I question why I fear everything, here are some answers

I have a vivid memory of this moment — When it was discovered I was coloring drawings instead of taking notes using the new set of highlighters at the ripe age of 9, those highlighters were smashed upon the concrete floor.

I’m a visual person to a fault. This blog has done well for sketches and photographs, but less so for written pieces. I’m trying out Medium as my writing platform of choice.

Here’s the start –

I experienced this just yesterday. On my screen is a not quite blank canvas: a defined scope and screenshots ready for editing. A product I thought I understood well. But alas, I couldn’t budge, why?

Particularly, the search results page mention!

Trulia’s suite of consumer products, its website, mobile apps and iPad app all got facelifts too. Photos got bigger. The design got flatter. And in the case of the search results page on their website, they lost the left rail altogether and moved to a two-column layout.

Grade: A

I like the direction that Trulia is taking its design. Deep-sixing that left rail of refiners is like a blast of fresh air across the page. Trulia was the last holdout of the major portals on this front. Vendors and brokers, if you’re still desperately clinging to that wall of dropdowns and form fields on your website, do yourself a favor and move on.

My bunny instagram spotted in Mission Mission.

Alumni Panel
March 22nd
Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, Room A-11

The College of Fine Arts is partnering with the Career and Professional Development Center to bring almuni back to campus to share their journeys and discuss their career paths. These CFA alumni have achieved great success in their fields, though the path may not have been linear. Students joining them for the Alumni Panel Discussions will be able to ask questions about those individual and inspiring journeys, as they themselves prepare to embark on their own careers.

Swing by if you’re around!

80% of users only use 20% of features. Part of good product design is hiding 80% of advanced features from those users so things do not easily go astray.

As per Marc’s piece, my process isn’t an exact match-up, but I do wholeheartedly believe –

Don’t force a process on a design team that everyone must follow.

&

Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a [seemingly] better design process.

Bad design processes are like 1984. They dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator so no one feels excluded. They make the team slow, bloated, and insipid. They allow non-designers to make terrible design decisions. They furthermore get non-designers to believe those decisions are better than their designer’s.

Luckily, there isn’t a sharp toned pitch in this story, so we are able to diagnose the poison. I wish I had good advice for how to navigate this situation. It would be right here [ ]! Check back in 5 years.

Ben Kamens:

At every position of the cursor you can picture a triangle between the current mouse position and the upper and lower right corners of the dropdown menu. If the next mouse position is within that triangle, the user is probably moving their cursor into the currently displayed submenu. Amazon uses this for a nice effect. As long as the cursor stays within that blue triangle the current submenu will stay open. It doesn’t matter if the cursor hovers over “Appstore for Android” momentarily — the user is probably heading toward “Learn more about Cloud Drive.”

And if the cursor goes outside of the blue triangle, they instantly switch the submenu, giving it a really responsive feel.

A collection of landing pages before you have any content.

A Dark Pattern is a type of user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.

Spoilers: Napa, CA. A wonderful, well done data analysis.

An awesome collection pre-analyzed by Sacha Greif.

I wrote my first guest blog post. Special thanks to Kera.io for having me.