Electron Hut (www.ElectronHut.com/iphone) has done it again. The first release of Santa's Wild! Slots is now available on the iTunes stores for only $1.99.

I purchased this new slot machine game through the iTunes store using my MacBook Pro and it works perfectly. I'm running the game on the original iPhone I purchased on launch day which has the 2.2 version of the iPhone OS installed. While I don't own an iPod Touch yet it should work perfectly on that device as well.

One of the most exciting features is the ability to "shake" the phone to spin the reels. Any time you shake the iPhone hard enough Santa's Wild! Slots presses the Bet Max button for you. You don't even have to touch the screen to play! How cool is that?

Continue reading "ElectronHut.com Launches Santa's Wild! Slots for iPhone and iPod Touch" »

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After some thought and a few hard decisions, I'm ready to publish my course selections for the UPA 2008 International Conference.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
8:30 AM - Opening Keynote: How Innovation Works
10:30 AM - Institutionalizing User Experience: A Consulting Challenge
1:30 PM - Visual Design and the User Experience: Keys to the Partnership
2:20 PM - How to Manage a User Experience Team (Without Losing Your Mind!)
3:30 PM - Subjective Ratings of Usability: Reliable or Ridiculous?

Thursday, June 19, 2008
8:30 AM - 10 Strategies for Negotiating The Politics of Holistic Design
1:30 AM - Teach Your Software Developers This Ideation-Design Process to Reduce Your Usability Work Downstream
2:10 PM - Rich Man's Problems: Beyond Selling Usability
2:50 PM - How to Break Consistency for Glory & Riches
4:00 PM - A Practitioner's Guide to the Modified-Delphi Card Sort
4:50 PM - The Pushed-RITE Method: A Hybrid Approach for Pushing Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation to its Practical Limits

Friday, June 20, 2008
8:30 AM - The Evil UI Designer: How to Really Confound and Annoy Your Users
10:30 AM - Closing Speaker: Ethnographic research: Bringing You Face-To-Face with Customers in Natural Environments

If you are in the same course as me, please take the time to say hello. I'd love to meet you or catch up again if I already know you.

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll be co-presenting a talk at UPA 2008 in Baltimore, MD on Wednesday starting at 10:30 AM. If you are interested in learning more about how a usability consultancy partners with select usability "champions" in a Midwestern advertising agency and a Silicon Valley high-tech company to develop blended UX teams, this talk is for you. Drop by Essex "C" in the Marriott Baltimore Waterfront's conference center to check out this presentation live.

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While attending the first of my pre-selected tutorials today I managed to capture some photographs of the participants in action. All of these photos are available as a photo set on flickr.com (my favorite photo sharing site). To see the pictures you can visit my photo stream at http://flickr.com/photos/gcochran/sets/72157605648149138/.

If you know the folks in the photographs, please drop me a quick e-mail and I'll update the titles and descriptions accordingly.

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm taking a "vacation" and will be attending the Usability Professionals' Association 2008 International Conference in Baltimore, MD during the week of June 16 - 20. Will you be there? If so, please find me and say Hello! I'm always interested in meeting new people and catching up with old friends.

Continue reading "UPA 2008 - The Many Faces of User Experience" »

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My recent blog post that discusses a design oversite on Apple.com and the impact on color blind users was page ranked number one on Google.com today. I'm very excited and pleased to share this news with the rest of the world. For me, this is literally a first.

See for yourself. Enter "iphone color blind" into the search box on the Google.com home page, then click Search. The result set should look something like this:

Achieving number one out of over 1.8 million pages to choose from is pretty cool indeed.

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As you might expect, the design team at VMware was pretty excited about the release of Apple's new iPhone product. As such, several of us stood in line on launch day to purchase the device. Other members of the team, however, decided to wait a bit longer, to scrutinize the UI design a bit closer, and to make a more informed decision about purchasing the iPhone.

Once the devices were in hand everyone was focused on which way the phone could be rotated and how the user interface responds or on how well the iPhone discovers WiFi networks and connects to them, for example. One item none of us initially considered was the UI design of Apple's web site supporting the iPhone launch.

As it turns out, Apple's web site violates a very basic design guidline in practice today.

Continue reading "iPhone Available: Except To Color Blind Users" »

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps my last post was a bit premature. Only about an hour after my last post and now my new iPhone is activated and working well. Thanks AT&T! Apparently the system had a little trouble at first and once the super smart IT guy on the backend kicked the server the problem seems to have been rectified.

The activation process in iTunes is a bit lacking in features, however, even that didn't matter. I was initially assigned a phone number in my home area code of 650 and when I called AT&T to request a 408 number instead they instantly changed it over. All I had to do was turn the phone off and back on again and it worked perfectly after starting back up almost instantly.

As I learn to use the device I'll be posting more updates. For now, I'm happy and things seem to be working well.

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We'll, I managed to pick up my new iPhone this evening at the Apple store at the Stanford Shopping Center and the whole experience was completely uneventful. I jumped into the shorter-than-expected line at 7:16 PM and had the device in my hot little hand by 7:57 PM. Well done Apple! Now, for the big bummer; I'm still waiting on AT&T to activate my device.

Continue reading "iPhone, Therefore iWait!" »

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A good friend of mine from my days working at Blue Martini Software has decided to make a go of it in the insurance business. He is a wonderful person that is honest and sincere and is deserving of your business. If you find yourself in need of auto, home, life, retirement, or small business insurance you should definitely give him a call.

Continue reading "Announcing: French Insurance Services" »

Posted by Glenn R. Cochran at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)