kuniform

Random notes from the nngroup conference. First off, while burning a mule I end up in the stall next to the esteemed (and stinky) Bruce Tognazzini, co-creator of the original macintosh interface. Poor Tog climbs out of the stall and before he can wash his hands people are all over him. I thought they were gonna pull out locks of hair or something.. I was like, damn! Let the man wash his hands!

Coolest thing he did was come back by us lowlife volunteers and do magic tricks during his 1 day seminar, when the payin’ schills were involved in a group exercise, which Tog never examined, collected, nor referred to during the rest of the seminar. Cracked me up.

Best Nielsen quote: “The web is like a psychedelic anthill.” I think Amerika is getting to Jakob.

Poor Tog part 2: Norman cuts him off 10 slides early because he’s running out of time in his keynote, which was better than the one he gave in 2000, even though it was the same material—it had better delivery (since he included magic tricks). Anyway, that is not a sentence, that whole string of phrases up there. So, Norman cuts him off early so they can get questions, and, in a room of 400 people, no one had a question. Embarrassing silence follows, break begins early.

In all fairness, though, it wasn’t Tog’s fault. His subject matter was so straight forward. I firmly believe if you watched this guy in action, his design methodology would appear simple, but the results would be great. Tog did not follow the UCD-ego pattern as much (except when puffing up to blow at OS X, Jobs, or m$ [microsoft]), but I will bet his results were better anyway.

Still working the kinks out of this redesign, and learning how movable type works. I am not sure which templates apply to which actions yet. Please submit feedback and let me know what you think, and pass the site along to friends. Soon, i’ll even have some nice links up here for folks to view stuff at.

thru my school i had the chance to volunteer at the nielsen norman group’s conference in chicago (opens in new window). it was cool to get the chance to see what they’re about after all this time, but it was a little depressing, too.