deep fun and mom on UX design2002.12.20

Active Invisibles: Can you guess the actors in these pictures? One problem - the actors' clothes are there, but their heads have been Photoshopped out. Really great PS work. (thanks BoingBoing)

In light of the current horrifying stress levels of work, I went in search of a little bit of brain relief. DeepFun.com is just a wonderful site with lots of great resources, such as Tips For Having More Fun at Work. I'm all about fun at work as a balance to the stress and politics that always seem to just happen. It's called staff morale, and if your coworkers or staff aren't involved and engaged and optimistic and, yes, having fun, then your productivity will drop and turnover rates are going to be higher than they should.

Humor, Laughter and the Brain is a good scientific look at why I laugh at work every single day.

A great list of NN4.x CSS bugs available from the CSS Pointers group saved me from tearing my hair out the other day.

My mom, charming technophobe that she is, has come a long way - she's got an email address that she actually uses (sometimes) and will check out web sites that I send her. But I will always remember our first session on the web - she hadn't used a computer since the days of custom OSes. Which means she'd never used a mouse, and I've been using the damn things so long I've forgotten how hard it is at first to control them. It was very cute watching her struggle, and a lesson in user experience design I won't soon forget.

Once we had the mouse thing working well enough, it was time to move on to the concept of the web - clickable links. This adorable cartoon shows pretty well the struggle we had that day. She did pick it up fairly quickly, but until the day I sat down with her I never realized how much there is to learn in terms of visual reference and terminology just to be able to use a computer. Just goes to show I've been a geek for way too long.

Maybe that book that's been brimming in the back of my head should be titled Everything I Need To Know About UX Design I Learned From My Mom. :)

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