Archive for March 2007

30 Mar 2007 0906H

Some observations: iTunes’ “Complete My Album”; Banned In China

Well, this solves the question whether people still use the word, “album”: iTunes now offers you the chance to buy the rest of an album if you like the single(s) you’ve bought. But do I notice some price inflation for selected albums? For instance, Hoobastank’s the Reason, the feelgood album of the Summer of ‘05, [...]

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27 Mar 2007 2351H

iPhone knockon effects visible in Zenzui demo at CTIA

PCMag blogged about this yesterday, as did Gizmodo and everyone else. AT&T’s COO said at the CTIA Wireless Conference that “ease of use” is the killer app for wireless. Easy for him to say since they’re locked in for the next however-many-years as the exclusive dealer of iPhones, which he, of course, promptly trotted out. [...]

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25 Mar 2007 2227H

Why are parking kiosk user experiences so damn bad?

I refer to those automated pre-pay parking garage machines where you insert the ticket and through some automated process, are read out what you owe for the privilege of parking your car in a crowded urban area that perhaps would be better suited for foot or rail traffic. At that point you are prompted for [...]

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21 Mar 2007 0846H

Mass customization: my client, and also, Blurb

We’re rolling out a mass customization “builder-type” application for my client, who shall for the time being remain nameless, in which I played the role of interaction designer, a role I find I enjoy more than, say, sitting in the National Archives for six months, four to six hours each day, poring over dusty, sooty [...]

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19 Mar 2007 0921H

Another random thought on prototyping, book review schedule

Seems to me that one of the pitfalls of prototyping is that the fidelity of the thing we’re putting before the user might not be sufficiently rich enough to test the interaction design. Then too, when we do so at a very high fidelity level that includes HTML prototyping with clickthroughs, and get up [...]

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16 Mar 2007 0906H

Eyetracking reveals what men’s preferences really are

What with General Pace making this statement and George Takei having to rebutt that statement, there seems to be all too much protesting going on these days. By way of my colleague Cathy, now, through the magic of eyetracking and empirical observation, studies reveal that when men look at pictures of other men, their eyes [...]

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14 Mar 2007 1532H

UX terms in Cantonese

In which we uncover some of the weaknesses inherent in English. English is difficult to learn to read and write precisely because the number of exceptions in the spelling mean that nothing is ever spelled the same way in any consistent manner, and so every written word must be memorized, but it does not mean [...]

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13 Mar 2007 2045H

The long tail

Have you ever seen the movie Uzumaki? It’s a pretty creepy tale about spirals, spirals everywhere, a curse of spirals actually. In a weirdly twisted (heh, sorry) way, Uzumaki wouldn’t have even have come to my attention if it were not for “the long tail” which is like these spirals. One begins to see the [...]

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12 Mar 2007 1003H

Don’t underestimate the customer support logs

It’s been said before, but, I’ll say it again. Customer support logs can be enormously helpful in redesigning the UX, but they’re rarely in a form that can be made actionable. For instance, search query logs for online help reveal a ton of information that you sometimes may not need to run usability tests [...]

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12 Mar 2007 0647H

Missed two articles last week

I wanted to mention two other articles that I was reading up on last week:
Richard Anderson made good mention of Checking Your Disciplines At the Door (When Beneficial). Good point. As Toyota shows, innovation comes often not from revolutionary breakthroughs but incremental evolutionary steps which come from any and all points of the company. At [...]

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