Rob Adams's User Eccentric

I'm Speaking At MAX

This week I'll be at MAX 2006, Adobe's (nee Macromedia's) annual user conference. I'm giving a talk on "Creating Learnable Applications", co-presenting with Stephen Gilson from the Flex docs team. If you'll be in Vegas for the event, come check us out; we'll be giving a bunch of practical tips and tricks on designing and documenting easy-to-learn applications, aimed at UI-savvy developers who may or may not have help from interaction designers, design researchers, or other UI folks. Also feel free to just wander up to me and say hi; I'll be the one critiquing the UI of the slot machines instead of gambling.

Ideas in the World

My friend Dan has started a little blog project called "No Ideas But In Things". Although the name is quite a mouthful (it's inspired by a poem) I love his premise. Basically Dan is collecting pictures of artifacts out in the world that may employ controls, displays, conventions, etc. with the aim of inspiring interaction designers. I've found that almost all great new ideas are really just remixing old ones, so there's no shame in borrowing or stealing in our profession. Give it a look, and if it inspires you, maybe send Dan some photos of your own.

Inaugural Post

Welcome to User Eccentric! I'm Rob, one of many user experience professionals doing my life's work in San Francisco, California. At the moment, I work for Adobe Systems, Inc. as the user researcher for our Flex product line. I'm in the business of designing great products that make people happy, and this weblog is about how I go about that business: interaction design, design research, and fitting the two together. I'm an industry practitioner, so I expect most of the content here will be focused on pragmatics. If I wax theoretical from time to time, forgive me; I did study philosophy for some time in undergrad and old habits die hard.

This is actually my second blog; the first, roblog.org, was an affectation of mine as I was attending grad school at Carnegie Mellon University. It ran for about a year and a half and collected quite a few entries before I fell out of the habit of updating it regularly. It's now defunct but still available for archival reasons, and will probably continue to be at least until I get around to moving all the interesting entries over here. All new content will go here, however, and I plan to keep a clearer focus on the field of experience design and research for this little project.

Enjoy!