Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

While you’re at work, you read a restaurant review for a new place you think sounds tasty. Come dinnertime, you grab your phone to pull up the address and location. One night on your tablet, you’re browsing articles for a report you’re writing at work. Back at your desk the next day, you struggle in […]

“My job shouldn’t be trying to convince you that I should get to do my job!” It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard from when interviewing a design professional, someone toiling in obscurity in an organization that didn’t appreciate her work. Sure, they told her all the right things when they hired her. […]

The experience of using a mobile website should naturally be different from a desktop experience – not just visual presentation, content should be prioritised and structured differently. The risk, though, is that you’ll wind up maintaining different versions. News flash: this will be a disaster. Duplicate content. Out-of-sync updates. Wasted effort. When usability pioneer Jakob […]

Just because someone is doing a search from a mobile device doesn’t make it a local search. And just because someone is looking for local content doesn’t imply they’re using a mobile device. Just because many local searches are from mobile devices does not imply that most mobile searches are for local information. If you’re […]

A conversation at the magazine. A. There’s no such thing as photo editing. B. What are you talking about? Our photo editor is right there. Look at him, he’s working. Whatever it is he does, it’s called photo editing. A. But can you really say there’s such a thing as photo editing? I’d argue that […]

Lorem Ipsum is one of those things like silicone breast implants or orange spray cheese in a can that just seems wrong. It’s fake. It’s unabashedly fake. It calls attention to itself by being so fake, making you look at it in wonder, asking: “What is that? Can that be real?” We don’t like fake, […]

Learning more about computing history is a sort of professional hobby of mine; I have a fetish for pictures of old mainframes and this research lets me indulge my proclivities. When I tell people in the user experience field about my studies the most common response I hear is “I don’t know anything about the […]