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About the site
This site is a personal project to engage critical thought on video games and usability. It's also a reverse-chronological portfolio–kind of like a blog with content, rather than self-obsessed voyeurism. The name comes from my background in usable interfaces, where the user always does the unexpected, and the user is always right. Interfaces must make sense to a normal person (not necessarily the programmers or designers).
Crankyuser was created in PHP using Macromedia Homesite, and has been tested in Windows 2000 on Netscape 4.73+, Internet Explorer 5.0 and 5.5, and Opera 6.05. I hate all browsers equally now.
Some design rationale:
- No homepage–redirect to the newest content instead. Many sites have a homepage with rotating content, making it difficult to link to.
- All content is at the top directory level, keeping the url short and memorable.
- The contents are available at all times, rather than using an archive page. This makes the site more flat and reduces navigation time.
- No cookies are used. Sort and font settings will be passed in the background (in progress).
- Use images with text sparingly, for faster loadtime and ease of internationalization.
- Use directory structures to keep filenames and extensions hidden. This makes the url shorter and more memorable, and is also scalable for future conversion without breaking bookmarks.
- Underlines make links less legible, so only color and contrast are used. Higher contrast helps the colorblind.
- Alt tags are used for browsers with images turned off.
- A flexible page layout gives the user control over page size. I recommend that the browser be resized so that there are 12 words per line. This is the optimal and most comfortable line length in English.
- A sans-serif font is used, to aid scanning. Verdana was developed by Matthew Carson with letter widths made specifically for screen reading.
- Text is left justified (ragged right edge). Full justification puts variable space between words to create a clean right edge. The variability is more difficult to read and causes eye strain.
- Users will be given control over the font size, without have to change the browser settings (in progress).
About the author
I grew up in central New Jersey (exit 9 on the Turnpike) without incident until being enrolled at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where people like to calculate their GPA to the hundredth of a point—even football players. I retaliated by being a fencing jock.
For college I chose a school far enough that I could visit my parents for holidays but close enough that they wouldn't visit every weekend, and ended up in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon. I graduated with a BS in Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. I also did a fair amount of work in film, theater, and VR, doing a mixture of directing, acting, lighting, sound engineering, and project management.
I worked in Pittsburgh for a year on a internationalized ASP .NET web application for the sourcing industry, with which a manufacturer could run an auction in French while suppliers bid real-time in German or Portuguese. In my spare time I worked on game development with friends, but relocated out west when I had the opportunity to do it professionally.
I started at Microsoft in November as a contract level designer on Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. Because of my background in usability and interface design, I worked on the tutorial and early environments to teach and reinforce key game mechanics. After some project and personnel cuts at Fasa, I was fortunate enough to be picked up by a racing title at Microsoft as a game designer.
I'm currently still stunned to be working in the games industry—much less designing—and have yet to adjust to the change in industry and lifestyle. Working on games all day and going home to play video games all night can't be healthy.
Partial résumé.
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