The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst

In his latest “Good Experience” email, Mark offers a series of notes for successfully addressing what he refers to as “the page paradigm.” Unfortunately, he’s misguided as often as he’s on target. Mark is basically correct when he states: – - – - – - – - – - The Page Paradigm – - – [...]

Research and Development in Interaction Design

In the February 16 & 23 issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki devotes his The Financial Page column to the unproductive R&D departments in big pharma. My first thought was, “That sounds just like Microsoft Research.” Now, I don’t know about Microsoft Research in detail, but I’ve occasionally run across their work since 1998, [...]

On the Unintended Uses of Information Technologies

Danah writes up her Etech talk on “Revenge of the User”, and she notes: When technologies are built, the creators often have a very limited scope of desired and acceptable behavior. They build the systems aimed at the people who will abide by their desires. Often, their users don’t have the same views about how [...]

What User Experience Can Learn from the Oakland A’s

The comments of Paul DePodesta, titled, “The Genesis, Implementation, and Management of New Systems,” provide much good food for thought for those of us trying to “make the case” for user experience work. While general manager Billy Beane gets all the glory for the Oakland A’s remarkable success while having one of the lowest team [...]

Again With That Word, “Design”

I subscribe to two magazines, The New Yorker, and BusinessWeek. I enjoy BusinessWeek for its clarity of reporting and its breadth of coverage. This week, however, I find myself seething at BusinessWeek. From an article titled “Designer Cars”: Now, a decade-long drive to close the engineering and quality gap among the world’s carmakers has left [...]

Designing for People – Chapter 7: The Telephone

Henry Dreyfuss’ widest-spread and most lasting design contribution was his work with Bell Telephone, and particularly his work on the 500 Series. (Taken from here) There are a few lessons from this chapter. The first is: don’t enter beauty contests. When Dreyfuss is first approached by Bell Laboratories about redesigning the telephone, it was as [...]

For God, Country, and… Starbucks?

Long-time peterme.com readers know of my love for the book For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of The Great American Soft Drink and The Company That Makes It. The title of the book comes from a letter written by a former G.I., who, in his distress over the release of “New Coke”, claims [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz