Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

The Research-Inspired Design blog

In addition to this site and CodBall, I am now actively writing for Research-Inspired Design, which was launched along with the new HumanCentric website.
Research-Inspired Design is the HumanCentric blog, where the whole company (usability specialists, industrial designers, graphic designers, software engineers, and interaction designers) share our thoughts on user experience. Check it out, and put [...]

Learning from Amazon.com

Jared Spool (UIE) is always fun to listen to, and his latest work of art, “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon” is now on Slideshare. In the presentation, Spool introduces Amazon.com as a unique place on the Internet, where strange things happen, like the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. Some [...]

Tips from Two Tweeps

Boston has a very strong usability community, which every year turns out in great numbers to their own annual “Mini-UPA” conference in the spring. It’s called Usability & User Experience and it actually has grown to compete with the national UPA conference.
A couple of my former peers at Bentley (@jledwell and @kaniasty) created a great [...]

Designing for Big Data

Jeffrey Veen (Small Batch, Inc.) gave a great talk on data visualization at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco recently (March 31-April 3, 2009). He provides a history of usage of visualizations, including the first subway map (the tube map) and John Snow’s map that is credited with ending the 1854 cholera outbreak in [...]

OK/Cancel Buttons on the Web

I’m a member of ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) and I had a great time recently at CHI ‘09 in Boston. Recently, all members of ACM received a postcard with instructions to vote in the board elections. The postcard directed members to a website similar to this:

I had to enter my PIN twice. [...]