.” All of this was in reference to the way I’ve been using my iPad, [...]
Updated 9/28/2011 Okay, it’s official. Instead of tuning out the Ticker, I am annoyed by it. And the top posts at the top above the recent posts in my feed? Please just show me everything in order! The music recommendations are great and the streaming through Spotify et al is a wonder. But so I [...]
In a previous post I talked about an example of technology constraining us in ways that don’t conform to the way we speak or write. We let the format dictate our attention span. For instance, I’ve broken this article into two posts because I was concerned it was getting too long for my (imaginary) readers. [...]
A week or two ago, a BBC News headline popped up on my RSS reader. The title said, “Ancient cave women ‘left home’.” Typical, I thought and sniffed in disgust at my monitor. I stared at the headline a moment longer, pondering an unhappy, dirty, hunched-over woman with bad hair sweeping a cave, tending a [...]
I had a chat recently with a long-time colleague and content strategist, Margot Bloomstein. She was doing some writing on IA and wanted to pick my brain about how I use that term and why. I referred her to my blog post and we had a humorous chat that seemed worth expanding on here. First, [...]
In recent weeks I suffered what I consider to be the most grievous insult ever spoken by a client to a designer. A client of mine said, “Thanks for the work you did. Don’t worry about the revisions. Our IT guy will take it from here.” All manner of expletives popped into my mouth. I [...]
We had a client once who defied all of our efforts to please her. No matter how hard we tried, no matter how many brand and design workshops we did, we could not get her to articulate her expectations regarding her site’s visual design. And as a result, we completed iteration upon iteration before gaining [...]
