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In Icons, Pedagogic Vectors, Forms Design and Posture we briefly discussed icon design. (Icons, in this context, meaning the sketch-pictures on buttons that you can click.) The bottom line was that it’s hard to learn and remember what icons stand for. In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we discussed how icons should be […]

I work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC has prioritized IT, and compared with many other academic medical centers, the IT department is fairly well-funded and well-staffed. The central IT umbrella spreads wide, including 16 major hospitals and numerous other facilities. UPMC uses Cerner for an inpatient electronic medical record (EMR) (and for […]

A common technique for prototyping computer screens is to use wireframes. A recent article in UXmatters discusses wireframes, and asks whether wireframe prototypes are used by program designers as a substitute for real collaboration. That’s a good question. But I think this is a better one: is showing wireframes to people a poor substitute for […]

When doing usability testing (see Discount Usability Testing) we tend to act like anthropologists, observing people using computers as if they were savages performing quaint native rituals. In a post in UXmatters, Jim Ross argues that we should also use the anthropological technique of participant observation: basically, going native. Or, in other words, trying to […]

Less is More —Mies van der Rohe In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, […]