11th
May
2006
“After a brief hiatus, Under The Loupe is back. This week we will be flexing that lump of worms between your ears. One of the biggest things that can separate a good design from a great design is a strong concept. Strong concepts don’t always just come to us; sometimes they take work. Perhaps not real physical labor, but a process of bypassing the obvious ideas to get to the hidden ones. Some people call this ‘Creative Thinking’, but when I was first introduced to this concept, it was presented to me as ‘Visual Thinking’. I tend to prefer ‘Visual’ as opposed to ‘Creative’ as it helps to shift the focus back to design specifically. Let’s define ‘Visual Thinking’ as: A process of idea-finding and formulation, typically with simple tools like a pencil and paper, where the cumulation of ideas influences the whole.”
posted in Visual thinking | Permalink |
11th
May
2006
“A long, long time ago, my friend Eric Bergman and I were working on the UI for Sun AnswerBook, which was a CD-based predecessor to docs.sun.com. AnswerBook Screen.Sun had invited Edward Tufte in to teach a session in our Boston office about the Grand Vistas of Information Architecture or something. After the class, we lured him into our usability lab to look at the user interface for Answerbook, of which were were very proud.” (Thanks kottke.org!)
posted in Interface design | Permalink |
11th
May
2006
“In these notes, I summarize my presentation of original research and testing of an Ajax application (Basecamp) with users of screen readers and other adaptive technologies. Here’s my working definition of Ajax: The use of scripting to cause portions of a page to refresh without reloading the entire page. That usually happens after the user does something, but it can also happen automatically.”
posted in Accessibility | Permalink |
