Currently Reading: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.
by Indi Young

This is a book from a series from Rosenfeld Media. The series includes Design is the Problem:The Future of Design must be Sustainable, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

What I’m enjoying most about this book is the practical advice for integrating UCD into less formal design processes. I’m only part way through, and there’s a lot of “real” information.

For as long as I have been using OS X – when you tried to eject a disk that had an application running or a document open you would see the following ambiguous error. If you happened to have a lot of different applications running or documents open, finding which was preventing you from ejecting the disk was a guessing game.

I upgrade to Snow Leopard this past week… I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the many tweaks that made it’s way into 10.6 was this clarification as which application or document was culprit. And if there is more than one cause, both are listed.

I’ll be honest – I have never liked Taleo’s so called Talent Management platform. Over the years I have encountered Taleo a number of times when considering career opportunities with medium size companies. After the first couple of (negative) experiences I have more or less avoided using their interface whenever possible.

As a one of the talented being managed, I can see that the system is designed primarily for HR users, with little regard to the talent’s user experience. Today I was about to ignore my own better judgement (the position looked pretty good) when I was reminded anew why I avoided Taleo:

Huh?

I guess it’s better to be stopped in your tracks at the beginning, rather than to find out much later that the system crashes your browser (as it did mine) or otherwise fails to make your life the least little bit easier.