Archive for September 2008

18 Sep 2008 1058H

Random recent thoughts

Should we call the kinds of usability testing most of us have been exposed to as preference elicitation instead? Should we not recruit passionate users, who tend disproportionately also to be expert users, and therefore, are unrepresentative of typical users of a site? Should we start to disaggregate the different kinds of work we now [...]

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18 Sep 2008 1005H

Vast oversimplification probably, but

If you invest in solid user experience, interaction design, and usability as central to your corporate values, then you don’t have to spend millions on an expensive media campaign, nor do you have to hire all these “gurus” to help people out: Besides the TV ads, Microsoft is adding content to windows.com, creating a related [...]

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09 Sep 2008 1235H

Initial reactions to the Let’s Rock event

• Slightly worried at how thin the Man has gotten but he did (sic?) have pancreatic cancer, not exactly easy to shake off as far as cancers go. . . • NBC to return to iTunes. Shocker. So what happens to Hulu? Are they learning from their Olympic success and seeing how far the rabbit [...]

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08 Sep 2008 1150H

E-ink on flexible plastic substrate

The possibilities are intriguing. So what about color e-ink?

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08 Sep 2008 0706H

Just because it works in a u-test. . .

doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will be incented (incentivized?) to take an action. In other words, beyond the role that user experience plays in making things findable and easy to use — for those of us who work in e-commerce, anyway — there is this other role we play in promotion of features. For [...]

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03 Sep 2008 0734H

Google Chrome powered by . . . Apple?

Was dinking around with the Chrome browser last night and saw this: Weird. Bits of Mozilla and such. So does this mean we’re playing around with what is essentially with a souped up version of Safari? Like Spinal Tap: “These go to 11.”

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01 Sep 2008 1330H

New Google browser?

The latest ploy by Google to own a piece of your desktop is your browser? That’s what this comic shows. Google Chrome, coming soon. But if you were to create your own browser experience, what would it be like?

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