Kenny's Thoughts on User Experience Design

Fast Forward Your Life

Kenny — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:50:25 +0000

Where would you be in four years if your life was fast forwarded? Two months ago I was asked to do the information architecture for a mini site for the One Tree Hill Season 5 DVD release.

The basic concept was to allow a user to answer a series of questions that would help determine their career in 4 years. The user would then be able to upload their photo onto the body of their given profession and use it as a widget to place on their social networking profile.

When creating the wireframes, I wanted to make it easy to use, always providing a logical next step, while at the same time, promoting the DVD. I think it came out pretty well.

Aurora Concept Video

Kenny — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:08:35 +0000

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series. For more, visit adaptivepath.com/aurora

User Experience Wordie

Kenny — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:02:06 +0000

Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently and you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

The Future of Firefox Mobile?

Kenny — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:46:33 +0000

A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs.

Check out Aza’s blog post for a more detailed discussion.

Usability Testing of Gmail Chat

Kenny — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:42:17 +0000

The Official Gmail Blog shows the evolution of Gmail Chat. In it, they describe having a usability lab to test out new features and ideas. The feedback from the testers are used to help guide their decisions. TechCrunch gave a peak inside Gmail’s Usability Lab. As can be seen, it is not some big lab with a two way mirror. Their lab is just a small room with a computer and some video equipment which any company on a budget can setup. I think what is most interested is that despite all the different iterations of Gmail chat seen from the links, Google eventually ended up with a very simplistic lightweight application. Sometimes, less is more.