This article could not have come at a better time.
There was one lesson from the UX Crash Course: User Psychology that caused some controversy: Anti-UX.
i.e. — working against the user to prevent them from doing something impulsive.
I absolutely stand by the lesson’s central idea, but the example I used definitely goes against the way some people think about UX.
So here’s an awesome example from real life, with data and everything. :)
In a nutshell: Lumosity added 5 pages of very relevant questions to their registration process.
It increased their active users by 10%.
At first glance that could either seem impossible or sound like a lie. But think it through.
10% is a relative increase. You can achieve that in two ways: add more active users, or remove inactive users. Aha… that’s the trick.
By making their registration more time-consuming while still keeping it easy and relevant, they made unmotivated users drop out.
That saves those users time, spam, and maybe money.
And, what do you have left after you get rid of the unmotivated people? Motivated people!
Lumosity will spend more time on the people that matter, and will get better information because they won’t talk to people who aren’t actually interested.
They will also create a better product, faster, and will design features for people with long-term interest and loyalty.
Everybody wins. And that could only have happened by using Anti-UX; working against the user.
I highly recommend reading the linked article, and a tip of the hat to Lumosity & First Round.
A technical glitch causes the Hubble Space Telescope, which ordinarily captures magnificently crisp scientific imagery of the cosmos, to lose balance and create this inadvertent piece of modern art.
It is suspected that in this case, Hubble had locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in this remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
But, at the end of the day—at the end of a lot of days—I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing women as props and symbols used to push the hero along his way. I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing the massive chasms between what they present, what they claim to represent, and what their fans insist they represent.
This feels like this is something I knew how to do, once upon a time, back in the days of MS-DOS...
Let's say you need a list of files in a certain directory for whatever reason. Maybe your boss wants all the files that belong to a departed coworker, or you need to inventory your gif folder, or you just like lists of things. In Windows, there's no quick way to copy file names and paste them into a new file (I know, right? Ugh).
So: workaround! Here's how to get a list of files from a local or network directory and save it to a txt file so you can access it later. Without third-party software. Without tearing your hair out!
Open a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd, or type cmd into the search box in Windows 7)
Type: dir [YOUR FOLDER PATH, ie \\network\drive\folder\subfolder or c:\Desktop\stuff] > [WHERE YOU WANT TO SAVE THE FILE, ie c:\Desktop\stuff\filelist.txt]
Profit!
Or, even better: dir [FOLDER PATH] | clip
Which puts it in YOUR CLIPBOARD
Just make sure it's not, like, a billion frillion lines, you know?
Then you can import it into Excel or wherever as text or a delimited file. No clicking! No retyping line by line! This just saved me about four hours of work today \o/!
I kind of resent the suggestion that there would be something inherent about superheroes that wouldn’t be of interest to women. That makes me nuts. I’m a 5-foot tall women with a quick temper who always looks like a child, so power fantasies are not strange to me. I also have this theater background, and I’ve always loved superhero comics the same way I love Commedia dell’Arte. The same way I love opera. This is Greek mythology. These are huge overwrought characters that somehow speak to the lizard brain. There’s genuine catharsis available in this stuff. I don’t think working in superheroes is slumming it. I’m proud of this form. I like this. There’s nothing inherently masculine about power fantasies. There’s nothing inherently masculine about superhero comics. There’s nothing inherently masculine about mythology. About science fiction. There is no reason that a woman who is interested in this field as a reader or creator should feel that she is peculiar in any way. It makes me furious when I see that — particularly when it’s the “nerd culture” that does it! Really?! Is that what we’re going to be about?! From a business standpoint, it’s just stupid. Women control the purse strings in families very often. Young women have their own income and love to shop and read. Why would you leave money on the table?
Dowling Duncan and redesigning the American Dollar:
Why the size?
We have kept the width the same as the existing dollars. However we have changed the size of the note so that the one dollar is shorter and the 100 dollar is the longest. When stacked on top of each other it is easy to see how much money you have. It also makes it easier for the visually impaired to distinguish between notes.
Why a vertical format?
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.
Why different colors?
It’s one of the strongest ways graphically to distinguish one note from another.
Why these designs?
We wanted a concept behind the imagery so that the image directly relates to the value of each note. We also wanted the notes to be educational, not only for those living in America but visitors as well. Each note uses a black and white image depicting a particular aspect of American history and culture. They are then overprinted with informational graphics or a pattern relating to that particular image.
$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.
Working on a website proposal for a client thinking about moving to a virtual storefront!
Luckily, styletil.es and cssgrid.net did their own heavy lifting and made the templates available, so I can spend more time working on graphics & coding and less trying to figure out how best to present to the client :)
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