Sometimes, it’s good to unlearn.
Think backwards, throw out your preconceived notions, forget about dependencies, and ignore your constraints.
If you search long enough, you just might find the right problem to fix. When you focus on the right problem, you might actually surprise yourself with what you can come up with.
Q-Drum solved the right problem.
The real problem…
A novel solution…
Pownce 403 page…
I’m incredibly intrigued by the idea behind the Cut & Paste battles. If you haven’t heard of this yet, it’s similar to DJ / B-boy battles, but it’s focused on design battles instead.
I guess I’ll have to find a way to make it to one of the eleven cities where the battles are (none are close to NC).
It really pisses me off that there are so many software companies out there that don’t understand the importance and implications of user experience. I just sat through a demo of a large product suite and the only thing that ran through my mind throughout the demo was “If I had to use this tool, I would shoot myself.”
That feeling came primarily because the look, feel, (lack of) usability, and (lack of) user experience of the application suite sucked. The capabilities of the suite were mediocre, but I just couldn’t get past how ugly it was. How the hell are you supposed to get excited about software like that?
If you haven't seen the videos for the BumpTop Prototype, you should check these out. I'm dying for this to be released.
Beyond the desktop, it would be really cool to have this functionality available for applications.
On the project that I'm working on, we are currently tracking our sprints with index cards (on a wall gantt) and by daily/sprint/release burndowns in a spreadsheet. The wall gantt is the tracking that is used for our day-to-day tasks and the spreadsheet is used more as a communication tool for our external stakeholders.
Our team has recently run across some issues with a few third-party software packages that have impacted our velocity and required some additional tasks. As part of the on-site team, my visibility has mostly been with the wall gantt. I've noticed that our velocity has taken a hit, but I wasn't sure how our velocity had trended over the release as a whole.
I recently ran across sparklines and was interested in using them to take a look at our velocity. I was extremely impressed by how much information could be viewed in a short space.
It's fairly obvious where the trashing started (around sprint 10). The sparkline shows a daily story-point burndown inside of each sprint. The high and low points of work remaining for each sprint are shown through the different colors. For the spreadsheet, I used the free Bissantz tool (thanks guys).
I'm looking forward to picking up Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte and reading about more visualization patterns. Reading his work is always extremely insightful.
I've been using Backpack extensively throughout the past couple of months and I've been very impressed with the simplicity and effectiveness of the service. One of the first things that immediately stood out was the effective use of blank space at the right times.
For instance, when I create a new page I have instructions that appear to help guide me through the process…
This is a very simple, but very effective idea that drastically increases usability
The Signal vs. Noise blog has a post about this here. I wonder if it was backpack that they were talking about in the post?
About a week ago I purchased the Getting Real book from 37signals. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this book to come out for a while now and I can say that it was well worth the wait. The book (available only as a pdf) is entertaining and very thought provoking. I can say that I agree with almost every one of the statements and sections in the book.
The biggest value for me in the reading of the book was the ability to be exposed to ideas for design as well as development. My primary activities mostly center around development on a day-to-day basis, but the insight into the design ideas in the book were a big eye-opener for me. I’ve preached most of the development-centric practices that are outlined in the book and it was nice to view the logic behind each of the sections in the book. The book also contains many good quotes that are provided from a diverse set of individuals.
I would recommend this book to anyone and promise that it will be well worth your $19.
My wife just received her real estate license and one of the initial things she had to do was to decide on a business card. As part of this process, we started to look around at different sites and examples of typical real estate business cards. I can honestly say that I didn’t find even one example that I thought was designed well.
Why is it that so many business cards suck? This isn’t just in real estate, it’s everywhere.
We finally came up with a design, but it’s nothing close to any of the ideas that we found online or the examples that she was given.
One business card of note (the one that provided the inspiration to design a card that doesn’t suck) can be seen in the “Down with Titles” post by Garrett Dimon. I love the fact that the card is simple, informative, and memorable. The accompanying presentation for the design of the business card can be found here (pdf).
Hi. I'm Ben Carey and this is my blog. I write about a wide variety of things that I'm interested in.
