Never pick up the phone unless it's your own

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What’s the explanation for picking up a ringing phone if the person who owns the phone, is away from their desk?

They caller isn’t calling you, you can’t help. Leave it alone.

The recipient may have set up call forwarding, or a usefull voicemail, which the caller now won’t receive.

More than that - you’re wasting your own time (picking up a call you can’t help with), the callers time (probably needing to call back, wondering who they just spoke to) and introducing uncertainty (will the message you took even get to the recipient?).

Hey, you - leave that phone alone.

Automated photo workflows with DropBox, Hazel and IFTTT - Part One

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In preparation for an even longer post describing my own complex workflow for sharing photos from my phone, across several social networks and back to my own computer for long term storage - here's my wife's work flow for dealing with her images and my daughters art work.

Okay, here goes:

  1. I take the photo using the Flickr app on my mobile. My Flickr app is set to upload photos as public, by default. I tag it with "#alia" during the upload process.
  2. I set up a "recipe" in IFTTT which says, "If I upload a public photo to Flickr with the tag #alia, send it to my Dropbox folder." I have set up a Dropbox folder called Photos/Alia_Art to receive these snaps.
  3. In Hazel on my Macbook, I set a rule which says, "Any photo in the Dropbox folder Photos/Alia_Art should automatically be placed in my iPhoto album." I have set up an album in iPhoto called Alia's Artwork to receive them.

Thus, an automatic process is created whereby any photo I take of Alia's artwork, tagged and uploaded through the Flickr app, appears in a special album within iPhoto. The whole process takes just a handful of clicks on my phone (to be specific: click, click, take photo, click, tag, click).

Once a month, I open my iPhoto album and edit the photographs. Every time the total number of edited photos in the album hits 100, I order a softcover photo book directly through iPhoto, which costs about £16. Bam! A loose-paper-free, space saving way to store hundreds of my daughter's paintings, drawings and collages in date order. We'll be able to see as she develops her art skills, and she'll love to have the books when she's older.

The best bits I'll still keep and get framed. The rest goes in the recycling.

What do you think?

5 UX phrases that sound alarm bells

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  1. This is an old favourite “To proceed, simply press the button to your left”. The phrase annoys me, managing to be condescending in a single word. As well as talking down to your audience it’s also a concrete admission of failure. If the next step in your users journey isn’t so obvious that it has sunk into the users brain the second the page appears then you should return to the drawing board.
  2. "Once you've filled in your details just go ahead and press continue". You fail at obvious next steps. Also an annoying Americanism used by Americans who haven't thought about the rest of the world whilst writing their content.
  3. "click here to continue" an oldie bit a goody I suppose. Your links should make sense out of context. That means, if everything else was taken off the page, the link still makes sense. This leads to verbose arrangements so think long and hard on your interface copy.
  4. “But that bit is really cool” or some such riff when discussing a design element. Sounds far too much like you have picked your pet feature and stopped being objective about it. Noticing this, and acting upon it (by ditching the element) will help the design.
  5. “The user won’t do that” - Are you sure? Did you test them? I’ve never, ever, failed to be genuinely surprised by something a user has done during a testing session. You are not omnipotent, you cannot see the future, we spend all day studying users and yet we can’t predict what they will do to our interface that only has 5 thing in it. Test. Then tell me that 95% of users won;t do that but we need to deal with the 5% who do.

Any more?