Crappy Back-Office Apps R Us: why I love back-office apps when nobody else does

by Joan Vermette on September 23, 2011

Okay, my home office location in Foursquare is meant to be a joke, but I really *do* do a lot of work on back office apps. And how do I love them? I’m about to count the ways for you. 1. There’s Lots of ‘Em In truth, loads more of the work of the First [...]

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Using index cards for personal knowledge management

by Joan Vermette on October 4, 2009

Setting out in my own consulting business has meant acquiring a lot of new skills in a hurry: everything from marketing to bookkeeping, networking, providing my own document templates and contracts, scoping, scheduling and all sorts of things that as a design manager in a large corporation, I had other people to do for me. [...]

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The Death of Wireframes? Or the rebirth of actually talking to each other again…

September 25, 2009

I invented wireframes. Okay, clearly I didn’t – you can read Whitney Hess on the history of using wireframes for application and web design – but back in the day (mid- to late-90s) when I started out, we didn’t blog or tweet every twenty seconds like we do now, or have as many networks or [...]

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Be a coach

September 24, 2009

Personal and Executive coaching is all about helping people clarify their desires, envision their futures, develop a concrete plan towards achieving that future, holding them accountable towards that plan, and holding their agenda for them in the times when they might give in to their fears or to distractions. That’s also what’s required of good [...]

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Pattern libraries and style guides

September 23, 2009

Although I created and ran a style guide for seven years of my career, style was the least of my concerns, and in retrospect, I should have lobbied for another title for myself, my group, our documentation and our activities. For in practice, it was always much more about patterns of functionality, data relationships and [...]

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Page templates? Components and layout standards

September 22, 2009

I have found that for large, content- and functionality-rich sites with many different types of users and business contexts, page-template driven content management and other systems break down for want of sufficient flexibility, or because there are so many page templates created in the system that it’s easier to take a basic one and mess [...]

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You’re not designing sites: you’re designing systems

September 21, 2009

Designing for reuse and consistency requires rethinking the way designers work: designers need to think globally and design locally. That is, while designing specific sites and/or features, we have to understand how what we create partakes in the design system as a whole. Does it leverage the core principles? Does it support or contradict a [...]

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Scope and continuity

September 20, 2009

On a film crew, there’s a role called “continuity” — this is the person that makes sure that while the film is being shot in scenes, it all hangs together as a whole. For example, he/she makes sure that the light is at the same angle as in the previous scene if there’s supposed to [...]

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UX evangelism and leadership

September 19, 2009

Big systems do not spring up for the sake of themselves: the reason for all of the grand effort it takes to get large web sites up, maintained and expanded upon is for people to use them and give you their money. They’re more likely to give you their money if your product is good, [...]

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