Michael T Pullen – 2013

Pegasus Collaborative: Where the unicorns come to play

Oh how many times do you read that job description and wonder what kind of unicorn they are looking for? So many job descriptions and so many articles have been written on the topic:

A UX unicorn is that job description that says the company would like the designer to do all of the research, analysis, visual design, interaction design, information architecture, copy writing, acceptance testing, validation, usability testing, CSS, HTML, Javascript, angular, node.js and be an expert in agile methodologies. Oh yeah, don’t forget, are experts at communicating at any level in the organization with product management, business owners and developers.

For many years I have worked with software development organizations. A challenge has always been to find great UI developers. UI development is not taught in colleges and universities. Most developers that I have worked with have been business tier or database developers. Since it is difficult to find good UI developers, every organization tries to convince their business tier devs that they can do the UI. I am forever having the long walk to the car with a […]

SharePoint leaves me a bloody mess

SharePoint is difficult. It is hard to use, confusing to set up and inconsistent. Now that I am done telling you what you already know, let me walk you through an inconsistency.

Recently I was working at a client site. They asked me to post my documents on Microsoft’s SharePoint so that everyone in the company can have access to the files. After hours of looking through all of the webparts, apps and what not that they jam into SharePoint I did not feel that I got very far providing access to all the documentation.

I soon found that it was not only the gross functionality that was all over the place but also the overall visuals combined with the basic interactions. Here is a walk-through of one page only looking at the hover-over actions and visuals. There are very few things on the page that do the same thing.