Author Archives: Bill
Lots of Color
Yes, I went ahead with it anyway. Last month, inspired by the visual excitement of Richmond, Virginia, and hearing tales from my colleague Wendy, at work, about the Color My Run, I bought two tickets to the event here in … Continue reading
Not Your Ordinary User Group Meeting
Last night the Raleigh Salesforce User Group outdid themselves and had a user group meeting like no other. We met at Tyler’s Taproom in downtown Durham, in the back room, for a presentation by TerraSky‘s Tony Nelson about Sky Visual … Continue reading
War Memorial as Text
For this Memorial Day, I visited a new war memorial that was recently dedicated here in Garner, North Carolina. Walking in the Garner Veterans Memorial is a beautiful and educational moment. It is set near the entrance in the lovely … Continue reading
Micro-Momentum and Designing Interaction
At a recent TriUXPA meeting, we listened to a recorded webinar by Stephen Anderson (thanks UIE) about Designing for Micro-moments. One of his themes was that interactions (as in user interaction with a web site or web application) is a … Continue reading
Richmond: A City Rich in Visual Expression
I recently went to Richmond, Virginia, for the weekend to see my niece’s graduation and to be a part of the celebration. I went a day early and toured the city a bit. My hotel was downtown, amidst one way … Continue reading
Interactivity in Instruction
There are some key features to instructional design that are not in, say, documentation or support, and that’s what makes it interesting. I’m not a full-time instructional designer, but I have this idea that there is something fundamental that separates … Continue reading
Mobile Feast
In keeping with what he has written in Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski, alias @LukeW, presented some great ideas about web interface design. He is a proponent of considering mobile devices and considering them first when designing web sites. At the … Continue reading
UA Tools Survey Review
Joe Welinski has done it again: produced a great tools survey and published the results. Here it is: 2013 User Assistance Tools Survey While the cynical among us might think this is self serving, drawing viewers to his site to … Continue reading
Extreme Judging
For a day of intense technical communication, comes the event of the year – STC Carolina Chapter Competition Judging. Last year, the chapter did a great job of taking a long drawn-out process of providing feedback on competition entries – … Continue reading
Protoblocking: Using HTML Blocks for Modular Prototyping
A bunch of us met at Capstrat in Raleigh to see the latest webinar sponsored locally by TriUXPA. The webinar speaker, Nathan Curtis, from EightShapes, talked about building HTML prototypes. His talk was titled “Start Full Screen: Organize, Communicate, & … Continue reading
Affordances are not Afterthoughts
When we have a great event, such as the TriUXPA meeting tonight, we realize what great things collaboration can accomplish! Richard Phelps, the president of the chapter; the speakers, Rex Hartson from Virginia Tech and Pardha Pyla from Bloomberg; Lulu … Continue reading
The Currentness of the Collaborative Cloud
Offline to All-line Once upon a time we talked about working “offline” as a way of saying that we were working on paper or in person, away from and apart from a computer. As more of our work moved to … Continue reading
Content Stratification
Ever-Broadening Content Horizons In her recent blog post ‘Content strategy – a revolution?’, Betty Tew is just touching the tip of the iceberg (or, whatever the equivalent in a cloud metaphor would be). I like how she refers to “the … Continue reading
Designing is Getting Touchy
Introduction Last Thursday, I joined other local TriUPA members and listened to Josh Clark‘s webinar titled “Buttons are a Hack”. He ostensibly was trying to get us to do more with gestures and less with traditional windows controls, menus, and … Continue reading
Tintinnabulation
This week I went to see the movie ‘Adventures of Tintin’ with my now grown sons. When they were boys, I introduced them to the Tintin books, mostly the English ones. So it was partly nostalgic to see it with … Continue reading
Web Analysis Project
There are many ways to interpret a web site. Through user interfaces, design patterns, business achievements, and social acceptance, one can obtain a general and sufficient understanding of a web site and what it has to offer. I am developing … Continue reading
