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On Saturday, May 19, Lane Halley of LUXr will teach a 1-day workshop on User Experience for Lean Startups. The event will be held right here at AO’s offices. User Experience is one of the most challenging and least understood aspects of creating a product…and yet it will make or break your product. During this…
As you may have heard, a bunch of us atoms went to Cooper UX Bootcamp Midwest a few weeks ago. As you also may have heard, it was a really great experience. Other people have done a great job of telling the story of what went on. You can read those stories here and here,…
I’ve never considered myself to be a brilliant artist when it comes to drawing and sketching. Although I grew up watching Mark Kistler on PBS every morning, I think my drawing skills have always been mediocre at best. Instead, I greatly enjoyed mixed-media styles of creativity when I was a kid, and as a teenager,…
atomic_usability_starter_kitGood usability testing takes a fair amount of planning. In order to get quality feedback from your test participants, it is essential to carefully craft your tasks ahead of time, make sure your software is ready for users to play with it, and make sure everyone on your team is in agreement when it comes…
Recently one of our teams at AO worked with a client to do 2 days’ worth of usability testing with real users. I acted as the test facilitator for this project. As the test facilitator, I greeted test participants when they showed up, explained how the test would work, and walked them through the tasks…
I drive a cherry red, 11-year-old Ford F150 pickup.* Every day when I drive it, I find myself admiring how well the dashboard is designed. Auto aficionados might be quick to point out that it’s not the most elegant dashboard in the world. However, where it lacks in aesthetics it wins in functionality and usability….
We’re working on a supercool new company website over here at AO, and recently I worked on porting our staff biographies from the old website to the new one. Doing this was a great opportunity to learn some fun new things about my co-workers. Reading these bios one after another, I was also struck by…
Marissa and I at the Denver Airport on our way to Usability Week 2011. A couple of weeks back, Marissa and I went to NNG Usability Week 2011 in San Francisco. During the conference, I attended the 3-day training course on Designing Complex Applications and Websites. The session was co-led by Lynn Pausic and John…
As a software designer, one of my biggest goals is to make every application that I design as logical and as usable as possible, so that it fits in seamlessly with a user’s existing workflow, or even better, improves and streamlines it. I have found that one of the most valuable ways to do this…
This year at Atomic Object, we implemented a new practice: designers, instead of sitting all together in a group, sit co-located with the developers on their project. There is no “design team” or “development team” here; we all belong to “project teams.” This is just another step in our continued efforts to tightly integrate application…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object