Published in UX Collective·PinnedThree levels of UX Research impactEvaluating the impact of UX research is hard. Here is a framework that can help. — “John did great work on this user study, but the results haven’t led to any product changes yet. How should we talk about the impact of his work in this perf cycle?” “Perf” is a shorthand for “performance review” at Google, and yes, it’s that time again to evaluate the…UX Research5 min read
5 days agoCrafting clean, rich, and meaningful information displaysWhat I learned from reading Edward Tufte — I was first introduced to Edward Tufte’s work on information design and data visualization when I was studying HCI years ago at the University of Michigan. I recently had a chance to revisit the most well-known three of his books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information (EI), and…Information Design6 min read
Published in Flutter·May 12Perspectives from early adopters of Flutter as a game development toolIntroduction During this week’s Google I/O, we unveiled the Flutter Casual Game Toolkit, a set of resources to support game builders in the Flutter community. Up until that point, Flutter hadn’t focused on game development as an officially supported use case, though we had been impressed by success stories such as…UX Research11 min read
Feb 26Emotional Design for Productivity ToolsWhy utility and usability are not enough — What’s the last time a productivity tool made you smile or even feel proud? What a bizarre question. After all, shouldn’t we judge productivity tools, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and code editors, by how much they help their users get things done? What do pleasure and pride have to…UX Design7 min read
Jan 17Paul Graham’s Arguments for StartupsWhat if you can work 10 times hard and get paid 10 times more? — In my last post, I shared a few interesting ideas about programming from Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters. Another theme of the book is startups. In Chapter 6 of the book titled How to Make Wealth, Graham makes a strong case for building startups instead of working for existing…Startup5 min read
Jan 10What do programming and painting have in common?Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters is one of the most interesting and opinionated books I read in 2021. If Paul Graham is not a name familiar to you, here is how Wikipedia describes him: “He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup…Programming5 min read
Oct 26, 2021ACM UIST 2021 “Trip” ReportLatest user Interface technologies for programming support — I attended the 34th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2021), the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces, in the week of October 11th, 2021. It was a fully virtual conference due to COVID. UIST covers many topics, but this “trip” report is focused on the…Human Comuter Interaction11 min read
Published in Dart·Jun 30, 2020Dart string manipulation done right 👉Like many other programming languages designed before emojis started to dominate our daily communications and the rise of multilingual support in commercial apps, Dart represents a string as a sequence of UTF-16 code units. The encoding worked fine in most cases, until increased internationalization and the introduction of emojis that…Dart6 min read
Apr 12, 2020Reading the Story of Building Windows NTI got my first computer at the age of 12. It ran Windows 95. Later, I learned that Microsoft had another version of Windows called Windows NT for professionals. I never knew that NT was an entirely different beast from Windows 95 until I read a book dedicated to the…Computer History3 min read
Published in Flutter·Sep 9, 2019Improving Flutter’s Error MessagesWhen you write computer programs, it’s inevitable that errors are introduced, even for the most experienced developer. To resolve an error, the first step is often reading the error message that’s displayed in the console. But, research shows that programmers, especially novices, struggle to make sense of error messages, never…Flutter7 min read
