whither mobile?

Last week, my colleague Janice wrote an inspiring essay entitled, “It’s A Whole New Internet.” She addresses the zeitgeist of excitement around web development, talking up tags, Ajax, developer idealism, and the like. One thing missing from her essay is any mention of design for mobile devices. Three or four years ago, all signs pointed [...]

Eric Idle Supports Iterative Design and Testing

I’m watching The Life of Brian DVD, and on the commentary track, Eric Idle just went on about how he loves testing films in front of audiences, because it allows you to shape the film in response to an audience, in the way that live theater will shape their production over a series of performances. [...]

User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and it’s definitely not the end-all be-all. Usability is simply a quality. It’s an important quality, but just one of many. And it [...]

Empowering Search through Genres

Luke’s recent post challenging the design of search results pages reminded me that my original genre talk had another way to use document genres to improve the web experience. When you use a search engine, say, Google, you get a list of ordered results. So, here’s what a search for “information architecture” returns. Which is [...]

I guess it IS the content, stupid!

At the Webvisions conference coming in July of this year, I will present, “It’s the Content, Stupid,” wherein I try to remind web designers that the reason people come to their site is not for their design and architecture. Since submitting that presentation topic, I’ve been made aware of two similarly titled essays. In “It’s [...]

Pics and Words from Hong Kong

I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from Hong Kong so far. This trip has been good. More jetlag than last time — we weren’t able to run around our first two days like we did before. Instead, on the day we landed at 7:10am, we had a meeting at 1pm. We’ve eaten very well on [...]

Great overview of the concept of genre

If you’ve enjoyed the bits I’ve written about document genres, and you want to go deeper, I heartily recommend Development of the Genre Concept. A thorough history of the idea of genre. It gets pretty academic at times, but worth the slog.

Once Again, To Hong Kong

I leave in 5 hours for Hong Kong, where I’ll be until Tuesday morning.

Extending Craigslist

In 1996, I had just moved back to San Francisco. I was starting to get deeply into web design, and found myself at Brainwash with a bunch of like minded folks, shooting the breeze about HTML, GIFs, navigation design, and the like. Toward the end of the meeting, one of the people at the table [...]

“Egg Freckles?” – Products Beware!

When Garry Trudeau mocked the Apple Newton in Doonesbury for its poor handwriting recognition, he did a lot to doom the device. At that moment, the device became unable to take seriously. So that even when it was improved in later versions, it carried with it the stigma of… mockery. I’ve thought about that when [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz