Life is like a box of … crayons!

Life is like a box of … crayons!

Have you ever wondered how or why companies choose what their main brand colors will be? Well if you haven’t, you will now.  Since I am not a graphic or visual designer, I have always thought the color choices were strictly driven by aesthetics or possibly what colors were trending at that time. But after learning more about color theory, it is clear that different colors elicit certain emotions. For instance, many financial institutions, like Chase, American Express, VISA, PayPal,…

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Accessibilty Testing

Accessibilty Testing

If you were to close your eyes, and I told you I was looking at a student right now, what would you be picturing? How about if I said he was a postgraduate engineering student working in the new electron microscope lab… is that easier to picture? Image taken from: https://www2.le.ac.uk/webcentre/plone/build/basics/add-images/alt-text As someone who does not have a visual impairment of partial or full blindness, Alt-text is somewhat a foreign concept. But as a designer, making sure the website I…

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Therbligs

Therbligs

Image by Jeff Suro taken from History of Usability I’ve always been drawn to history and often ask myself, or my wife, “I wonder how that came about?” As I was driving to work this week listening to Professor Darren Hood’s podcast The World of UX with Darren Hood on Spotify, my interest was piqued as he discussed the history of UX. Most UXers have probably heard about “Kaizen” or “Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing” employed by the Japanese car manufacturer, Toyota, in the…

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people with question marks
“Stupid” Questions???

“Stupid” Questions???

Have you ever heard the phrase, “There is no such thing as a stupid question.” Well, that’s wrong. There are stupid questions, many of them. The problem is we aren’t asking the stupid questions we need to, which can often lead to a new way of solving for the RIGHT problem as designers.  As Don Norman states in his book The Design of Everyday Things, “A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious……

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Invisible Gorillas & Passing Doors

Invisible Gorillas & Passing Doors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&feature=youtu.be “Watch the video and count how many times the players in white pass the basketball.” -Daniel Simons Sounds pretty simple, I mean the video is only 1 minute and 21 seconds long… how many times can they really pass the ball in that time period? What’s most interesting about this video is that during an experiment where subjects were asked to do just this, count the number of times the team in white passed the ball, nearly 50% of…

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Inclusive Design

Inclusive Design

“Diversity is our worlds greatest asset, and inclusion is our biggest challenge.” ~Jutta Treviranus, Founder of Inclusive Design Research Centre (OCAD) This week during my Masters in UX Design course, I found myself down a rabbit hole, filled with exclusion. I was browsing on LinkedIn when I saw a post from Ben Woods, sharing a post via Darren Hood, referencing Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Principles. In moving through the site, I came across a film they produced which opened my eyes…

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My First UX Blog Post…that sticker on your apple!

My First UX Blog Post…that sticker on your apple!

If you get a chance, check out this Pinterest Board, Eating Apples. You will see babies eating apples, Beatles eating apples, and even Marlon Brando chowing on an apple during a break on the set of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951). What you won’t see are those little stickers that need to be peeled off, often taking some of the apple with them before being rolled up and flung into oblivion. We don’t see them, because we barely notice them…

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