24 February 2009
The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment
Jim Walls investigates the discount offshore logo business.
Found via Dave Shea's Mezzoblue
Me:
Abina-
Upon further consideration, I feel that you guys have really missed the religious connotation in my company’s name, and we really want to play this up. Is there a way to emphasize this connection? Specifically, when you redesign the various cheeses, is there a way to approximate DaVinci’s “Last Supper”? I do think the Swiss cheese could be positioned roughly where Jesus is located, since Swiss is a very prominent cheese.
Thanks for your continued hard work. We’re close!
—
50DollarLogo:
Dear Jim,
Thank you for the email.
We have informed our designers about your request. We aim to send you the improved logos within 2 working days.
We are happy to provide you as many numbers of revisions as you want. We strive to make our customer fully satisfied.
Thank you,
Abina
Found via Dave Shea's Mezzoblue
Labels: design
02 January 2008
Outlook UI Annoyances vol. 1: Unread Items
Like many "knowledge workers" in the world I am chained to the Microsoft Outlook at work for my email and calendaring purposes. My own personal thoughts on email as a collaboration tool aside [that's for another day and perhaps its own startup] there's somethings about it that drive me absolutely batty. Today's annoyance:
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
Notification of unread items
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
- Deleted mail you haven't "read", including ones that you use the pop-up notifications to resolve
- auto-saved drafts of mail messages that are still being composed
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
The "Unread Mail" folder itself
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
04 May 2007
My First
I'm finally done interviewing for new jobs and signed an offer to start at an exciting new place. It's going to be nice working on a real design team again, at my last couple positions I've been the sole usability resource and that's a bad place to be in. I recently read this post by Mark Hurst and it brought back some memories.
I was actually the UI designer for Evite when that version of the invite launched way back in fall of 2000. It was my first UI-related job title. Yes, its basic structure is six years old save for about 2/3 of the ad units. Of course back then it also seemed like a good idea to employ 70 people to make it happen and that's what led to the company being sold to Ticketmaster and basically put in maintenance mode from a product development perspective.
I'm not ashamed of it, it was a great challenge to try to deliver good design weighed against the need for customization by the user and a need for more advertising and our whole design and PM team worked very hard to make it happen. It just fails to incorporate the last half-decade of good user experience thinking. Sadly we had an entire new structure for creating the invitations based on a lot of customer feedback and user research but we never got to launch it.
Evite was the first place I ever worked that gathered feedback directly from users instead of through surveys, third-party focus groups, overpriced usability consultants and the other traditional market research. We made imagemaps out of screen comps as prototypes. We used to monitor usability tests with a VGA splitter and a Speakerphone so we could watch the users screen actions on a projector in the next room. We tested multiple versions of new screens to portions of our users. We used to invite expert users over and feed them pizza in exchange for the ability to pick their brains. These were the days before "Don't Make Me Think!" and most people still thought you needed an expensive, monolithic testing cycle to get valuable feedback. As unsuccessful as it was as an independent business it was a great place to work and we did some very interesting work. And a lot of the people I worked with there have gone on to do some very interesting things.
I was actually the UI designer for Evite when that version of the invite launched way back in fall of 2000. It was my first UI-related job title. Yes, its basic structure is six years old save for about 2/3 of the ad units. Of course back then it also seemed like a good idea to employ 70 people to make it happen and that's what led to the company being sold to Ticketmaster and basically put in maintenance mode from a product development perspective.
I'm not ashamed of it, it was a great challenge to try to deliver good design weighed against the need for customization by the user and a need for more advertising and our whole design and PM team worked very hard to make it happen. It just fails to incorporate the last half-decade of good user experience thinking. Sadly we had an entire new structure for creating the invitations based on a lot of customer feedback and user research but we never got to launch it.
Evite was the first place I ever worked that gathered feedback directly from users instead of through surveys, third-party focus groups, overpriced usability consultants and the other traditional market research. We made imagemaps out of screen comps as prototypes. We used to monitor usability tests with a VGA splitter and a Speakerphone so we could watch the users screen actions on a projector in the next room. We tested multiple versions of new screens to portions of our users. We used to invite expert users over and feed them pizza in exchange for the ability to pick their brains. These were the days before "Don't Make Me Think!" and most people still thought you needed an expensive, monolithic testing cycle to get valuable feedback. As unsuccessful as it was as an independent business it was a great place to work and we did some very interesting work. And a lot of the people I worked with there have gone on to do some very interesting things.
