Warp speed blog

Some time ago I decided to take up new challenges and next week I am going freelance and starting my small business. I am leaving my company with which I will keep good relationship and where I met some truly great people. However, I feel it is time for me to continue chasing my dreams. [...]

There’s a popular belief that innovation can only come straight from the mind of a genius. After the article User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea has been published some people have taken it as proof that processes like User Centric Design (UCD) stand in way of innovation. I’ve spoken to my [...]

There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.— Charles Antony Richard Hoare Feature-creep or featuritis is a [...]

It’s always fun to play with jQuery especially when you are trying to recreate something that you enjoy using. One such thing is window chooser in Opera Mobile browser where opened windows are positioned below each other and only a portion of each window is visible. The one on the top is current window that [...]

Although different people assume different things when it comes to design, the fact is that good design is often thought to be decorative and aesthetic. This applies to design in general so web design is no different. We admire beautiful design solutions that are mostly nothing more than eye-candy. Seems as if primary goals of [...]

We all know how important form validation is. Users must provide required information, users must provide information in specific format, user must… Right. But imagine the scenario in which user saves a form even if validation fails. That is, when inappropriate formats are provided or required fields are left blank. Sounds ridiculous? To kill validation? [...]

Seems as if modal overlays are quite popular on the Web lately. A large number of easy to use plugins such as Lightbox, contributed to the expansion of overlays on the Web. Two years ago lightbox was named an Interaction Design Technique of the Year. Since then, overlays became a common way to show forms, [...]

I was in the middle of writing a long text in one online web application (made in Silverlight) when my FireFox crashed (Firefox is doing a great job in restoring your work, but in case of silverlight or desktop apps, you just can’t count on your browser). I lost the most of what I wrote [...]

Although many will argue that Microsoft products are an example of a good design, Minibar was one of design refreshments that came out with the Office 2007. It is a variation of a toolbar that exposes context-related functionality. In case of MS Word, context is a text selection. Since Minibar always pops up near the [...]

As I mentioned before forgiveness is very important principle in UI design. But error prevention is even more important – whenever possible try to prevent an error instead of recovering from it. Preventing an error to happen is known as Poka-Yoke principle. The first time I heard of it was in the book Designing for [...]