Category Archives: Design
Unability exception: Northwest Airlines flight notification
Northwest sends you a text message before your flight to notify you of your departure time. This is a useful feature because it confirms that your flight is on-time or delayed. So the text message reads: (Northwest Departure Status) NW 218 June 2 ON TIME to depart MSP at 5:35 pm and arrive PDX at [...]
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Usability exception: Introduction
I was recently on a trip with the devel team and I saw a lot of things that bugged me; which in turn bugged the team when I complained about them. Most of them were related to how we interact with things. This series is dedicated to BAD usability. I coin them usability exceptions. Not [...]
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In review: Still in love after the honeymoon
So, I’ve had my Macbook Air for a few months now and I still love it! I actually had to do some maintenance on my wife’s Dell the other day and i couldn’t believe how bad the keyboard was. It felt like I was using an old computer from the 80′s. The feel of the [...]
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Art from limitation: Self-imposed limitation
I have a piece of glass in my workshop. It is 2′ by 5′, tapered on the edges. I want to make a table out of it however, I’m not feeling inspired. I think it is a waste to have a nice piece of glass sitting in the corner but I don’t want to use [...]
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Art from limitation: Twitter
If you don’t know about twitter go google it… The most amazing thing about twitter, to me, is how you have limited characters in your tweets. I love it. It is a great example of thoughtful design. The creators decided that 140 characters is all you need. There is no technical limitation, tweets could be [...]
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Art from limitation: Ruby on rails
We have been learning about Ruby on Rails for the past few months at work. We currently write in C# and ASP.NET. Now it has served us well, but there are some very intriguing things about Rails and the newer frameworks. Convention over configuration. This is a powerful notion. I think that fundamentally people like [...]
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Art from limitation: Graphic Design 101
Back in college at MCAD I was taking a Graphic Design 101 course. For all class periods we had one assignment: make a design using the defined elements. Each week we would spend the 60 minute class reviewing everyone’s creations. That’s it. No text, no lectures, no direction. On 8.5″ x 11″ white paper with [...]
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Art from limitation: OSX vs. Vista
I grew up on Apple products, I went to art school, I make design and build furniture in my garage, my notebook is a sketchpad. I would consider myself a design person. I left my last Mac in 1996, it was a Quadra 800 AV. I have been working in Windows since then. Tightrope starting [...]
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Art from limitation: Introduction
I have ben trying to get into blogging for a few months. It has been hard for me to find what to write about. I can write about Tightrope’s product releases, tricks in our software, or general reactions to things that I run into. That hasn’t motivated me. I needed a subject that I could [...]
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Unability exception: MAX light rail announcer in Portland confusing