Jill's musings

I recently picked up a project from a UX colleague. Here are a list of questions I asked (or wish that I had asked her). People Who are the key people? What are their workstyles like? Who are your resources? Who are your best friends? Who might have opposing views from UX? What are people's expectations from UX? Project Is there a project charter? (Goals, stakeholders, schedules, milestones, risks, etc.) What does the project schedule look like? What are the milestones? What's the overall project strategy? How is success measured? What are the important assumptions? Are there any risks you are aware of? User Who are the users? What are their roles and goals? What motivates them? What are their primary tasks or workflows? What are some of the tips for working with these users? UX work Where are we in terms of UX research and design? What UX work has been done? Explain materials/artifacts. Explain process for a...

Holiday cards are always fun to make. Our card from last year caught many by surprise: it appeared that the Gu and Cao family had adopted a new family name, "Thompson". That was not what we had intended at all! What went wrong We were super behind in creating the card last year. In fact, I didn't get to it until well past January 1 of 2017 (gasp)! In a haste to get things done, the blunder happened, inevitably. I unknowingly agreed to the new family name Walgreen's had decided for us (or for all of its customers who happened to have selected the design).  Not until when I was holding a giant stack of cards that bore our proudest family photo of the year did I notice the the tiny print sneaking under the cheerful "Cheers", and it spelled T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N. Oh, no! I wasn't going to discard all the cards that I had just paid for so I had to fix it. After experimenting with a few variations, I settled on "The 'Thompson' Family" because...

One of my favorite books I read in 2016 is an interior design book named Styled: Secretes for Arranging Rooms from Tabletops to Bookshelves by Emily Henderson . The book is teeming with beautiful photos and amazing tips that can transform any space from boring to sophisticated. In this book, Emily encourages her readers to use a tray to hold small objects together. I tried, and it worked! Just look at how pulled-together my vanity l ooked after following this tip. And I can't help but wonder: what a magical tray! Interestingly, I came across something very similar while reading on a seemingly unrelated topic, web design, this time. In their book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design ,  Jason Beaird  and James George talk about the concept of proximity when considering  the composition of a web page. It's a pretty intuitive idea: in a composition, objects that are close to each other tend to be interpreted as a single unit by the viewer.   The p...

Life with baby Ryan is hectic! Perhaps just a tad more hectic than I had anticipated. In between endless feedings, diaper changes, and plenty play time, I try my best to squeeze in a little bit of me time here and there. My latest attempt would be this long-waited post and I'm so excited! Being a first-time parent, I'm very cautious about anything related to my baby's health and I have used three methods to track Ryan's patterns, namely the old paper and pencil, the Baby Feeding Log App, and the Eat Sleep App on. I'll be reviewing all three in this post. The Old Paper and Pencil Log While we were at the hospital, we were given a sheet of paper with a table printed on it to keep track of Ryan's feedings. It worked OK for the first couple days but soon after coming home, I became frustrated with having to carry a pencil and the sheet around. One good thing about the paper and pencil way was that it was super accessible . Anyone knows how to do it. It was...

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 Mors...