Author
Mica McPheeters
Mica McPheeters is editor-in-chief emeritus of A List Apart, creative director at Soulments, and founder of Agent Tenacious. She specializes in cross-disciplinary design and communications.
Also from this author
Animation has come a long way over the course of the web’s still-young history. For years, designers felt the need to take sides. Should we build hypnotic sites in Flash? Or should we stick to static, standards-compliant sites built with HTML and CSS? Author Val Head never wanted to choose. Her new book, Designing Interface Animation, celebrates how animation is finally coming into its own, and shows us what we can do with it. In this wide-ranging interview, she tells us why she loves animation so much.
Good intentions can easily blind us to bad ideas—accidentally awful outcomes that alienate and distress our users. It's time to take a hard look at our processes, to recognize and work through our biases toward idealized users in ideal situations. In this interview with managing editor Mica McPheeters, Sara Wachter-Boettcher talks about what she learned while writing Design for Real Life.
About five years ago, I bought a cushy couch for my office. (Okay, yes, I did get the model that could flatten into an emergency nap station, but let’s just say that I plan for contingencies—it sounds more professional that way.) Our projects required a lot of office-to-office visiting to discuss situations in person, and eventually, said couch (and therefore, my office) became a veritable beacon, attracting anyone looking for an excuse to decompress. Such is the life of a one-couch, 50-chair business.
