Waldo, Duo, pop-up stores, and friends who come in the mail

I found Waldo…

…he’s on the back of the Chubby Chickpea food truck. It serves falafel, hummus, and other yummy Middle Eastern food.

My favourite thing ever is pop-ups: pop-up museums, pop-up restaurants, and now pop-up stores.

Pop-up stores are huge in Boston. Kanye West opened a store in the city that saw huge lines, overnight campers, and saw it sell out of merchandise faster than the 3-days it planned to be open.

This pop-up is not Kanye West’s pop-up. It’s an antique shop near Faneuil Hall and I don’t know how long it is going to stay open.

Here’s a little bit of project, design, geek-i-ness…

On a lot of design heavy projects that I’m on, it’s difficult to get developers into the mindset of the person who is using their software. One tip is to give your users a name, a persona, visualize them, and print them out.

In this case we created “new friends” in Adobe and then ordered cardboard cut-outs online. The quote of the day from the design team is, I ordered my friends and they came in the mail.

Finally, La Niña and I switched our video communication tool from Hangouts to Duo. Both are Google products but Duo is far better on bandwidth, better quality, and easier to chat with. As an added bonus it’s figured out how to handle jumping networks.

We’ve had very few hick-ups with using Duo. Getting it set-up is simple… and the usability geek in me jumped for joy and clapped my hands at the simplicity. The rest of the world should pay attention.

I know it’s really nerdy but we turn on Duo in the evenings and just chat and do homework together.