Ellen Beldner

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...

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 do some fast icons for a small project a couple of years ago. (I happened to be at his website because a friend of mine needs a template for his blog & I was going to recommend Dan.)...

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 a carbon offset!") and a printable certificate. I agreed, and in the process gave them a fresher look, made a new logo, suggested some product ideas, tweaked their navigation, and redesigned their page layout to improve the visual direction. Tragically I didn't save a "before" screenshot for comparison. The project took about 15 hours. I did it in a weekend. I agreed to do two iterations of the badges and...

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 is http://www.thoughtsoninteraction.com/....

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 someone is willing to take the time to hack around and build something that wasn't part of the spec, that means that they're willing to spend capital to have that functionality. Which means it's some sort of market opportunity. Enterprise software can often be maddening like this: companies sell their software for $200k + and they want to be gatekeepers and prevent customers from getting into the code -- they...

(...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 team mailing list where someone had -- reasonably -- gotten a bit miffed that Joel Spolsky blithely assumes that most of usability and design are trivial functions that anyone can easily do anytime. One of the Joelisms she cited from User Interface Design for Programmers was: if usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus...

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 boots of interaction design: no one really believes in them but you see everyone else with them and you're like "ummm maybe I should" and then you just look like a mess and in 3 years you look back an you're like "oh god what was I thinking?" Be ahead of the curve....

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 our bulk uploaders have only a couple of files, the tabular format was overly busy and misused the screen real estate. The page was also getting messier as we added promos (for AdWords, Checkout, and some of the other inernal tools, like using FTP to submit your files). These changes were some of the few we've made that didn't stem directly from usability research mandates. Rather, they're based on design...

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 demo that had already been built, wizard-style. I came up with a few user scenarios that led to functions like storing account information so users can easily update their items in one click. That is, if someone has an Ebay store and they want to get listed on Google, it'll be better for them if they can store account information so all they have to do is periodically click something...

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 make item types more visible, help users understand what base is, deemphasize search (to keep the focus on Base as place for uploading, not for searching) and help users make better choices about the right upload technology for them. One of the things that I think makes this design work really well is the IA of the page. Users who come here are either brand new (never heard of Base),...

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.

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....

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 white) so it doesn't compete too much with the brick & timber in my loft. Work will start ASAP. I can't wait to start cooking again. My 14 boxes of kitchen and dinnerware are starting to annoy me, and I want to have dinner parties again....

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 I've done about three major UI revs and one software upgrade....

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 on earth would you need a remote-controlled bidet control? This sketch is an exploration of different solutions based on my task analysis....