BusinessWeek Loves User Experience
The December 6, 2004 issue of BusinessWeek (with the inflammatory “The China Price” cover) is a boon to folks who care about good design in all its components.
The treats:
Pierre Omidyar and eBay
A profile of Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. And this phrase:
The Web’s real power lies in its ability to connect people instantly around [...]
Examples of Interaction Design and What’s Interesting About Them: #1 In a Series
A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were asked to present on the subject of interaction design. The audience needed primer material. We started out the presentation by walking through some examples of web-based interaction design and explanations as to why they were interesting.
I thought I’d share a few.
Booking Reservations at the Broadmoor. A [...]
Oahspe — The product of too much nitrous?
She pointed me to this image:
The title page to Oahspe, a sacred text written by a dentist, and credit for the first use of the word “star-ship.”
Self-serving Social Networks
David Weinberger posted about “Selfless Social Networks,” and his thoughts didn’t ring true for me. While I agree that the users of these tools aren’t predominantly selfish, I don’t agree that there’s a significantly strong thread of selflessness. I wrote a comment to that post saying that, if anything, these tools tap into our self-serving [...]
Relationships, not Information
Ever since reading his insightful weekly columns on Hotwired’s too-good-for-its-own-good site Packet, I’ve been a fan of Michael Schrage, and the insight he brings to issues of business, economics, technology, information, and society. An old essay of his, “The Relationship Revolution,” has been recently reposted, and ought to be required reading for those of us [...]
For what little it’s worth…
I firmly believe the… disgusting? distressing? … brawl that complete last night’s Pacers/Pistons game is a symptom of living in George Bush’s America.
America is increasingly a country predicated on fear, hate, and demonizing “the other” (whatever that other is). I wholly expect to see such senseless conflagrations erupt with shocking frequency throughout this land [...]
The Tension between the Personal and the Public
Cathy Marshall touched on this in her talk on personal digital libraries, and Gene addresses it in his post on personal information architecture: these new systems necessarily call into question the relationship between the personal and public.
Cathy discussed it with respect to annotations, markings, etc., that we might have in our personal digital library [...]
Cathy Marshall on Personal Digital Libraries
Yesterday I attended a lecture given by Cathy Marshall on her nascent research into Personal Digital Libraries. Cathy has written a lot about hypertext, digital libraries, the experience of reading, and other such subjects, and it’s now seeming to come together in research on how we will maintain our own digital libraries.
Cathy’s work strongly [...]
Fall Movie Update: SIDEWAYS and THE INCREDIBLES
Alexander Payne’s Election is among my favorite movies of the last 10 years, and combine that with the universal critical favor that Sideways received, and I went in with some pretty high expectations. And went out feeling, “Eh, it was pretty good.” Sideways goes a baby step beyond About Schmidt (which my dad dubbed [...]
How (Not) To Sell A Novel Product
From Dan Brown (via email) comes a compare-and-contrast exercise in using marketing content to communicate what a novel technology does. This is the Tivo problem — it’s hard to get across what the thing does, but when people use it, they love it. In this case, we’re talking products that wirelessly connect your music [...]
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