Category Archives: User Experience

UX, human computer interaction, usability, etc.

Seven days with the Samsung Omnia 7 Windows Phone 7

One of the perks of working in software is occasional access to sweet, new hardware.  I’ve befriended the super-busy Mobile team at the office, and asked to borrow one of their spare Windows Phone devices.  Craig handed me a Samsung Omnia 7 and asked me not to destroy it.  I had been wary of the …

March 25, 2011 – 13:34 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development, User Experience | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Presentation on Accessibility and Design on Jan 20, come!

For those of you in Kitchener-Waterloo who are into web accessibility and product design, myself and Ali Ghassemi are doing an hour-long talk at the next uxWaterloo event on January 20, 2011 at 5:30pm.  We’re super excited! The focus will be practical advice for designers and developers about building accessible web applications. Ali and I …

January 4, 2011 – 17:50 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development, User Experience | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Explain your job to someone in 1950

Sometimes my mind is blown about what I actually do for a living, just based on the fact that I have a really hard time explaining it to people. Despite being in a world where cell phones, the internet, and Microsoft Office are part of the daily fabric of life, how many of us are …

November 3, 2010 – 09:57 | By dariusz | Posted in Personal Stuff, User Experience | Comments (0)

Aiming for Accessibility Conference

Desire2Learn sent me to the Aiming for Accessibility Conference at the University of Guelph for one of the two days, and it was a really solid.  There’s quite a bit of expertise around accessible web technology here at the office, so it’s nice to see the cause celebrated and discussed.  The conference wasn’t huge: intimate …

June 25, 2010 – 15:55 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Chrisitian Rohrer’s Greatest Hits

Whenever I try to frame a usability problem we have with some sort of solution, I usually get overwhelmed.  Usability research is difficult to execute well even if you know what you’re doing .. but UX is a field with an over-abundance of methods and strategies.  All of these strategies have pros, cons, proponents, and …

June 16, 2010 – 11:49 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Sorting Country Names in their Native Language

I used to think that sorting things was easy. Collation is a really difficult problem, especially once you start considering different script (Latin, Chinese, German, etc.) and numeral systems (Western Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, etc.) in the same list, not to mention locale-specific sorting irregularities like German Phonebook sorts. The problem of sorting country names is …

May 10, 2010 – 11:44 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Blue Beanie Day 2009 @ Desire2Learn

blue beanie day. Originally uploaded by jclhicks. So some of the design and standards people at work wore blue toques today in celebration/encouragement of designing with web standards: Doug Vos’ Writeup on Blue Beanie Day 2009 If you’re interested in showing some web-standards solidarity, take a look at the Facebook group.  We’ve been really struggling …

November 30, 2009 – 10:42 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Comments (0)

The birth of the Microsoft Office “Ribbon”

New ideas for user interface components don’t come by very often.  For example, the pointer, icons, and toolbars have been around since the late 1970′s courtesy of the work done at Xerox PARC.  It’s safe to say that the computing environment in the late 70′s was quite a bit different than it is today, so …

August 4, 2009 – 14:47 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Internet Literacy in Education

Wanted to share a pretty great video about internet media literacy, and higher education. For someone finishing up a Masters, some of the points he makes ring very loudly. From the YouTube video: Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, …

May 8, 2009 – 12:31 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

An actually useful poster from the UPA

This has to be one of the most functional and relevant posters I’ve ever put up on a wall.  It’s from the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) and it briefly goes over and organises the process of designing software for the user. I got one mailed to me when I joined the UPA as a free …

May 7, 2009 – 13:31 | By dariusz | Posted in User Experience | Tagged , , | Comments (0)