Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A few years back I came up with a strategy for dealing with the temptation of eating around the holidays. In the time-honored tradition of Tim Ferris’ Four-Hour Body I call this the Minimum Viable Diet: You don’t have to watch what you eat. You don’t have to cut back on drinking. You don’t have […]

Alere Multi-year retainer relationship doing UX and IA for the employee-facing experience of an employer wellness program site. Avaya A long term Razorfish retainer client, I don’t think I did any real work but I know I went to some meetings. BankOne Led UX design for Bank One’s first launch of transactional online banking, alongside […]

I am delighted to announce that I have formed a new strategic consulting firm with Ethan Marcotte and Jeff Eaton called Autogram.

Who visits a page on a conference website about a grievance procedure? The way we as information architects approach our work is by trying to understand the audience for a given piece of information or task. Any communication should be designed to meet that reader or user’s needs. The audience for this particular web page […]

Last week I received pretty much the best email I’ve ever gotten, from Emma S.: As a student doing an eighth grade project on careers, I was greatly drawn to web developing and designing. I’ve always loved working with computers, learning about coding, and spending as much time as possible on being online. Part of […]

“You’re lucky,” said Mr. Pelcek, my elementary school guidance counselor. “At least they’re not bigger. When I was a boy, hearing aids were huge boxes people wore around their necks, with cords running up to their ears.” Was I also to be overcome with joy that I wasn’t lugging around an ear trumpet, like the […]

About twenty years ago I asked a man I’d never met to meet me for coffee. It wasn’t a blind date—he’d been recommended to me as an academic who understood the field of technical communication, and I wanted to ask him some questions about graduate programs. We spent an hour or so talking about my […]

My friend and lawyer, Alison, has the unenviable task of talking me down when I get screwed over by a client or business partner. My strategy is to whine piteously “but it’s not fair!” and then she explains how to use each incident as a learning experience so I can avoid making similar mistakes in […]

I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces. These included: Evaluating whether content is useful, valuable, actually worthy of being […]

I know a few things about how to live out of a suitcase. I’ve spent the better part of the past couple of years traveling as much as I’ve been home. TripIt tells me I’m in first place among my friends for number of days on the road—a dubious honor. These tips aren’t aimed at […]