What is interesting about Wikipedia? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not how it it is made. A “wiki” is a content source powered (in general, completely powered) by social software technology, with people collectively creating and refining the content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the quintessential wiki — while there are other major wikis, … Continue reading Pedia Tricks
There are two ways of writing nouns in the English language: you capitalize proper nouns and you don’t capitalize common nouns. There is an unfortunate tendency, however, for people to think that you can elevate the importance and even the definition of any old common noun simply by capitalizing it. To me, this is the … Continue reading There is no “Design with a capital D”.
Touch Sight, a fascinating “camera” for blind people. For my entire design career, my colleagues and I have wrestled with the terminology we use to segment and focus our work, both in our careers and in our critiques. Whether it’s the “information architecture vs. interaction design” debate or the “visual design vs. graphic design” debate, … Continue reading See. Feel.
What do you do with a video camera? You video. I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly … Continue reading Video is a Verb
A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations. Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst … Continue reading Research + Interpret + Produce = Design
A quick thought for this fine Friday: Something about the term “Getting Things Done” always bugged me. Now I know what it is. It’s the passive voice. Instead of the indirect phrasing using the verb “to get”, maybe we really should simply say “Doing Things“. GTD isn’t about getting other people to do things — … Continue reading Doing Things vs. Getting Things Done
I just watched the latest episode of FRONTLINE, whose title, “Growing Up Online“, pretty much accurately describes the content. The show is excellent, and while I’m not inclined to share my specific thoughts about the program, I am compelled to show you this screenshot illustrating “cyber bullyingâ€.
‘m not going to say much about Kindle — as an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb. But the breathless excitement over the supposed “death of the book” is even more preposterous, especially to book lovers like my wife and me. For us, books, periodicals, and printed matter of all sorts comprise, quite literally, the very structure of both our intellectual and physical worlds. Kindle is an insult to our world view — Amazon should think of how to support technophiles and book lovers with the same service.
Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. She was interested in the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends, no matter how far-flung, through technologies that informally reveal us to each other. Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku … Continue reading Ambient Intimacy, Collective Musing, Intellectual Doodling
Designers of interactive products and services are having more and more influence on how businesses work, providing guidance that goes go far beyond layouts, flows, grids, colors, and movement — ideas that are fundamentally more that just look and feel. We are helping businesses understand and solve broader challenges, helping them define their core feature … Continue reading There is No Strategy!