So I stopped practicing UX at Kobo. Haven’t touched the stuff in over 9-months. I don’t even have Omnigraffle or any Adobe products installed. I don’t even know if I could graffle my way out of a wireframe. A bit of background Back around February, Kobo made some changes in the Product and Design were […]
In “The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” Steve Denning writes about Roger Martin’s new book “Fixing the Game“:
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Martin. “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
Emphasis added by me. Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Looks like I picked the right profession to be in. Fuck yeah.
A year ago, if you asked me what I was doing, I would have said, “No biggie, just designing an eReader application for the iPhone.” Since then, I’ve worked on the mobile architecture for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre and Android. The past two weeks saw Kobo announcing their new eReader device for our retail partners, […]
The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap of previous mobile efforts from Microsoft, from the look and feel down to the underlying code — everything is brand new. 7 Series has rebuilt Windows Mobile from the ground up, featuring a completely altered home screen and user interface experience, robust Xbox LIVE and Zune integration, and vastly new and improved social networking tools.
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Besides just flipping the script on the brand, the company seems to be taking a much more vertical approach with hardware and user experience, dictating rigid specs for 7 Series devices (a specificCPU and speed, screen aspect ratio and resolution, memory, and even button configuration), and doing away with carrier or partner UI customizations such as Sense or TouchWiz. That’s right — there will be a single Windows Phone identity regardless of carrier or device brand
From “Engadget’s coverage of Windows Phone 7 Series Launch“ regarding the need for tightly controlled UX.”
Hmm, maybe we shouldn’t count out Microsoft just yet. Bing has been great, it’s not better enough for me to switch from Google, but there are some really innovative things there. Windows Phone 7 series looks very much like the Zune; very promising.
I’m glad that Microsoft realizes that the UX is the most important factor in developing a winning product—they are about the only company (next to Apple) that has the clout to dictate a rigid stance on hardware and UX (for better or for worse) to its carriers and partners.
It’s been just over a year since I rolled out the current design of Pixels and Widgets and for the past four weeks, I’ve been itching to tear it down and start all over again. I guess the question that occurs to me is: Why redesign a site that you barely update? I’ve been asking […]
I had a chance to trial a Vodafone HTC Magic (from the UK) this weekend. It’s uses the Google-experience flavour of Android and as such I was not able to connect it to my client’s corporate email account. Total bummer. If I were to purchase a Rogers Wireless version, I’d get the ability to use […]
Working with my current client and developing mobile applications for every mobile platform under the sun has made me more aware of the user experiences for each device. In the past, I have dabbled using Windows Mobile, but for the past 5 years have stuck with Symbian powered phones from Nokia (with a brief 5 […]
I had a chance to take the iPhone from work and use it over the past weekend and I felt that I should write about it. The process was very simple: Just switch SIM cards and sync my contacts, email settings using iTunes. It was so seamless. Pretty jaw dropping if you have a Mac […]
