Archive for April 2007

27 Apr 2007 1008H

CircuitCity.com Bricks-n-Clicks UX Story

Our former CCO (corporate creative officer), Bill, who’s now a design director at CircuitCity.com, might not like it much if I were to say this, but, I had a terrible customer service experience at a Circuit City up north recently. No one dashing to help me. The store had few people walking around, so the [...]

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26 Apr 2007 2023H

Conveyor-belt sushi user experience learnings

So, this blog is called “everything is design,” right? Then you shouldn’t be surprised to hear there’s a few user experience learnings from the kaitenzushi experience described earlier below. As we were leaving, I noticed E picked up a laminated menu sized card and was staring hard at it. As it turned out, it talked [...]

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24 Apr 2007 1006H

E-commerce account management is miserable; Business Week Innovation Podcast

After benchmarking dozens of online retailers, both bricks-n-clicks and pure play, I’ve come to the conclusion that e-commerce account management is generally miserable on a great many websites and it’s apparent that competitors often look to each other for leadership, leading to a rather ridiculous situation of mutual miserability, if I could use that term, [...]

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22 Apr 2007 0749H

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

Thanks to Joel for hooking me up with this. It’s a talk by Malcolm Gladwell that says in essence that there is no one perfect product, only clusters of preferences across a horizontal continuum of products. We call them personas. Selected TED Conference talks are now available on the TED site.

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21 Apr 2007 1107H

On benchmarking; on building a consulting firm

Now that all has been said that can be said about Seung Cho (until the book and movie rights are sold) and the Chicago city elections (whose true effects won’t be felt for a while to come), we return our normal broadcast schedule. Been doing a lot of benchmarking for a client as part of [...]

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19 Apr 2007 0723H

Muji Design Competition

Design isn’t design unless there’s a problem to solve, for someone or some set of circumstances, that’s generally accepted. So it’s particularly noteworthy when a big design centric retailer like MUJI, which is coming to the New York Times building soon, opens up an international design competition around the theme of “RE”: RE Theme for [...]

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18 Apr 2007 2009H

The four story limit in design pattern language

Scuttlebutt at Viant HQ in Boston was that the company would never allow our offices to be higher than four stories. And then, going through Christopher Fahey’s deck on Interaction Design Style from IA Summit 07, I saw this page. It was so incredible I had to google it to make sure I wasn’t, you [...]

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17 Apr 2007 2059H

Smash Big-D Design!

Sometimes I feel like big-D design, design of the fetish variety, design writ large, worshipped as a goddess, should be destroyed. (This blog is actually small d design, contrary to what the title says.) Was it not said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him?” Originally this post was entitled, “Death to [...]

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17 Apr 2007 0807H

Looking back on Open Source Usability

Needs to be some framework to incorporate user experience work into the open source process, which is decentralized, but the tools and processes could help facilitate that. Found this entry from Rashmi Sinha who wrote last year about some stuff on open source user experience efforts.

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17 Apr 2007 0722H

5 minutes on the Shape of Phones

Interesting brief movie about the design of phones at Motorola, involving a design engineer, an industrial designer and a human factors professional. It would have been nice to get them to talk about collaboration, probably inappropriate for the audience, but, possibly may be because they’re still based on a waterfall/stage-gate model where there are handoffs [...]

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