Driving Usability With Empirical Data

Driving Usability With Empirical Data
Too often, I work with folks that dismiss many years of interface design and information architecture experience as “your opinion” and are eager to offer their own in place of good design practices. To avoid such “he said, she said” arguments (oh, and do the right thing for the user), I’m always happier when I’ve ...

Selenide: Extending com.codeborne.selenide.Condition

Of all the libraries I’ve used over the years, Selenide has come to occupy a top spot in my developer’s toolkit second only to that of jQuery. Selenide has played a crucial role in making Selenium (while functional) easy to use. I’ve been using Selenide for a few months on a current project; I’ve finally ...

Customizing Rally With Greasemonkey

After a break of several years, I’m back using Rally for agile product management. Often, my scrum status involves “beating Rally into submission.” I’d like to share one of my tools that accomplishes that goal, in the form of a Greasemonkey script that makes the various Rally screens a little more usable. It’s a simple ...

Making Better Charts 1

Making Better Charts
As I was browsing the Business Insider blog this morning, I ran across an article entitled Tablets Are Becoming More Important Than Smartphones For Online Shopping, But Retailers Aren’t Ready. Interesting stuff. The article includes the following chart: Using the chart, I wanted to answer the following questions: How much more important are tablets than ...

Drawingmachine by Eske Rex 1

The video above shows the creative art of Eske Rex. From his web site: Drawingmachine is a construction involving two pendulums, each suspended from a tower construction and connected through “drawing arms” and moveable joints. A ballpoint pen resting on a drawing surface covered with paper is mounted at the point where the pendulums come ...

Keyboard shortcuts with Mousetrap

As a JIRA power user, I’m impressed by the dizzying array of keyboard shortcuts that are available throughout the product. It was the clear inspiration for a similar integration I added to a recent project, using a great little JavaScript library called Mousetrap. Share this:FacebookLinkedInTwitter

Groningen: The World’s Cycling City 2

A very interesting look at how Groningen, a city in the north of the Netherlands, has become a wonderful place to cycle via a combination of serendipity and design. From a medieval times as a fortress city that prevented sprawl to a controversial transportation development plan in the 1970s, a number of unique factors have ...

On product management and taking medication like oxycodone when you’re sick 1

Today someone asked me what I considered to be the most rewarding part of product management. Immediately, that quiet moment after sprint planning is complete came to mind. As the team files out of the conference room and I’m breathing a sigh of relief, I feel an incredible sense of accomplishment when the team has ...

jQuery FTW

In August 2006, I began working at ColdSpark, Inc. as a Senior Web Engineer. One of my immediate charges was to choose a new UI framework and supporting set of JavaScript libraries to build a new management and monitoring console for the SparkEngine product suite. After careful investigation of the options available (including an empirical ...

R and Cassandra

I often find myself turning to R to perform basic statistical analyses that either aren’t possible with Microsoft Excel, or are too manually tedious. Recently, I was faced with the challenge of analyzing data stored in Cassandra and started with the goal of creating a histogram of message sizes. I began my efforts by: Grep ...