steve kwan user experience designer

Cabin Fever

(March 25th, 2005 - 1:51AM)

I'm heading to my parents' cabin for the Easter weekend. Sarah is coming. There won't be any updates to the site until Monday at the earliest.

I'm trying to print off a copy of my BCIT course notes so I can study for the final exam (this Tuesday) while I'm at the cabin. You'd think this would be a relatively simple task, but the notes are in PowerPoint presentations and I don't have PowerPoint at my parents' house, where I am now. I've converted the presentations into Word documents, but they're quite large and are taking some time to copy over to the computer at my parents'.

I'm currently sitting at a desk and drinking a glass of Merlot. It's not bad. I'm not sure what Paul Giamatti was talking about when he said, "I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!" See Sideways if that line is new to you.

At work, we've made tremendous progress in terms of interface, but perhaps I'm the only Eloquentee who thinks so. My co-workers are generally not big graphic design or interface enthusiasts, so I'm more or less on my own when it comes to pitching new interfaces.

One of our online public search mechanisms is what we call the Public Keyword Search. Compare the old Public Keyword Search to the new Public Keyword Search and see what I mean. The colors and so forth are controlled by stylesheets, so it's quite easy to customize the look and feel per application. Luckily, my predecessors seemed to have anticipated the need for stylesheets and customizability, so the work I needed to do to make this new interface happen wasn't that much.

Note that all I really changed on the Public Keyword Search was the coloring and imagery; however, I hope that this will give a more positive impression of the software. Our products are very powerful, but up until now, the look on the outside didn't adequately represent the power inside.

I'm planning to do more work on our interfaces and perhaps customize a few layouts designs for certain clients.

I'm currently on my second glass of Merlot, which I believe classifies me as a lush; this is the fifth alcoholic drink I've had since I woke up.

By the way, I'm going to see Damsel Fly on April the 8th. Anybody interested in coming?