Category: Gigs

  • For those who don’t have the spoons

    For those who don’t have the spoons

    We will all do what we need to do to keep our loved ones safe in times of tribulation. For now, I choose the spoon, for myself and for those who can’t.

  • Reports of our death…

    Reports of our death…

    I appreciate all the folks who’ve reached out (including some of our partners at work) concerned by what they’ve been reading about our team and wanted to send a brief acknowledgement to the folks out there that we are still in here fighting the good fight:

  • Technical difficulties

    Technical difficulties

    If I seem at all distracted it may be that my new boss’s old boss who is also possibly the actual boss of the country’s new boss is currently attacking the team I work for, and doxxing my colleagues. 18F’s account on Twitter was apparently deleted (actually a good thing, if you ask me) but,…

  • So… this happened

    So… this happened

    Like an aging AAA slugger called up to the majors, like a prep-school outsider starting college, like a choreographer with bad knees getting access to the biggest stage, I find myself leading the product management chapter at 18F as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. 18F is a consulting entity in TTS (Technology Transformation Services) in…

  • Super friends

    Super friends

    Between recording sessions and working for the state, I’ve been planning a redux of the one-day remote Design in Product conference and just posted a video over on Linky-Din promoting it.

  • Where I’m writing from

    When Apple brought the touch screen and the tablet together they kicked off a new revolution, one that moves us all one step closer to direct manipulation of the digital world at our hands. As a writer, I suppose I have naturally gravitated toward the realm of writing and editing, where we’re still following “word…

  • Tune In, Cloud On, Rock Out!

    Tune In, Cloud On, Rock Out!

    One thing about working real hard is that a lot of things I’d love to post about never seem to make it to the top of the queue, and then the blog turns into “here are my slides, here is a video of my talk, here is a weird song by the band, here is…

  • Broken Experiences panel at the IA Summit 2012

  • There's no 'I' in 'corporate brand' (or is there?)

    Jeff Gothelf has just published an article in Smashing Magazine on How to Maintain Your Personal Brand as a Corporate Employee. He interviewed me, as well as David Armano and Luke Wroblewski, while researching the article, and I’m quoted a few times in it. Here’s part of his conclusion: Be respectful of your employer and…

  • AOL?!? Really?

    Some thoughts on my first few days on my new job as a consumer experience evangelist at AOL, and what I hope to help the team here accomplish.

  • My Yahoo! years

    This post has turned out to be a lot more difficult to write than I expected. Last Tuesday was my final day at Yahoo! I wrote a valedictory post for the YDN blog as my official signoff. It wasn’t easy resigning from Yahoo! I started working there more than three years ago and had a…

  • Talking patterns, openness, and community with the Tummelvision crew

    Oh, cool! Heather posted the Tummelvision episode I appeared on a couple of weeks ago.

  • Tags as collecting behavior

    When I first started curating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, I put “tags” near the top of my list of user interaction patterns to investigate. By that time, Yahoo! had already acquired several pioneers in the tagging realm, Flickr and Delicious, and there were some subtle distinctions in how they implemented the experience. We got…

  • New navbar patterns in the Yahoo! library

    Over the past few months I conducted an audit of the patterns in Yahoo!’s internal design pattern library, with an eye toward publishing as many of them as possible in the open library at YDN. Why? Well, for one thing, to get more eyeballs on them, to gather more feedback and keep improving the patterns.…

  • Putting the social in the mobile

    My continuing series of blog posts linking to essays published in our book, well, continues now with Billie Mandel’s Designing Social Interfaces for Mobile, in which she writes: Contextually speaking, mobile phones are by definition social networking devices. Breaking out of the classic phone/phone book mental model and transforming that experience to include 21st century-style…

  • Talking social patterns with thriving UX communities in London and Berlin

    Talking social patterns with thriving UX communities in London and Berlin

    A week or so ago I undertook a whirlwind visit to the UK and the Continent, giving two presentations about design patterns and social design, one in London on Tuesday, and another in Berlin on Thursday, each event sponsored by YDN (and the one in Germany co-sponsored by the local IxDA group). The London event…

  • Your users are mental

  • New iPhone stencils for prototypers

    Interaction designer and prototyper Chris Stone recently volunteered to adapt the iPhone stencils in our OmniGraffle based stencil kit in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and optimize them for use in Adobe InDesign. Chris “created a customizable, vector-based iPhone stencil library for InDesign.” To make it he worked from the PDF version of the stencil…

  • New Presence patterns in the Yahoo! Pattern Library

    We just published two new social patterns in a new category, called Presence (under People), in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The two patterns are Availability and Updates. The Design Pattern Library is a collection of guidelines for the design of online interactions that can aid decision-making and guide the work of web developers and…

  • Designing social interfaces at Web Directions South 2009

    I had a great time presenting at Web Directions South 2009. J.J. Halans took some wonderful photos at the event, such as the one showing the Where’s Waldo slide (above) and this one (showing Erin’s awesome visualization behind me): The slides by themselves are only part of the story of course but I’ve just posted…

  • First YDN video podcast with Jonathan Leblanc

    Jonathan gives a few shout outs to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and my new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The best part is when the host says he considers the Yahoo! Developer Network to be “the unsung hero of the Internet.”