fill the void

Posts Tagged design

Don’t make users feel bad

Matt Drance posted an interesting thought the other day about the average consumer rejecting bad user experience. When helping out my parents or other non-technical folk, I’ve never found that. At least, not exactly. Average consumers do not think about user experience. They don’t think about workflows, calls to action, marketing copy, or corner cases. [...]


Measuring Design Changes

A week ago, I replaced the Flickr photos in my blog’s header with iPhone OS apps: Retrospect Touch and Dollar Clock. Since I hadn’t updated Flickr since Christmas, the iPhone/iPad apps seemed more appropriate, and I was curious to see if the switch affected the download numbers. Here’s the before and after: Today, I checked [...]


WordPress Tip: Recent, Relevant, and Random Blog Posts

12 May 2010 Update: Interestingly, Google Analytics revealed that in the month since adding the sidebar, there’s been no significant change in the average time spent on the site (54s) or pages per visit (1.3). I still like it. Recently, I thought it would be interesting to add a sidebar to my WordPress blog. I [...]


Tracking and Staging WordPress Changes

Making template/theme changes to a live blog is a bit frustrating. While mucking around with CSS or a theme header, I occasionally render this blog completely illegible or obviously broken, then I scramble to revert my changes, hoping I remember the original code correctly. Editing is a pain without source control or a staging process [...]


Blog Breadcrumbs: Relevance, Recognition, and Trust

Whenever I encounter a strange error message or a similar roadblock while programming, I google for answers. This approach leads to a wide array of websites, almost all blogs. (In fact, most of this site’s traffic comes from Google, presumably from the same approach.) As soon as I get to the site, I want to [...]