UX, Design, Code, Technology. Future Perfect™
Eric D. Fields is a user experience developer in Boston, MA, USA. Ask me anything
Eric D. Fields is a user experience developer in Boston, MA, USA. Ask me anything
February 16, 2011
January 9, 2011
All I want is a “Copy CSS Styles” menu item.
Look Adobe (or any developer of image editing software for the mac): it doesn’t have to be this complicated. Trying to get CSS out of an image editor should be trivial. You know about a rectangle, its height, its width, how its being filled, if it has an outline, if it has transparency, if it has a border radius. You know this because I told you to make such a shape. I did it your way and you listened. Everything I ever wanted out of this rectangle, you’ve given me. Thanks.
But now that I or any of my designy colleagues have this thing looking pretty and signed off on, can you go ahead and give me all those rectangle’s qualities as CSS?
Hey, don’t get so worried! You don’t have to read my mind. I don’t expect that. Be as verbose as you want to. Even if I don’t need the width and height, give it to me anyway. It’ll take less time to delete your CSS output than code up fresh styles myself, especially if its a piece I didn’t design myself.
You already kind of have that, but your process doesn’t work for me. I don’t need ALL of the site, because you’re just not good enough to get it right. Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s just that this is a picture of a website, not the real thing that has unique intensions and offline conversations associated with it that you can’t possibly know about.
So please don’t do too much. Just give me a small export of the data you already know about with a simple click.
Thanks a bunch,
Eric
December 22, 2010
My Preferred Terminal Typeface: Anonymous Pro
Anonymous Pro (2009) is a family of four fixed-width fonts designed especially with coding in mind. Characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code.
I also roll it on a barely transparent black background (just enough to see text I might be copying behind it) in a lovely shade of banana and at 12px.
December 15, 2010
Bonobos couldn’t be a better men’s shopping experience
I’ve been asked a few times for a good recommendation on where to go to shop for great everyday (work/life) guy clothes. I always say Bonobos, an online-only mens retailer that started off with a better-fitting pant but now does so SO much more so SO consistently well.
Assuming all the stereotypes concerning guys and shopping are true, shopping online with Bonobos alleviates the following:
- You get to stay in your chair. No driving, no crowds, no salespeople. You get to stay as lazy as you like to be and don’t have to smile.
- Shopping with your girlfriend means sharing a screen or sharing links. You’re in control. Unplanned two-hour distraction shopping at the lady’s store: successfully avoided.
- You can do it in 10 minutes on a Sunday afternoon without missing a second of the Patriots game.
What makes this all possible is also what makes for a successful e-commerce experience:
- focused, quality inventory (seriously, there’s no bad clothing here)
- multiple, high-resolution images of the products
- findable, useful product information blended with plenty of personality
Also, if for any reason you have to deal with customer service, their ninjas are exquisite. They do Twitter, Facebook or email. Take your pick, they’re real easy to get a hold of.
Finally, as a super-pro style-blogger by night, I appreciate that they’re devoted to making the modern man look good. Check out the product details in the screenshot below and you’ll see foreign clothing concepts like “rise,” “inseam” and “finish,” which all describe the product’s qualities. Then when you wear this pair of brown glen plaid wool slacks and start receiving all sorts of complements, winks and job offers in the elevator, you now know what to look for in your next pair of pants. Ha, you just got a fashion educated, bro.
And here’s $50 off your first order. You’re welcome. Enjoy!
November 30, 2010
Email marketing in the smartphone era: mornings aren’t the best time for me
Go to bed with a zero inbox, wake up to 8 messages. Check email on the bus in: 5 marketing offers, 1 new follower, 1 coworker correspondence, 1 company emailbot telling me I still have no items caught by our spam filter (YAY!). I’ve got the iPhone set to show me the first 3 lines of copy of the email. Based on skimming the initial copy, I do the following, in order: delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, I’ll read this in the office, delete.
See what I did there?
The Official Email Marketing Handbook postulates that people go to their inbox first thing in the morning when they get to the office, so make sure they have something to look at. Well, I check my email on the bus often so I can start working when I get in (or read the news on a bigger screen, most likely). Its a 12-minute ride, and I’m still half-asleep, so unless there’s something really captivating in the first 200 characters or so of the email — or its from the rare sender that doesn’t send me something every single damn day — its getting cybertossed to the cyberwaste cyberbin.
Its interesting that come the end of the working day, anywhere from 5-7 PM, I no longer care about work email and sometimes the games or music I have don’t interest me. Nor do I want to read some serious articles per se. I think I’d appreciate some light reading material for the bus ride home, but no one seems to send email marketing material out toward the end of the work day.
So here we are, in 2010, on trains and busses at 5:30 PM for anywhere from 10 to maybe 90 minutes, on iPhones and Blackberries and, realistically, some wi-fi or 3G-enabled laptops. Anyone else see a missed email marketing opportunity?
November 16, 2010
Of all the years I’ve listened to this song, I never thought to look for a video. Magnificent.
The album this track is off of, btw, is perfect.
Oh, and The Avalanches have a christmas album, too. Who knew?
The Avalanches - “Frontier Psychiatrist” (2001)
Possibly the greatest video of all time.
The turtle man has haunted me for years.
November 12, 2010
You Can’t Ping a Podcast
You can’t “like” or “post” about a Podcast or iTunes U episode via Ping. You can’t use the Ping button to show the publisher or episode in the iTunes Store (a handy shortcut).
You can’t follow a university, or a Podcast publisher, or any one of the dozens of traditional media outlets who’ve done a real service providing their content via the iTunes Podcast ecosystem (NPR: thank you).
Think of all the conversation that could happen right in your iTunes around the countless informative and timely content these two corners of the iTunes store provide. Think of all the (arguably more worthwhile) recommendations you’re not getting from your Ping-mates. Think of all the updates and announcements those outlets could be posting in your Ping stream.
Disappointing.
November 11, 2010
Blog - Zach Waugh: The difference between Apple and everyone else
Every time Apple releases a new product, it becomes more and more clear that no other company really gets it. The next war for winning consumers’ hearts - in both hardware and software - will not be based on tech specs, but on usability and user experience. Computers are already way faster than…
The great impact of this article is the juxtaposition of images of the hyper-minimal Apple TV remote with those of two upcoming Google TV implementations, one by Sony, one by Logitech. Both integrate a keyboard with standard TV controls with hilarious results.
I get the rationale for the remote: search. I’ve never used an Apple TV, but typing on the Roku — which has a similar simplistic remote — is just painful. Apple probably expects most Apple TV users to also have an iPhone or iPod Touch they can pair with the device for a typing experience they’re already familiar with. This is a significant advantage Apple has over the Google TV competitors.
But what about those users who have an Apple TV who don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch? My hunch is that 80% of the content users drive to is only a few levels deep: new releases in the iTunes store or Genius playlists, for example. If you don’t need to search 80% of the time, you certainly don’t need a keyboard 100% of the time.
November 10, 2010
Tips from Google RE Instant Preview
My favorite parts from the official announcement:
Try to avoid interstitial pages, ad pop-ups, or other elements that interfere with your content. In some cases, these distracting elements may be picked up in the preview of your page, making the screenshots less attractive.
and
Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a “puzzle piece” icon or a black square. We’re working on rendering these rich content types accurately.
From here on in, I’m an Instant Preview Optimization Specialist™ (IPOS)
November 9, 2010
@danielmall @daringfireball @simurai So we all agree runaway code is the problem?
As simurai has expertly demonstrated, a Flashless world does not equal a more CPU-friendly world (fire up a CPU meter with that page open in a modern browser). Clearly, any poorly-written code that finds its way spinning through our processors has the capacity to degrade the user experience, and Ars has found that there seems to be a lot of poorly-written, processor-intensive Flash ads posted up all over the web that chug away at precious cycles and battery life.
Code that harms the overall computer experience is malware. I’m sure that as long as there has been software, there has been malware. Recently, malware showed up in the Android store. But you know where malware hasn’t creeped into? The App Store.
The Flash “problem” is the result of a universal plugin running applications — widgets on webpages — mostly ads — that aren’t regulated by anyone. If only there was some sort of rich interactive advertising network where ads were distributed and regulated in such a way that prevents poorly written code from ever reaching the user.
How about iAds?
See where this is going?
Apple’s iAd platform really hasn’t had much action, and as far as I know there’s yet to be an advertising experience as rich as the Toy Story 3 demo from apple’s iOS 4.0 announcement. iAds are likely to have the same sort of rigid approval process as iOS apps. They’ll be checked for poor performance, malicious code, and appropriateness. And as soon as developers get used to the rules of the game, we’ll start to see some really intense, engaging ads. But I bet they won’t steal cycles or drain a battery as fast as a similar Flash experience.
Let me end this pontification with the fact that I’m not smarter nor more informed than your average web developer who follows industry news as closely as anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can. So this is all just a hunch, and I’m not really interested in arguing whether this is right, wrong, good, or bad.
But taking a look at history, this all smells strangely familiar…
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