Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Making images responsive on the Web is actually pretty easy. Don’t specify the width and height of the image, and include one simple CSS declaration, and bingo! Responsive images that scale beautifully as the page resizes and reflows. But what if you want a different crop of your image on a mobile device? Well, that’s […]

The Web marches inexorably forward, and we love to see the innovations that come from that progress. But usually, a proportion of your users won’t see the new hotness. They’re stuck on an old ‘n busted browser that they either can’t update (because IE8 is the highest version of IE available for Windows XP, and […]

I grew up in what you might call “a Disney family”. What this means is as a child growing up we always looked forward to our annual road trip from chilly Wisconsin to sunny Florida. We enjoyed the palm trees, cheesy shell shops, orange juice stands and “Meeting the Mouse”.  Watching Disney movies and relating […]

Many news outlets have reported that this year’s flu season has hit early, is unusually strong and will result in the worst flu season in a decade. I recently discovered Google Flu Trends, which is a project based on Google Trends. Since Google performs 4.7 billion searches per day, they are sitting on a mountain […]

Form Follows Function has put out a growing set of interactive examples using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. What you’ll find there is some really interesting interaction and occasionally seizure-inducing animation. Are all of the examples practical? No, but that’s not the point. What is being shown off here is that with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you […]

Investing in innovation is a gamble that usually ends in flop or fortune. Frequently today it falls to startups to make those wagers as they may have less to lose. Seth Godin argues instead that “with great power comes great irresponsibility” and that existing companies don’t have to always play the safest route and ought […]

According to IDEO, “Design Thinking is a about believing we can make a difference, and having an intentional process in order to get to new relevant solutions that create positive impact.” It is also described as being human-centered, collaborative, optimistic and experimental. IDEO follows an open-source process to implement Design Thinking by dividing it into the […]

Back in October of 2012, I wrote about how smartphone screen had steadily grown with the current king being the Samsung Galaxy S III with a 4.8-in, 1,280 × 720 display (the best-selling smartphone during third quarter of 2012).  However, the big news out of the Consumer Electronics Show recently held in Las Vegas was […]

Being on the bench gives a man more time to do what he truly enjoys: mindlessly playing around with new technologies, APIs and generally making a lot of cool stuff that doesn’t really do anything. Enter…the gyroscope! What is a gyroscope? No, it is not a telescope that automatically zooms in on the nearest Greek […]

For years, Starbucks has served only dark roast coffee drinks, implying that the dark roast was a better roast and appealed to everybody. I’ve previously written about a very interesting TED talk where Malcolm Gladwell discusses the trend toward understanding customer preferences instead of relying on one absolute “best” product.  Gladwell actually mentions coffee at about the […]

A couple of years ago I was working on a small project where the client wanted to visualize data from their field operations on a map. Nothing overly complex – just locations, custom icons, radius of operation for that location, etc. Easy, I thought. We’ll use a system like Google Maps. Except the client wanted […]

A little while back I wrote this nugget of wisdom: Creating a great user experience extends beyond the research, beyond the wireframes, and even beyond the visual design. All that hard work is ultimately for nothing if your website or web application isn’t fast. Why? Because if your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will […]