Category: Business
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Come to my Classy SXSW Panel
UPDATE, 3/11/07: My post-mortem on the panel, and links to many other people’s opinions on the panel, are now posted here. I am running a panel entitled High Class and Low Class Web Design at the 2007 South by South West Interactive conference. It will explore the same subjects I discussed in my series of…
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Aura of Inevitability (or: When a Technology’s Time has Come)
New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example.…
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Usability Foxes Guarding the Henhouse
On the NYC-CHI mailing list today, someone from a big web shop wrote this: My company is dismantling its focus group and usability testing lab, due to a chronic lack of space and clients’ growing reluctance to allow our agency to do testing on our own work. Behavior‘s thinking has always been that it takes…
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HR Block’s Software Strategy: “You got people”
Soylent Green? The new formula for software success? People. H&R Block‘s new slogan, “You got people”, coincides with their apparent transformation into a hybrid of their old business as a tax preparation service company and their new business as a tax preparation software company. They’re positioning themselves within the software market as a different kind…
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I Like to Crash
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by
I am an extreme multitasker. I usually have at least fifteen windows open on my desktop at any given time, often as many as thirty. I usually have several Firefox windows open at once, too, each with a dozen or more active tabs with pages I either intend to read or need to use as…
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Going out of Business Spam
Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50…
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Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier
(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.) Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid…
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Class and Web Design, Part 5: The Politics of Class
(This is Part 5. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, and Part 4) Go get ’em Mom: patiencemerriman.com I recently designed a web site for my mother, who is running for the Vermont state legislature (I’m so proud of her!). Vermont is a small, largely rural state, and there are…
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Class and Web Design, Part 4: The Vicious Circle of Desire
(This is Part 4. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 3a) Earlier, I talked about the markers of class that surround us every day. A person’s cultural immersion in a narrow range of class markers can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle of desire: Poor people can’t…