I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading. Each time I receive a New Yorker magazine and see Gladwell’s byline inside, I immediately read whatever he wrote […]

Continue Reading: What Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can teach us about interface design

Several folks have noticed I’m using a larger font size on bokardo now…here’s why. In short, the text is easier to read now. Not just the body text, but the text in all columns. The inspiration for this change came from an image in the blog post relative readability by Wilson Miner, who explained his […]

Continue Reading: Why the larger text?

Just a quick update on the various speaking events I’ve got coming up. UIE Virtual Seminar: Designing for Sign Up This thursday, December 9, I’ll be giving a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing for Sign Up. This presentation is for folks struggling with getting people signed up for their product/service. I’ll go over some of […]

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Are we hypocrites when it comes to technology? Or are we merely suffering from the tyranny of context? My wife and I are currently staying at an amazing farmhouse built in 1745 along the Merrimac River. Our lovely hosts, Windy and Brent, are caretakers of the house and estate and are what you might call […]

Continue Reading: The Tyranny of Context

One of my favorite examples of sign-up is from Tripit.com. They have a unique way of signing you up for the service. Instead of filling out a form to sign up, which is the norm, you simply forward them a confirmation email from a travel service. So you book your flight on Orbitz, they send […]

Continue Reading: Tripit’s innovative design evolves (but is it for the worse?)

An interesting bit came across my twitterstream the other day: Gall’s Law “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start […]

Continue Reading: What if Gall’s Law were true?

Kathy Sierra says we’re all marketers: “In this new open-source/cluetrain world, I am a marketer. And so are you. If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the […]

Continue Reading: Are Designers also Marketers?

If there is one book you should read next, it’s “Letting Go of the Words” by Ginny Redish The other morning I changed my about section here on Bokardo to this: “Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications. I write about recommendation systems, identity, ratings, privacy, comments, profiles, tags, […]

Continue Reading: Book Recommendation: Letting Go of the Words

We’re building tools to watch the world change… Doc Searls has a wonderful post on his long-time meme: The Live Web. What I like about Doc is that he knows words matter. So when he talks about the Web he uses specific words and phrases that frame discussion. He says that when people treat their […]

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Here are the slides from the talk I gave at d.Construct in Brighton a few weeks ago. Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: dconstruct08 interface-design)

Continue Reading: Slides from Leveraging Cognitive Bias Talk