#design

Years ago, I shared some blog posts about half-baked ideas for a bug tracker. I wasn’t planning on trying to build a business. I wasn’t even sure if I was going actually write any code. I just wanted to explore some interface ideas.

In our incessant rush to move quickly, everything is ephemeral. Technology moves so quickly that today’s strong favorite is outdated in a matter of years. We slurp up notifications and are fascinated by the next thing before we even fully understand the…

For years I’ve been planning to work fewer hours. I really don’t work all that much, maybe 50 hours per week, but with the office at home, there’s little separation between work and everything else. My plans were always centered around this or that…

It seems like many stories about quitting a job are dramatic and quick. i.e. “I had finally had enough and just quit.” It doesn’t need to be that way, and it’s probably easier if it’s not. Instead of thinking about giving your employer two weeks notice,…

The full stack for a web application can be rather overwhelming, but it’s not quite as bad as you might think. If you look at this list knowing only a small portion of the items, it can be incredibly intimidating. Really, though, it’s an incremental…

After the recent presentation, I was surprised how many questions I heard about our choice of business model or application. There also seems to be no shortage of people debating between native mobile and web applications. For me, there are a variety of…

It was a little over a year ago that I set out to try and turn a few mockups into a full-fledged revenue-generating piece of software. For the most part, it’s been a pretty smooth ride, but there have definitely been some lessons learned. In January of…

Like many, I hate to see mindless copying or stealing of visual designs. When it comes to interface elements though, I feel exactly the opposite. I want to see sites reusing bits and pieces of interfaces. It’s key to improving the usability of the web…

If there’s anything I’ve learned about designing web applications in recent years, it’s the fact that things change over the course of a project. Learning to embrace that fact and direct it towards a productive evolutionary process has made a…

One of my favorite topics is the influence of business decisions on interface design. It’s an unfortunate truth that the underlying business structure and decisions will invariably affect the interface. It’s important to recognize this fact and work to…

One of the key requirements for creating any kind of issue tracker is making it easy to get data into the system. While the browser is the primary interface, I felt email also had to be a first class citizen for issue submission. The browser interface…

Last time, I went into my vision of a simpler bug and issue tracking life-cycle. This time, I want to focus on one of the manifestations of a simpler process—the status bar. As I mentioned before, status and responsibility are the two most significant…

For my issue tracker, I’ve wanted a more natural process for updating issues. I decided that all activity would have to go through the comment form associated with each issue. This way any change in status, priority, category, or assignee could quickly…

Even the longest journeys begin with a single step. The redesign of this site is just that—one step. It isn’t meant to be revolutionary or flashy. Instead, it’s meant to enable and focus on the creation of better content.

Use cases, functional specs, interface specs, site maps, you name it. I have yet to come across any of these documents that are usable. I’m as guilty of this as the next person, but if our job as information architects, interaction designers, or…

While back-end technology has become more and more abstracted and powerful with frameworks like .Net, Rails, and their Java counterparts, the possibilities with front-end technology have grown increasingly complex. The web needs more front-end…

Things are busy, but it’s finally time to announce something that has been occupying much of my free time for the past week or so. A long time in the making and the brain child of Eris, Refresh Dallas is finally having our first real meeting. The First…

We spend a lot of time designing headers with logos, navigation, search, and more. Why not do the same with footers?

The length of your instructional text is almost always inversely proportionate to the usability of your product. Unfortunately, I’ve been saying this for so long that I can’t remember if I stole the idea, modified the idea, or came up with it all on my…

I’m always intrigued by our industry. In particular, I think it’s incredible how web developers and designers are collaborating and sharing in ways that are unimaginable in other industries. We learn something new, a competitive advantage if you will,…