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A lesson in Interaction Design from my son Wyatt

Posted on: Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 in: Usability, User Interfaces

Wyatt (my 2 1/2 year old son) was putting on his boots and I was surprised to see that he’d lined them up the right way (with the arches toward each other).
My first, pessimistic, thought was that he had a 50% chance of getting it right but I praised him all the same.
He then […]

Mint Desktop Linux

Posted on: Friday, February 22nd, 2008 in: Linux, Usability

I just installed the Mint Desktop Linux and I’ve got to say it’s pretty slick.
Seamless so far.  Better UI than Ubuntu and so far it doesn’t have the annoying temporary lockup that Ubuntu and gOS had for me (every 5mins or so the system would look solid for about 5 seconds).
If it doesn’t lock up, […]

Are you sure you want to _______?

Posted on: Monday, January 14th, 2008 in: Programming, Usability, User Interfaces

I’d love to never see that dialog box again. Can we make that happen? Would it be worth it?
Abstractly, you can treat all user actions as transformations on an application’s state. Undo is then implemented by either remembering the state before the action, or by knowing how to do the action in reverse (depends […]