I noticed this resource in someone’s retweet today. Back in December, UXBooth unleashed their “Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions”.
My favorite: the browser screen resolution checker (#5). Because ya gotta know how your baby looks at different resolutions.
Top 29 Free UX Tools and Extensions :: UX Booth
Tags: resources
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I know that as a professional user experience practitioner I should avoid angry rants, as they’re (mostly) unproductive.
But here’s the thing: I am PISSED OFF right now, I feel cheated and abused by this printer’s designers, and I have no real recourse except to call out the manufacturer and tell them just how thoroughly they have failed me… and in all probability, many other customers.
I’ve owned this printer – a Canon MX860 – for about a month. So far so good, I’ve been able to connect it to my network and print plain paper documents with no problems.
So this morning I tried to print a half-dozen photos so I could send pics of the kids to my 99-year old grandmother. Sending attachments or a link to my Flickr account is not a viable option. She wants pictures, big pictures. Pictures she can hold in her hands.
No can do. I’ve spent more than 45 minutes crawling around the backside of this stupid time vampire of a machine, trying to figure out why it insists on printing from the rear tray, and realizing I don’t know how to load this until-now-unknown-to-me rear tray.
I’m angry. This stupid piece of crap printer just stole almost an hour of my time. And I still don’t have the damn pictures to send to my grandmother.
So you fail, Canon. You fail hard. It’s a pity actually. I really like and enjoy my Canon cameras. But you’ve just stolen – yes, stolen, as in consumed without my agreeing to it – an hour of my time. Think that’s a trivial amount? It’s not. Not when you multiply it by x number of people who’ve also struggled to print photos. And I’m sure “x” is not a small number.
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So I’m seeing a nice little Twitter spike about my latest UXmatters article “8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your UX Practice, But Probably Aren’t.”
It was a column borne of equal parts desperation and writers’ block. Then I remembered how much mileage Cracked.com gets out of the “X Things” format, and decided to try a UX-specific version. You take your inspiration where you can get it, right? Honest truth, I had low expectations for myself.
The funny thing was when I finished it, I realized that the article didn’t actively suck. In fact it was kinda decent. Of course, it helped that I had some good advice and suggestions from Susan Hura, John Rhodes, and Dan Szuc. But no one said I couldn’t turn to friends/colleagues/wife for a little inspiration.
So here’s a little taste of the article; for more go to the site and check it out yourself. Quoting me:
…here are 8 things you should be doing to improve and grow in your professional practice, but that you’re probably not doing—or not doing enough:
- Communicate simply
- Read, read, read
- Pick a new UX tool and experiment with it
- Hold a UX stand-down and operational review
- Stretch yourself outside of user experience
- Think about your UX career path
- Repurpose your UX assets
- Depart from script on user research visits
I hope you enjoy the article, and feel free to comment either here or at UXmatters if you have more things to suggest.
8 Things You Should Be Doing In Your Personal UX Practice… :: ? Paul Sherman
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(Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard of News of The Future. He actually submitted this about two weeks ago, and I’ve just been too busy with project work to post it…my bad. My apologies, and thanks for the pic and post Andreas! -Paul)
The following user interface of a video-conferencing system cries for simplicity. It’s crammed with so many buttons that the average viewer easily gets overwhelmed.
Even the core task of “setting up a video conference connection” becomes a challenge.
User-centered design was definitely not part of the software development process for this product.
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