Ellen Beldner

The system is what the user makes of it -- the system is what the user brings to it. That's the essence of social sites, compared to crowdsourced sites. Crowdsourcing fails and usually sucks, unless you have a community of people who actually know what they're talking about. So while everyone in the industry has been hyping social for several years now, it's not because authoritative, editorialized, expert content is actually going to die or go away. It's because we're just now getting the technology that ALSO affords other people the ability to create and partcipate. In other words, I'm...

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...

Okay, I already knew that I hate and detest the new-ish Facebook practice in which you don't just navigate to outgoing links; you get taken to a Facebook page with the site you were trying to visit loaded into a frame, and with a Facebook toolbar at the top of the page. And now, not only does Digg do it too, but the sites are so dumb that they're double stacking these stupid toolbars. This is crap primarily because it breaks basic web behavior: the URL on your web browser no longer represents the page you're viewing, or trying to...

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...

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...

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....