Strategy

28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost [...]

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29 Nov 2009 0833H

Black Friday internet sales up 35% over last year

“It was a stronger picture for Internet retailing. The average online order on Black Friday rose 35% from last year, to $170.19, according to online retail analyst Coremetrics — an indication that people may be looking to buy gifts after a year of economic woes.”
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25 Nov 2009 0645H

Re: Barnes & Noble’s Nook

Dear Mr. Frain: slash the price on the Nook. Give the thing away. Why? The real game is to sell books, not to sell Nooks, just like Microsoft and the other game companies. To compare with video games: if you have good product, as Nintendo planned, quite successfully, with the Wii against Microsoft’s XBox 360 [...]

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24 Nov 2009 1008H

New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Today observed my wife shopping online and cussing out the webpage at checkout. You see, she is one of the many people — not a majority of users certainly, but definitely a persona to be designed for — out there who I observed at Sears, MyGofer, Hallmark, Borders, Wilton, so on — who use the [...]

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10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not [...]

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21 Dec 2008 1647H

Do you matter: how great design will make people love your company

(by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery with Russ Hall: FT Press, 2008.) Examples are too heavy on the Apple fanboy love, when so many others are available, and there is this sense, despite the hard orange cover with its glossy Helvetica type in a trendy slim, vertical format, that this book is actually a rough [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1419H

Isn’t that . . . marketing’s function?!

Was reading a white paper from HFI the other day. Said they wanted to move beyond usability, which as I’ve noted in previous posts, as we typically experience it, is more normative than it is positive. In essence they described what Grokdotcom might call Persuasion Architecture, but which they are calling, Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. [...]

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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 site [...]

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17 Aug 2008 0850H

Effective design problem solving

By way of Noise Between Stations, there’s a line in this work, my emphasis added, by Nigel Cross’s Expertise in Design:
Expert designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, especially in terms of the time and attention they spend on defining the problem. However, this seems to be appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that [...]

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