About Rob
Rob Adams makes products people love. He is currently employed as a design researcher by Adobe Systems, Inc.
Author Archives: Rob Adams
The Four Qualities of Successful Design Researchers
In my four-plus years of being a professional design researcher, I’ve worked with a fair number of other design researchers. As part of my own professional development, I’ve reflected on what makes the great ones so great and the mediocre … Continue reading
Posted in design research
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Firefox 3 Makes the Web Safer
I recently accessed my Paypal account to fork over some money to a friend for buying me a few bottles of wine. I had also recently upgraded to Firefox 3, without spending any significant amount of time looking over the … Continue reading
Posted in interaction design
2 Comments
Snackr Sinks Its Teeth Into Google Reader
As a side project, I’ve been helping NJ out with his Snackr AIR application. Way back when he first started building Snackr, he sent me a build and I started using it. It was exactly what I needed to get … Continue reading
Snackr: Don’t Read Blogs, Snack On Them!
My coworker and friend NJ has created a new way to read and digest your RSS-syndicated news feeds in the form of a ticker-like desktop application built in Flex and AIR called Snackr. I’ve been using it to help him … Continue reading
Posted in snackr
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A Pattern Library for Information Design
I’m not usually one to recycle links, but this pattern library for information design was too good to pass up. Christian Behrens catalogs around 55 different ways to display information that helps application designers and others go beyond blasé bar … Continue reading
Posted in interaction design
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Thermo: The Board Game
As many of you may know, I’m currently hard at work on Thermo (demo video), our next generation RIA design tool, along with the rest of the design team. I wanted to share one of the research techniques we’ve used … Continue reading
Posted in design research, flash catalyst
7 Comments
Excellent Example of Eliminating Work
Yesterday’s xkcd demonstrates a FIG best practice in action: Although one might quibble with it’s means, the Wifi autoconfig program depicted here does an excellent job of following the FIG best practice “Use the impeccable memory and powerful processing abilities … Continue reading
Posted in interaction design
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FIG Evaluation – The New Dilbert.com
(Disclaimer – as always, the opinions expressed below are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer.) Dilbert.com recently relaunched with a new site design that uses primarily Flash. Good technology choice. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone … Continue reading
Posted in flex interface guide, interaction design
2 Comments
enabled=”false” Considered Harmful
Oftentimes when designing applications, certain functionality needs to be present in some situations but not in others. The traditional way of dealing with this on the desktop is to enable the controls that provide access to that functionality when it … Continue reading
Posted in interaction design
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