UX

I currently own a couple late 80’s three-series BMWs. What I love about these cars is how responsive they are to my inputs. Steering, throttle, brake, the car does what I want it to do. With manual transmissions and ABS and cruise control removed, there is only one entity controlling the car, me. If I want to threshold brake through a corner, I can push the limits beyond what ABS would allow.

Stanley Marcus, of Neiman Marcus fame, once said, “There are only two things of importance. One is the customer, and the other is the product. If you take care of the customer, he comes back. If you take care of the product, it doesn't come back.” These days, that focus on customers and products comes together in the User Experience.

One of the primary draws to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is the ability to download and install apps on the device. The paradigm of an application storefront began in early versions of Apple’s iOS, and has since been adopted by all smart device operating systems. Now what interests me the most about these storefronts is how people use them.

Mobile consumers these days are demanding faster browsing experiences. This study shows that a good number of users expect web pages to load on their mobile devices at speeds comparable to desktop browsing.

Today I stopped by a favourite local bakery (Uprising Breads) to get an iced latte and Avocado and Hummus sandwich. The people there are always friendly and that sandwich always terrific. The problem arose when the barista served me my coffee.

There's been quite a bit of buzz recently about the "daily deals" business, what with Groupon's upcoming IPO and the advent of competitors such as Google Offers.

There's a deli near the office that many of us frequent for lunch. They make a good sandwich at a good price (for Gastown anyway). Recently, they changed ownership and although they kept the basic format, small changes began to creep in. Now, I'm all for change but some of the new ideas were questionable. One minor change in particular annoyed me.

Many video games allow you to configure your buttons the way you want. For example, if you don't like that you have to press X in order to jump, you can assign the O button to be your jump button instead by going to a button configuration menu. Unfortunately, not all games do button config menus the way you'd expect them to.

Happy World Backup Day. This auspicious day was created by a few of the gang over at Reddit to remind us to take better care with our precious information and data. I wish they would have reminded me sooner.

OnLive, one of the newer companies to make waves in the video game industry, just announced their plans to deliver content to mobile platforms.