On an ice cold night in New York, we headed to Nobu New York for a warming modern Japanese American meal. I had heard many good things, and was excited to taste Nobu Matsuhisa’s fusion cuisine. He is, after all, one of the pioneers of Asian fusion cuisine.

Typically, I’m wary of an kind of fusion cuisine, because a lot of it just not well executed. Many chefs just smear some soy glaze on a typical western creation and call it a day.

Unfortunately, even though there were some interesting highlights, Nobu failed to impress. Many of the dishes simply had poor execution–faltering on basic elements like seasoning and rice preparation.

We decided to go with the omakase, leaving it to the chefs to serve their best dishes. The following was our evening.

Toro Tartar

The toro was served over a rich cold broth of wasabi and soy. The toro tartar was very fresh and delicate, but overpowered by the inordinate amount of wasabi in the broth.

Oysters Kahata with Soy, Citrus, and Oil

The oysters were fresh, but the sauce was overwhelmingly salty. Again, a potentially great dish that was ruined by poor seasoning.

Yellowtail with Yuzu Soy Dressing

Again, the Yellowtail was firm and fresh, but was over-salted. I could barely taste the Yuzu.

Lobster Tempura

This was one of the better dishes of the night. The lobster was nice and tender, and the tempura batter was delicate. However, the rich creamy sauce made the tempura soggy. It would’ve been better if they had served the sauce on the side.

Black Cod Miso and Foi Gois

This is Nobu’s signature dish, and was well executed. The cod was very tender and nicely flavored throughout by the soy and miso. The outside was nicely browned, and the foi gois added an exceptional richness. There is an almost identical dish that is served at the Mayflower Restaurant in San Francisco (at a cheaper price, of course).

Sushi Course

This was probably the worst dish of the night. Of all the dishes, I thought Nobu would be able to execute sushi flawlessly. Instead, the rice was too dried out and not properly seasoned (needed more vinegar). The fish was fresh enough, but not anything extraordinary. Very disappointing.

Chocolate Green Tea Molten Cake with Green Tea Ice Cream

The night finished with a molten chocolate cake. I thought this dish lacked any originality. The addition of the green tea sauce within the cake didn’t add much interest to the usual molten cake dish. The green tea ice cream was made in house, and had a subtle and natural green tea flavor.

Overall, Nobu just didn’t leave me with a good taste in my mouth. The dishes were not well executed, and many lacked any kind of originality. Even though Nobu is hailed as the pioneer of fusion cuisine, it managed to lose its attention to detail, which is very sad indeed.

During my trip to NYC, I decided to focus my attention back onto street photography–something that I’ve always been passionate about, but have had little time to pursue. And, what better place to rekindle the joy of capturing people than in NYC?

Joanne got me the super nifty spy lens from Photojojo, which lets me stealthily take photos of people on the street without them noticing. I’m much more confident when using this lens, and it lets me capture moments that would never take place if the subjects knew the camera was aimed at them.

My first adventure was shooting people in the MoMA. Using the lens takes some getting used to (more on that later), and shooting people who are stationary and staring at art is good practice.

On a funny note, one of the security guards, after watching me shoot for quite some time, noticed that I wasn’t using an ordinary straight lens. He came up to me immediately exclaimed that I was shooting “laterally”. I was stunned that he was such an astute observer, and shared with him some of the shots I made. He was genuinely amused, as he had never seen such a thing before.

I’m hoping to restart my photoblog sometime in the future, but, for now, here are some shots from the MoMA (all using the spy lens).

I recently got my first produce shipment from Farm Fresh to You and was excited to start using the fresh vegetables in some dishes. There was plenty of chard, so I decided to improvise and make some seared tuna with chard and avocados, doused with a bit of sweet soy sauce marinade.

Yes, I know, it’s not a very traditional pairing, but the result was surprisingly really good. The chard soaked up all the nice sweet teriyaki sauce and complemented the tuna quite well.

Ingredients

• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 3 tbsp rice wine vingar
• 2 tbsp honey
• salt
• pepper
• olive oil
• 3/4 pound fresh Yellowfin Tuna
• 2 bunches chard
• avocados, sliced
• Vegetable or peanut oil
• garlic, chopped fine

Directions

1. Make the sweet teriyaki marinade and sauce: combine and whisk soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, honey, salt, and pepper to taste.
2. Marinade the tuna for 20 minutes in teriyaki sauce (no more, or else the meat will start to break down). Make sure to reserve some sauce for later.
3. Slice the chard stems and leaves into thin 1/2 inch strips.
4. Heat up a skillet and saute the garlic and stem parts of the chard for 5-7 minutes.
5. Place the rest of the chard into the skillet and saute for addtional 5 minutes, then cover and let cook for about 8 minutes.
6. When chard stems are soft, remove chard from skillet.
7. Turn the heat to high and put vegetable oil in the skillet (this is ideally a cast iron or heavy skillet, but really, any skillet, even non-stick, will do).
8. When oil shimmers, sear the tuna for 30 seconds on each side.
10. Place tuna on a bed of chard and fan avocados on top.
11. Pour a few spoonfuls of teriyaki sauce over the tuna and serve immediately.

About a month ago, we launched a mobile optimized site for Scribd. The intent was to build a mobile site that would be a joy to read and explore documents on any mobile phone with a modern browser, like the iPhone or G1.

The design process for the mobile site was refreshing, as we could essentially build a new interface from the ground up. We paired down the functionality of the mobile site to three main features: searching, browsing, and document viewing.

In mobile design, it’s key to keep things simple, as the the typical mobile user has very little time to interact with and learn new interfaces. Search is very important, and was thus placed at the top. Clicking on any document shows a summary page with some information about the document, with an obvious direct download button. You can also browse around the various tags and categories in a simple and direct list format.

At the Scribd offices, we’re huge fans of the iPhone, and we definitely kept that particular mobile phone in mind while designing the site. However, we built the site so that it would conform with best practices for mobile usability. So, the site should look good in any modern mobile browser, like Safari or Opera Mini.

We also decided to depend on the mobile phone’s internal document viewer, since flash isn’t supported on most mobile phones yet. iPhone’s built-in document viewer is definitely well designed, so we were comfortable with this decision.

If you haven’t tried out the mobile site yet, I would encourage you to fire up your favorite smart phone and point the browser to http://www.scribd.com/ and start exploring. On most phones, you’ll automatically be directed to our mobile site. If you didn’t, go to http://www.scribd.com/mobile and give it a whirl.

Usability testing is an essential tool in any product life cycle, especially at startups, where you live and die by your product. It is the most effective technique to get real user data on how they are using and assessing your product–in real life. If the product stake holders are not already bought into user testing, you need to convince them, now. Usability tests are cheap, and have the potential to save development time, money, and headaches down the road.

1. Determine Your Personas

If you’re doing a startup, you should already have a good sense of who uses your site. Is it the normal internet user? Is it business people who are internet savvy? Is it your grandma? Make sure you pin down all the potential user personas before going any further.

2. Recruit Testees from Craigslist

Depending on your location, Craigslist has a rich ecosystem of people willing to give their time for usability tests. Here is a sample text I usually post:

We are a company creating an online consumer product that needs people for usability testing. The test will be no longer than 1 hour, and we’ll pay you $35 for your time. Easy money!

Requirements:

List your demographic requirements here

We are located at LOCATION, and we’ll be conducting the tests on DATES. If you qualify, and are interested, please reply with the following information:

- Name
- Date and hours of availability
- How much experience you have with internet sites, specifically searching the internet
- How many hours a day you spend on the internet
- The industry in which you work

Be as specific as possible with your requirements. You can always widen them later if you don’t get enough responses. In the San Francisco Bay Area, I received about 20 responses in the first day, most of them eager to help out and that fit our personas. Avoid putting any information about your company or website, as you want the testees to see your site for the first time during your test.

If Craigslist isn’t popular in your area, I suggest just grabbing some people from your local coffee shop. You’ll be surprised by people’s enthusiasm when they know they can help improve a product.

For your first battery of usability tests, take two days and block out 4 hours on each day, and try to set up times with 8 people. Some of them will invariably cancel or flake out, but, that’s okay, since you really only need about 5 people to have an effective test.

3. Prepare Your List of Tasks

I highly suggest picking up Don’t Make Me Think, which is a great introduction to web usability and usability testing. It’s short, and chock full of practical information.

Now, write down all the user tasks that are crucial to your site. This may be the signup flow, or the upload pictures flow, or the browse profiles flow. The point is, you should be testing flows that are most important to your business objectives.

Remember that testees will take much longer than expected to complete the tasks. It’s easy to lose sight of this, but as the founder or member of the product team, you’re an expert at using your product. Testees have never seen your site before, and they’ll have to figure it out all on the fly. Try to limit your first set of tests to 4 or 5 tasks.

Your list of tasks should be derived directly from the user flows on your site. It’s best for each task to have a very specific objective for the user with a plausible story behind it. For example, a task on YouTube might be: “You’re sitting at home relaxing with a friend, and you’re looking for videos of lolcats. You land on the YouTube homepage. Now, I want you to go and find some funny cat videos.” The more realistic the imagery you put into the testee’s mind, the more comfortable and natural they will be at completing the task.

Try as best you can to make these tasks funnel the user to do one type of action. Of course, you may not be able to avoid multiple paths–just be sure to take into account all them in your task list. In example above, the user might use the search functionality on YouTube, or, they may simply browse by category.

Make a spreadsheet with each tab being a separate task, and list each step of each task on a separate row. This makes taking notes easier during the test.

4. Download Silverback

Seriously, Silverback is the easiest and slickest video and screen capturing tool for usability testing. It captures the screen while also capturing the video from iSight and puts this all into the same video on export. You’ll be able to review the videos without missing a single thing the testee did during each task.

At $50, it’s cheap.

If you’re worried that Silverback is Mac only, and your application must be tested in Windows, you should be able to run Parallels.

5. Conduct the Test

You will need two people: one to take notes and one to direct the user to do the tasks. Here are some simple guidelines:

• Make the testee as comfortable as possible. The less comfortable they are, the less likely the user will respond realistically to your site.
• Many testees are nervous. Tell the testee that they are not being tested, rather, it is the product that is being tested.
• Ask the testee to speak out loud during the session, explaining what they are thinking at all times.
• When the testee first sees the site, ask them about what they think the site is. This is the best moment to get their genuine first impressions.
• Start off with an open ended task that allows the testee to explore the site on their own.
• Tell the testee to do each step of the task, but never tell the them how to do each step. This is by far the hardest part of usability testing. Remember: you need to let the testee struggle, or else the pain points in your product won’t reveal themselves. If, after about a minute or two, they still have no idea, ask them, “Is there anything in particular you are looking for?”. If it’s a total no-go, mark the step as FAIL, and simply point to whatever the solution is and ask, “What about this option/checkbox/button/etc?” Note their response.
• When taking notes, no detail is too small. Observe everything the testee does — did they click on the image that was not hyperlinked? Did they frown when their upload aborted without a message? Were the confused by the order of things in a dropdown menu? It’s the little nuances that will tell you the problem areas in your application.

6. Post Mortem

There’s no point in usability testing if you don’t analyze the results and make action items. Gather the team and go over the notes and videos. Everyone will probably be surprised by the number of small and big problems overlooked when designing the product.

Typically, the solutions to the problems seen in usability testing are obvious and easy to implement. Be decisive and move forward quickly.

I suggest doing usability tests periodically (once every few months) as you actively develop your product. Typically, there are no shortage of features and flows to test on your site, and it’s best to catch usability problems early.

I hope this post will encourage you to do your first usability test. A lot of people tend to dismiss conducting usability tests, saying, “I know exactly what the user wants in the design.” But, the fact is, in most cases, you’re not the target demographic, and your intuition about the design is vastly different than the average joe. It’s much better to have empirical evidence that users are responding well to your site, rather than falling back on your own gut feeling.

UPDATED 12/14/08: Thanks goes to Ron from Design Perspectives for his awesome feedback on this post.

I’m absolutely loving the Ocarina app for the iPhone. They’ve done a superb job of creating an instrument that is a true joy to play, and that has the expressiveness of actually holding a wind instrument in your hand.

What I also love is that they’ve built a community of people creating music scores and sharing notes on how to play the app.

At $1, this is one of the top apps I would recommend. Grab it soon as I hear they will be raising the price.

Enjoy some Zelda from me:

Zelda Ocarina (iPhone) from James Yu on Vimeo.

Gmail selected me in the bucket testing for themes. Some of them are cool, and some are horrendous. Screenshots follow:

The New Default

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Bubblegum

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Tea House

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Desk

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Terminal

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Theme Selection

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Made some potato and leek soup tonight for a nice autumn meal.

Ingredients

• 5 pounds white potatoes, peeled and quartered
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 2 leeks, bulb only
• 1/2 cup butter
• 4 tablespoons white wine
• salt to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

Directions

1. Cook potatoes in chicken stock until soft. Set aside, do not drain.
2. Put potatoes in the work bowl of a food processor in batches. Add 5 cups of chicken stock from the potato cooking pot. Puree until smooth.
3. Half the leeks lengthwise, and soak in water to clean. Finely slice. Saute in butter until transparent. Add white wine, and cook for 3 minutes.
4. In a soup pot, combine remaining cup of chicken stock from the potato cooking pot and sauteed leeks. Stir in pureed potatoes, and bring to a simmer. Season with salt and white pepper. Cook to desired consistency, adding more stock if necessary. Garnish with parsley.

For Joey’s birthday on Halloween, we decided to make two cupcakes. Two giant cupcakes — enough to feed 30 people.

We bought the Wilton Giant Cupcake Pan from Amazon. Basically, you bake the “muffin top” part separately from the bottom, thus creating the illusion of a muffin shaped cupcake.

The ironic thing is that cupcakes are meant to be easy to make — by creating a large box cake version of the cupcake, we’ve essentially made a more complicated bakery item in the shape of an easy to make bakery item.

There are a few tricks if you want these to come out right. The muffin top part of the cake is smaller and cooks faster. Place the pan off center so that the bottom part of the cake is in the center of the oven. This will allow both halves to cook evenly.

Also, each half will rise and balloon out of the pan. You’ll need to cut off the excess with a bread knife so that both halves will fit together.

I suggest getting a revolving cake stand so that you can easily decorate the top evenly. We opted not to decorate the sides.

We used two cupcake recipes from Billy’s Bakery, which turned out fantastic, even though we were essentially making a box cake. Just ignore the parts about putting them into cupcake tins, and it’ll be fine. They are as follows:

Billy’s Cupcakes

Ingredients

Makes about 30 cupcakes

• 1 3/4 cups cake flour, not self-rising
• 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• Billy’s Vanilla Buttercream
• Colored Sprinkles, for decorating, optional

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt; mix on low speed until combined. Add butter, mixing until just coated with flour.
2. In a large glass measuring cup, whisk together eggs, milk, and vanilla. With mixer on medium speed, add wet ingredients in 3 parts, scraping down sides of bowl before each addition; beat until ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat.
3. Divide batter evenly among liners, filling about 2/3 full. Bake, rotating pan halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
4. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat process with remaining batter. Once cupcakes have cooled, use a small offset spatula to frost tops of each cupcake. Decorate with sprinkles, if desired. Serve at room temperature.

NOTE: For the giant cupcake version, it’ll take about 1 hour to bake.

Billy’s Butter Cream

Ingredients

Makes enough for 30 cupcakes

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 6 to 8 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions

1. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter until smooth and creamy, 2 to 3 minutes. With mixer on low speed, add 6 cups sugar, milk, and vanilla; mix until light and fluffy. If necessary, gradually add remaining 2 cups sugar to reach desired consistency.

Chocolate Cupcakes by Billy Reece

Yields 24 to 27 cupcakes

Ingredients

• 2 sticks unsalted butter (8 ounces)
• 1 cup granulated sugar (7 ounces)
• 1 cup light brown sugar (7-3/4 ounces)
• 4 large eggs (one at a time)
• 6 ounces unsweetened chocolate
• 2 cups cake flour (9-1/4 ounces)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup buttermilk (room temperature)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions

Cream:
2 sticks unsalted butter (8 ounces)
1 cup granulated sugar (7 ounces)
1 cup light brown sugar (7-3/4 ounces)
Add:
4 large eggs (one at a time)
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate (chocolate should be melted, then cooled for approximately 15 minutes before being added).
Add and alternate:
2 cups cake flour (9-1/4 ounces)
1 teaspoon baking soda
With:
1 cup buttermilk (room temperature)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Bake at 350 degree for about one hour, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Simple Chocolate Buttercream by Billy Reece

Ingredients

• 4 sticks butter
• 12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
• 2-3/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions

Cream (with hand or stand mixer):
4 sticks butter (16 ounces) until light and fluffy, approximately 5 minutes

Melt (in microwave or double boiler):
12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate

Set aside and allow to cool for approximately 20 minutes. After chocolate has cooled, add it to the creamed butter and mix on low speed until just combined. Scrape sides of bowl then …

Add:
2-3/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

On low speed of a hand or stand mixer, mix until fully incorporated; no confectioners’ sugar should be visible. Mixture should be smooth and medium brown in color.

Do not refrigerate; use immediately or store in airtight container for up to 2 days.

Decided to make a meal at home after a long hiatus of cooking. Bought some salmon at Whole Foods and marinated with sugar, soy sauce, and garlic for an Asian salmon bake.

Baked it with broccoli and cauliflower drizzled with olive oil, garlic, and salt. After a short 15 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, I got a nice flavorful autumn meal. Simple.