Cranky Tip #35: Easy Ignoring

May 18th, 2008
Cranky Tip #35

Easily Ignoring is as Important as Easily Finding

To be effective, our designs need to make our content easy to ignore.

As strange as that might sound, if your most important users can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, it means that they have successfully looked past everything else. Some Web sites make this harder to do than others.

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Things I Don’t Care About

May 11th, 2008
Cranky Lists

Things I Don’t Care About

  1. I DON’T CARE where information architecture ends and interaction design begins. I’ve got a big rock and it needs to get from one side of the river to the other. I’m just going to solve the damn problem.
  2. I DON’T CARE how your weekend went, I don’t care about anything involving the weather forecast and I don’t want to talk about rush hour traffic. This doesn’t make me a bad person. I just find all of those conversations a lot less interesting than just about anything else we could possibly discuss.
  3. I DON’T CARE about defined methodologies when it involves the user experience. If it’s my work, I’m going to cherry pick good ideas out of any methodology and use those as I need to; if it’s your work and you’re telling me about methodologies then you’re trying to sell me something, which is fine if I wanted you to try to sell me something. Are you sure I asked?
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Cranky Tip #34: YehBut Label

May 4th, 2008

Cartoon

Cranky Tip #34

Watch Out for the YehBut Label

Have you ever been a YehButter? You know, somebody who other people say things about like “Aw yeh, they’re really talented/smart/creative” and somebody else says “yeh, but they’re so intense/angry/moody” and everybody listening nods their heads in agreement and just like that you’re marginalized.

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