Superhuman Ross Capicchioni tells the unbelievable story of how he survived getting shot multiple times with a shot gun in Detroit's east side. (via Devour).  Part two can be found here

This is just so awesome.

Frank Gruber and I did this back in March which we were at SXSW 2011. I knew ahead of time that the interview would end up being about 3 minutes, but because we're friends we ended up talking for about 15 minutes. The result is a highly edited interview, but it turned out well. I should note that without context, the bit about being lucky to "work at companies that could have failures and not suffer from them" is a bit of a "say whaa?" but ultimately I'm happy with this interview. 

Hat tip to @gruber via @thefoxisblack for pointing out the video above – "How Stanley Kubrick used Escher-styled spacial awareness & set design anomolies to disorientate viewers of his horror classic The Shining. This is a must for serious Kubrick fans and psychology students. Written, narrated and edited by Rob Ager."

I absolutely love this video. It's an example of spectacular nitpicking. As someone with a deep passion for user experience, I always joke that my propensity for being an obsessive nitpicker due to some (arguably) minor OCD tendencies make me well positioned to have UX be one of the focuses in my career.

User experience is largely about nitpicking. It's all in the details of the details. I look at pages and screens like blueprints and imagine someone walking through them when I design. Where am I leading you? What's getting your attention? Is what's being presented to you intuitive? When you walk into someone's kitchen, you know it's a kitchen without needing a sign. If you click through to a page, do you know what its purpose is without reading the header? If I've done my job well, you do.

In my brief time in architecture school, I always dreamt of designing buildings that would require no directional signage. Such a building would require strong visual cues to guide someone exactly to where they needed to go, and only at the exact necessary moment would they encounter descriptive text (ie. a number or name on a door or gender assignation on a restroom entrance).

Web and mobile application user experience should be viewed similarly, only the user is moving through a design with their eyes and not their body. However, it's still realistic to think about not over-burdening a design with "signage". In order to successfully achieve this, you need to be one hell of a good nitpicker and constantly be thinking about where you can be misleading someone as much as you're thinking about where you're leading them.