Jill's musings

A friend of mine, let's call her O, is starting a new blog on being a new mom with her two sisters. With this new venture, the three sisters hope to share their stories and experiences as a way of supporting each others as well as any new moms or mom-to-be's out there. As a busy career mom of an adorable one-year-old boy, O is new to blogging and had asked me to help her set up her blog. We had a fun time on FaceTime yesterday, chatting about pregnancy, babies, and things she ran into using Blogger as a first-time user. I couldn't help but put my UX hat on. Here are the things I learned from our conversation from a UX lense. What is ... Blogging introduces plenty new concepts for a new user to digest. The exact meaning and implications of some of the terms aren't crystal clear to myself as someone who has blogged on and off for a number of years.   What is a Domain? The very first concept we talked about was Domain. O had the sense that a domain name is the

Summary: A user experience a selection barrier when he/she is faced with multiple choices for accomplishing a task but is unsure of which one to select [1]. I recently experienced this as I was beginning to do text analytics in MATLAB. In this blog, I document my trip through a land of many choices trying to figure out a single file reading function to use and how I wish the experience had gone better. Finally, I Text  analytics is a hot topic these days. I came across John Laudun's Text Analytics 101 when browsing for an intro article. The article walked the reader through an example that involved revealing language usage patterns in a short story based on the frequency of words. A light bulb lit up in my head: why don't I do the same thing with my Toastmaster speeches? That would help me understand, quantitatively, what words I "rely on" the most and help me think about how I might vary my language to make my speeches more accurately express the meanings I int

As the weather in the New England gets colder, we've been spending more week nights at the town's library. My favorite section of the library is the northeast side of the second floor filled with books on homemaking, art, and career. As a frequent visitor, I'm hardly surprised by the surroundings here. But I was the other night. As I was walking down the aisle, I noticed a couple of unusual signs on the side of one book shelve (Figure 1). They were eye-catching because  they had pictures in them in addition to the expected book section numbers. (First time in my life had ever noticed a picture on the side of a library book shelve!  Anyone else in the same boat?) One picture had a puppy and a cat in it pointing out the Pets Section. Another showed a pot of boiling spaghetti for Cooking, obviously. And finally, the last one was a clipart with a man and a woman in power suits hinting at the Career & Business Section.  Figure 1. A couple unusual signs at the Morse