Category: Uncategorized

Significant Objects (http://significantobjects.com/) has writers create a story around an object. The object and the story is then posted to eBay. All profits are given back to the artists. The items are simple items worth very little and are selling for way more than you would expect. “[The auction for this Significant Object, with story… Continue reading Stories Provide Value

Now that we have touch interfaces and these interfaces are successful in the marketplace, why can’t we have interfaces that work with touch and proximity? Matt Hirsch has put up some of his work and it is very intriguing. He is looking at existing technologies so that manufactures could build possible gestural interfaces in the… Continue reading 3D interactions

Forrester did research to show the cost of User Experience to business performance. http://www.cynergysystems.com/forrester/forrester_customer_experience.pdf

Peer-to-Peer Lending Networks Friends and Family Retirement Funds Seller Financing http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/buyingandsellingabusinessmikehandelsman/article204238.html

Tom Peters in his over the top energetic way points out how doctors on average listen to their patients for 18 seconds before jumping in. He scolds the managers of the world for doing so too. This makes me think of a “Friday Forum” at a company called Symmetrix. One of the muckety-mucks was on… Continue reading Listen … Damn it!

37 Signals has an image of the back of their book online. My favorite line is “Planning is Guessing”

This a cool design solution to a complex problem. When doing analysis of urine samples the difference between the sample and the ideal may be very slim. Many visual representations take to long and are error prone. These people solved this with sound. http://synesign.squarespace.com/blog/2009/3/7/the-sweet-sound-ofurine.html

Seth Godin has created a list of things he thinks a company should do to start in today’s world of marketing. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/is-it-too-late-to-catch-up.html The first 3 mentioned are: get email make a company website with addresses and contact info at a minimum start an email campaign The others on the list are even more interesting.

Dan Saffer’s article on design research is a great overview for someone trying to understand what design research is all about. He does an excellent job setting the stage of what design research is and why it is important. Hopefully it will excite more people to do design research on a regular basis. http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1389669&rll=1

Have you ever heard of Spezify? It is a search engine that brings all the results back on an infinite plane. All the images of videos, pictures, text and tweets are spread across your desk top and you pan around looking for what you want. Either you have many monitors that you are spread across… Continue reading Visual Search

On the HFI site Susan Weinschenk is doing a top 100 things you should know about humans. Her first item is Inattention Blindness. This stuff is so cool. I love the human brain. You can be asked to focus on one thing and in the process you ignore what seems to be the irrelvant items.… Continue reading Inattention Blindness

Is UX becoming a commodity? With an emphatic NO!! I soooo disagree with Kem’s assertion, I even left a nice comment. Kem Kramer on Johnny Holland declared: “After 10 years in the field, I woke up one day to realise that my service as a UX practitioner had become a commodity. Usability had become the… Continue reading Is UX becoming a commodity?

As a person who approaches design from the cognitive science and human factors angle, I think I resemble this quote. “User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable… Continue reading Case Made for Compelling Visual Design

Johnny Holland has an article on Sketching as Communication. The video is a bit long but the first half is worth listening to. Mark Baskinger talks about sketching in industrial design and interaction design. He points out why interaction designers should work on their sketching skills.

I liked the use of black in this page. The background is almost black. The font oscillates in transparency as it moves across and up or down the page. The page is split by completely black headers. I like it. http://konigi.com/interface/webmynd-header-and-footer

I love this technique California Pizza Kitchen is using. This article asks if we should be doing more of it in interaction design. I would say yes if you are having a hard time getting repeat visitors or users. “Here is a rather interesting promotion from California Pizza Kitchen. At the end of my dinner… Continue reading Curiosity in Design

Surprise! Surprise! I looked at the new apps installed and there was BrowserPlus. It was not even under the Yahoo folder. Anyway, it is a pretty cool idea. Here is a little snippet of what they advertise: “The most unique attribute of BrowserPlus is its ability to update and add new services on the fly… Continue reading BrowserPlus

Innovation and unique ideas seem to be on the top of mind for product and service people these days. This article is an interesting summary with a few links for further reading at the bottom. Design for Interaction: Ideation and Design Principles “The purpose of brainstorming is not to find the one perfect design for… Continue reading Brainstorming

280 Atlas.com : Cappacino and Atlas I am ready to check this out. It looks cool. A quick way to build html applications. I like the idea that they are focusing on application development on not on website development. This looks promising. http://vimeo.com/6930037 http://280atlas.com/ Beta is coming out soon. They have done a good job… Continue reading HTML Application Rapid Design Tool : Cappacino and Atlas

I really enjoyed this video of a design to replace the mouse. Instead of coming up with an out there kind of experience that would require a different paradigm of interaction, 10gui extends the use of your hands. Can we extend the idea of the mouse pad to something more useful. make it bigger and… Continue reading Beyond the Mouse

What do you do in your spare time? Do you have spare time? How do you come up with new ideas?  ” No slack: In the last decade, many companies have become obsessed with becoming lean, with wringing all of the slack out of their operations and processes. The problem is that when you wring… Continue reading Boredom is Good

Why is it that the design does not look like you expected? You gave a picture of what you wanted. What you got back was exactly the things you asked for but … it just does not look the same. What don’t they see? Why can’t the developer get the UI just right? Luke W… Continue reading Read between the Lines