Category: Business
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Social Networks are Brands
Six Apart, maker of MoveableType and TypePad, has apparently been recalibrating their product development away from targeting professional web developers like me and towards the massive “teen/tween” market. TypePad was the first step in this direction, but now they’ve been working on a new social networking app called Vox which is obviously designed to enter…
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The Vicious Cycle of Web Redesign
Do we really need to keep all this stuff? Can we throw some stuff away before we move in? When we pack our belongings to move to a new apartment or house, we often take stock of our posessions and choose to throw a lot of useless stuff away. We lighten our load so that…
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TimesSelect: Dead to me, so far…
Have you seen me? I haven’t ready any of the New York Times Op-Ed commentators in at least six months, ever since they put them behind the pay-only TimesSelect wall. I have no idea what any of them are saying these days. I think I saw that they’ve got Ted Koppel in there now, too.…
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Retail Change Management
The coins-on-top method. Coins slip-sliding around on top of the paper bills. It seems like over the past several years, every cashier in the world has decided — or has been told by their bosses — to hand customers their change by first placing the paper bills in the customer’s hand, then placing the coins…
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IA Summit 2006: The Science (and Pseudo-Science) of Personas
I attended a fascinating IA Summit presentation by Molecular’s Steve Mulder called “Bringing More Science to Persona Creation“. Lately I’ve been pretty interested in how different companies approach user personas, so this was a must-see for me. I was impressed with Steve’s insights into user persona creation, but this was tempered by a fear that,…
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Going to the IA Summit in Vancouver
Less than two weeks after getting back from SXSW, off I go to another conference! Late tonight I’m flying out to the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver. I was actually on a panel at the 2003 Summit in Portland, but the timing of my business work for the past two years prevented me from…
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SXSW Confidential, Part 2: They Write Books
Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect. I’m reading all…
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Unfamiliar Workspace = Greater Productivity?
Can working in an unfamiliar environment, away from all of your everyday tools and resources, actually help you work more efficiently? I’m starting to think it does. Instead of working late or using the Behavior VPN, lately I’ve been packing all of my working files onto a company “floater” laptop and bringing the whole computer…
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I just dont get this whole bo.okmar.king thing.
What ARE these things?? Zeldman’s gang over at Happy Cog have just designed and launched the brand new ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking tool. Ma.gnolia seems to be something like del.icio.us, of course (as if you can’t tell already by the product’s na.me). And there are other sites, too, like Outfoxed and Stumbleupon, which also…
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Design Patterns: Don’t Reinvent the Widget
Yahoo’s interaction design department has for the last year or two been developing an intranet dedicated to sharing, internally, their interface design conventions and standards (or, to use the current hip jargon, “Design Patterns”) for their internal development teams, to ensure quality and consistency of interface widgets. It’s kind of an IA “style guide” for…