Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology outsourcing. Jobs are outsourced from companies like Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Honeywell, and many others. In Microsoft I’ve worked with teams in both India and China developing software for a variety of uses. Having our headquarters in the US, I usually work with small satellite teams in these countries. I couldn’t help but wonder why these countries who had become huge in the area of software technology, struggled so much in the area of user experience and UI innovation. … »

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for Johnny, which I apologize for. I’ll keep this as a short observation piece on what I’ve seen in the last several years and what I’d like to see moving forward. I’m Interested in any comments others might have. … »

Everyone reading this knows what a brainstorm is (I hope). I want to review a bit about the process I’ve used to find success in brainstorms, why they are helpful, and how they can be more successful in a corporate environment. If you work in an agency, this may not be as helpful, but might offer an interesting perspective. For those in the corporate environment, I hope this will help give you new ideas and erode old beliefs. … »

Over the last few years, social computing has been relegated to asynchronous websites like FaceBook and Twitter, where users connect with many people and their collective information is harvested for the larger group. However these are still largely individually actions, not synchronous… yet we call it “social”. I would like to expand that definition. … »

In my first article I laid some ground work discussing touch as part of an ecosystem and the matrix of inputs available for people to interact with systems. In this article we’ll look at making things a little more complicated by adding in different technologies, form factors, and the cardio effect of touch.
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Initially we only had a keyboard for the command line and text entry. Then the mouse appeared for navigating two dimensional plains of UI. Now the field of computing has a new input toy to play with; our hands. Touch, multi-touch and gestural computing, also known as Natural User Interface (NUI) has become the newest input craze. Excitement around this has even spurred comments predicting the demise of the mouse in the next 3-5 years1. Computer designers (and engineers) have become engrossed with the ability to touch the screen with multiple fingers and control software by waving their arms. However in this excitement, have designers overlooked how to properly engage users and use multi touch to create useful, innovative, and interesting experiences? … »