Google Calendar: Your modals suck.
9 September 2011
Seriously, don't you ask your candidates about Fitts' Law during interviews any more? It's not like scheduling recurring meetings is an infrequent event, especially at a business, making this a...
Groupon is hiring UX people, all levels, all functions.
19 July 2011
All roles can be in our Palo Alto product / development office or in our Chicago HQ. We're looking for people in all roles who have a strong grounding in...
Apps are just little websites in cheap fur coats.
8 July 2011
While on the London Underground I saw a poster advertising Potiche, a movie starring Catherine Deneuve, who I think is the bees' knees. I made a note to myself to...
New job as Dir of UX at Groupon
2 June 2011
Today seems like an opportune time to announce that tomorrow is my last day working at LinkedIn. On Monday I'll start a new job as Groupon's director of user experience,...
Disjoint thoughts on productivity
23 May 2011
Fried goes on to suggest that the perceived distractions of Facebook and web surfing at work are false, with "M&Ms" (managers & meetings) making up greater, involuntary, more disruptive and...
Damn the metrics, full speed ahead!
12 May 2011
A/B testing is useful, important, and a valuable part of the software production process. (Note that I didn't say part of the "design" process.) You can use A/B testing to...
LinkedIn Today: Congrats to LI UED members...
10 March 2011
LinkedIn just launched LinkedIn Today, its social news aggregator for professionals. Props to the members of the LI UED team who have been hammering away at this for the past...
Yes, I DO often want to see my email and calendar at the same time
27 January 2011
Convo in team chatroom: Ellen Beldner: Is there any way in Outlook 2011 for me to simultaneously view both my calendar and email? like, the way I'd be able to...
...but Outlook, I don't see a SAVE button.
24 January 2011
Jakob says (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/action-object-closeness.html): One of the oldest principles of human-computer interaction is that things that are close together on the screen are seen as related. (Similarly, users view as...
Pandora: iPad HCI fail
28 December 2010
"Oooh! Pandora for my iPad, cool! I've been getting into Pandora lately, bought a premium subscription, using it a lot more & becoming a fan...." Download & install -- fairly...
Thoughts on Interface Consistency
13 December 2010
We had a big discussion today at work about consistency. When do you force it? When do you challenge it? On one hand, I understand the point made by a...
My Design Principles
18 November 2010
This list is based on the original Google design team's UI principles, which I helped draft in 2004-ish. Google updated its UI principles and published them around 2008, when Irene...
Happy Diwali from LinkedIn!
5 November 2010
Had my first launch at LinkedIn yesterday. It's a custom homepage, visible in India, that wishes viewers a happy Diwali from different LinkedIn employees. Happy Diwali LinkedIn blog post. We...
In search of books on mobile usability & UI...
27 January 2010
Recalling CMU intro HCI course whose capstone project was UI improvements for the PalmOS.... Here's the question on Quora, but haven't yet gotten much of a response: http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_best_fresh_up_to_date_academic_type_resources_for_mobile_UI_UX_design...
Dan Cederholm likes Halvorsen too
13 July 2007
Halvorsen is the typeface I recently used for my GreenBetween redesign. Turns out that Dan likes it too. I don't really know Dan, although I hired him via Google to...
Project description: GreenBetween.com
21 June 2007
GreenBetween is a site that allows people to buy carbon offsets. A friend of mine was starting the site and asked me if I'd design some website badges ("I purchased...
Published: Thoughts on Interaction Design
30 March 2007
Jon Kolko, who I met at CMU, just published his book Thoughts on Interaction Design. I'm a guest author and wrote a chapter called "Getting Design Done". The book's website...
NYTimes: User hacking leading to product innovation
28 March 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Proto.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Summary: Let advanced users hack on your products. They will come up with innovations that you didn't think of. This stands up nicely to an economic interpretation too: If...
Usability engineers designing nightclubs
9 March 2007
(...I was thinking about calling this post "Ellen on Joel on Software" but I think that would be a gross thing to say.) We had a thread on the UE...
Tag clouds don't work: The Tshirt
15 November 2006
As part of the Decidr and Widget Bitch tshirt series, I just published tag clouds don't work to the WidgetBitch CafePress store. Because tag clouds don't work. They're the UGG...
New dashboard -- Google Base bulk uploads
8 November 2006
Woohoo -- new design for the Google Base bulk upload dashboard! The old bulk upload dashboard was a 3-second one-off using our generic tabular data widget. Since most of...
Google Base Store Connector
5 October 2006
The other day we launched the Google Base Store Connector. The progression to the final version was pretty neat. When I started working on the project there was a functional...
Redesign of the Google Base homepage
19 September 2006
Less suck, more hot. We did a ton of usability testing of Base in the past few months, and this revised homepage came out of it. Goals were to...
Software specs are not the enemy.
29 August 2006
The fact that a lot of organizations cram unreasonable, un-vetted features into the spec and call it a "spec" is not a problem with specs. It is an organizational problem. Blaming the existence of specs for problems caused by bad management is not fair to the spec.
Google Base digital content uploader
14 August 2006
I already wrote the blog post on the official blog. But this is one of the more successful design-to-implementation experiences I've had on Base....
PRD for my home remodel
5 May 2006
Sitting down with my architect this weekend to make decisions about kitchen cabinets, countertops, sink, and how the stairs will work. The kitchen will be monolithic charcoal gray (or maybe...
Pironimo.net
25 March 2006
Pironimo.net is a twiki installation that I deployed, customized, and maintain for a small community of friends (around 30 people). It began on another server in September 2002. Since then...
Placement of Toto Washlet controls relative to toilet
22 July 2004
At work we have a bunch of Toto washlets. One day I was explaining to some friends about the wall-attached remote control. One of them, in annoyed puzzlement, asked why...