A week ago, Jesse James Garret veritably bellowed the words “user experience designer” in his plenary address at this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, attempting to create some common ground between the information architects and interaction designers in the room and across the industry. In a strong and deeply-felt speech, he admonished the community (-ies?) … Continue reading Experience Design User
Today is the seventh anniversary of the incorporation of Behavior, the humble web and user experience design consultancy I helped found in 2001. Happy birthday to us! My four awesome partners and I started the company in what at the time seemed like the worst possible economic climate to launch a new business. The one-two … Continue reading Behavior is Seven!
This is a website Behavior made for the Smithsonian’s American Museum of National History during the 2004 Presidential election campaign. It is the web companion for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy, an exhibition of artifacts from America’s long and colorful history of voting technologies. It was a fascinating physical exhibition. And I’m still proud of … Continue reading Vote: The Machinery of Democracy
What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface or an application for just one person? Most design work is done for audiences: whether designing mass market products or niche objects of desire, we seldom have a single, real person in mind when we work. We think of audiences as groups … Continue reading Designing for One User (Bespoke User Interfaces)
When I was just 20 years old, I went on a student exchange program to Amsterdam to study sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Those six months I spent in Europe, impoverished and starry-eyed, shaped a lot of who I am, both personally and creatively. I’m delighted to say that I will be back in … Continue reading Going to Amsterdam
Last week I delivered a brand new presentation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, right here in New York City, entitled The Seduction of the Innocent: Merchandising in Interactive Product Design. (I’m presenting it again this Friday at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, hopefully with a few enhancements.) The topic itself went through an … Continue reading Seducing Web 2.0
As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike. One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual … Continue reading The Wisdom of Don Draper, Part 2: It’s Toasted!
Two months ago, I tweeted the following cry for help: Over the last several months I have made some tough choices about what to devote my time to. And “blogging”, unfortunately, didn’t make the cut. In short, I have been extremely busy doing things other than blogging. In the next week or two I will … Continue reading Spring Ahead
It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times: “The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to electronic versions that — with a touch of a finger — visitors can flip through, page by digital page, from cover to dog-eared cover.”
I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient: Mobile Phone: 2002 iPod (3G): 2003 Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003 … Continue reading My Aging Fleet