about uxtraordinary
UXtraordinary is written, designed, and coded by Alex O'Neal (me!). I hope you enjoy these writings, and find some small portion useful.
The breadcrumb JavaScript used on the lower-level pages is primarily an edited code snippet from Greg Griffiths' helpful site. Also, extraordinary architects Kathleen Egge and Jonathan Evans have both provided invaluable feedback, particularly as I worked through the challenge of integrating breadcrumbs into a persistent (via CSS) menu.
personal guidelines
Since there is no one perfect design, there can be no perfect set of rules—only the best, most natural approach at a given moment. These are the guidelines I've developed for myself over the years.
- Taxonomy is context, and context is everything.
- Every audience is different. Even the same group of people will be a different audience for a different product or service. The behavior you desire will be different, and therefore audience triggers and responses will be different.
- Every audience is the same. Even two groups with no overlapping members share similar neurology. Information design can make use of these common perceptive and cognitive traits to optimize engagement and usability, both on an individual page and throughout the site.
- Form follows function. Do what you need to do as well as possible, and beauty will follow.
- Closely related is this: don't be attached to the beauty of the moment. Taste and technology and audience needs change—and so must your site.
- Every solution is a blend of need and options. It's not that the glass is half-full or half-empty, it's that you have a glass and a certain amount of water. Now, what can you do with that?
personal guides
Scattered throughout the site are quotes from others that have informed my user experience philosophy. Here they are in one place, with some friends.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
—African proverb
For actions, here are the biggest questions: what are the seriously considered options available to an expert? Then, what do naïve people do?
—Clark Aldrich
A positive user experience is the only method of differentiation these days. In the early days of the web, I mistakenly believed that brand drove user experience which, in hindsight, was an old media way of thinking. These days, brand (and everything else) follows user experience.
—Andrew Anker, Six Apart
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
—Marc Chagall
Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
—Albert Einstein
Nothing is useful unless likewise honest.
—Erasmus
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—Galileo
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement.
—Stephen Jay Gould
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
—William James
Personally, I think neither of these methods must be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Both may be used in turn by the same individual.
—Henri Matisse
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
—Marvin Minsky
Any architect (physical or digital) needs to have one foot in the past and one in the future.
—Peter Morville
Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.
—William of Ockham
Continuous eloquence wearies. [Or, I can haz lolspeak?]
—Blaise Pascal
You know you've got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for.
—Clay Shirky
Without an architecture of our own we have no soul.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
—Stephen Wright
Braaaaaiiinns.
—Zombie
