Design

One Word, Sounds Like

Today I was thwarted by a voicemail directory. I called the main phone number for a company with an automated PBX. However, I didn’t know how to spell the last name of the guy I was trying to call.

Schrödinger’s Poor Cat

I’ve become a regular reader of Creating Passionate Users and the Kathy Sierra’s latest article Schrödinger’s Product is another excellent instalment.

However, in today’s article Kathy trots out the standard Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. Now I’ve been blessed with feline companions for 15 years, so I might know a thing or two about cat behaviour. And if you think you’re going to lock a cat in a metal box with a vial of poison, you’re crazy.

Keeping Users In Mind

Kathy Sierra has a really great article about designing for users rather than features. (Thanks Josh for linking to the Creating Passionate Users site.)

The closing paragraph really sums it all up:

Who Designs These Things

For Christmas I bought a Canon Selphy CP510 for Anna. It’s a really cool dye sublimation printer that will print up to 4×6 photographs. The photos are water proof and basically every bit as good as those you’d get from CVS or Walgreens.

Except some idiot designed the physical unit.

Developing a Site for the Bean

Some of you may already know that in about a week’s time I will become a father for the first time. My wife has already registered the domain name weewatkins.com so I’d like to create a Web site for her to post photos and short thoughts.