Archive for February 2008

25 Feb 2008 2257H

Just a reminder: buttons do things, links take you to pages

For instance, “add to cart,” probably one of the oldest and simplest examples, other than, “submit,” perhaps. Nielsen of course provides the rules: don’t use buttons for navigation; use links when users move between pages. It’s not a matter of popularity. It’s a matter of consistency of the design vernacular with convention. 

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19 Feb 2008 0739H

When things are free, what is value?

I’d asked that question last summer. Kevin Kelly has a longass answer. Haven’t had a chance to think it out yet since my head’s full of another thing this morning.  

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18 Feb 2008 2122H

It’s ridiculous to think that

there’s a one size fits all e-commerce interaction model. It’d be like saying that user experience is the same discipline as marketing.
Of course, there are many pretenders out there.

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16 Feb 2008 2232H

Overheard: Amazon’s Kindle rocks

I had originally passed on Amazon’s Kindle e-book appliance, but overheard a conversation among techies over the cubicle wall the other day that it is quite the must-have nerd-toy. Not just an e-book reader with an e-paper screen, it also provides one-handed access to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and even podcasts; apparently it is wireless-enabled and [...]

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16 Feb 2008 0950H

The end of cart?

Rehashing an old post from last year, but, now, everywhere it can be seen that the walls that form that decade-old convention of shopping cart as a label are crumbling down. Bag, basket — “my gear” even, on one site — it does not really seem to matter to people, so long as there is [...]

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14 Feb 2008 1211H

Exotic occidentalia

It’s interesting to note that places like Chinatowns, apart from their daily functions as communities of Chinese immigrants, recently arrived and oftentimes, not so recently arrived, historically have touted themselves as internal tourist destinations, exotic gateways to the inscrutable Far East.
But what if you were to take that concept and stand it on its [...]

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12 Feb 2008 1926H

What if

we did away with product detail pages? What if we did away with shopping carts? What if we radically changed how checkout works? What do you hate about online shopping? What do you want to be working out better?

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10 Feb 2008 1913H

Apple laptops & OS X Leopard

Went to the Apple Store this weekend after cutting my way through the snow and ice that had accumulated in the driveway while I had been away; the store seemed busier than ever before, and the weather seemed to be cooperating. I played around with an iMac, a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro, and came [...]

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10 Feb 2008 1906H

E-commerce shopping experiences

This last week at work, towards the end at least, I had the opportunity to take a look at how various teams are handling various aspects of the online shopping experience and was somewhat surprised — I don’t know why, since I look at this stuff pretty much everyday — to find how much has [...]

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03 Feb 2008 0942H

Painting with ice

One of the great pleasures, or so I’d like to think, of living in a city that experiences four distinct seasons, is that you get to experience things that only happen in that season, and that tends to contribute to the richness of living. I think it would be a great thing if we were [...]

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