Molly Malsam

Perficient has recently launched a new blog called “Spark”, dedicated to discussing innovations in technology. On that blog, I discussed the use of a sovereign posture for mobile applications in today’s post and when it might be a good strategy. The explosion of mobile has led to many more variations on context of use than […]

When talking about mobile applications, the concept of the software’s posture doesn’t come up often. Posture is essentially the program’s behavioral stance, or the way it presents itself to the user. Alan Cooper, in About Face 3.0, explains that desktop and Web applications can fit into four posture categories: sovereign, transient, daemonic, and auxiliary. You’ll […]

In my previous post, I introduced  Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes card deck, and discussed one of the card’s insights. Another one is about triggering: “We need small nudges placed on our regular paths to remind and motivate us to take action.” This concept becomes increasingly important as our world daily becomes more full of information […]

I recently purchased Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes card deck. The cards offer “50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.” Because user experience design draws insights and […]

Just read this illuminating post from a former esteemed colleague. It coincided well with my attempt just a few hours ago to find the pages that I’ve “liked” on Facebook. I wanted to see if I had remembered to like a company page to get into their free iPad2 drawing. I have declared to my […]

Error messages are still too often an afterthought in a development project. No offense to my esteemed developer friends out there, but you can usually tell when a developer has quickly written an error message that got thrown into production code. I just got the following error message today (box title tactfully redacted to avoid […]

Every time I’m forced to use a collaboration tool I don’t like as much as my favorite one, I realize how important they are to my productivity. Once you use a product that was designed to be as simple as possible and to do the most important things well, you really don’t want to go back to the one that makes you take 5 or 6 steps to do something you can do in one click. I won’t name names of those that I don’t like, but here’s a roundup of collaboration tools that make my life easier.

Every time I’m forced to use a collaboration tool I don’t like as much as my favorite one, I realize how important they are to my productivity. Once you use a product that was designed to be as simple as possible and to do the most important things well, you really don’t want to go back to the one that makes you take 5 or 6 steps to do something you can do in one click. I won’t name names of those that I don’t like, but here’s a roundup of collaboration tools that make my life easier.

Check out UI Stencils’ new product: an iPad dry erase board. I’ve used their sketch pads and stencils, which help my inner-child fears of drawing with just a pencil and a blank page.

Creating a good user experience with portal implementations is both critical and cost-effective. Because the users of most Web portals are very diverse, a solid understanding of the types of users—their needs and goals, their contexts of use, their task flows—goes a long way toward designing the most appropriate experiences. And because the tasks done […]