Strategy

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 [...]

Read the rest of 1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

Respond »

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 [...]

Read the rest of In praise of the Pre

Respond »

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 [...]

Read the rest of Do you matter: how great design will make people love your company

Respond »

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. [...]

Read the rest of Isn’t that . . . marketing’s function?!

1 response »

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 [...]

Read the rest of Vast oversimplification probably, but

Respond »

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 [...]

Read the rest of Effective design problem solving

Respond »

17 Aug 2008 0647H

Biting the hand that feeds you

Seems a recent post at grokdotcom has inflamed the information architecture community: hardly worth mentioning really but for the strident responses drawn to that flame. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that interaction design or information architecture is faulty or point out how they are incomplete, and most mature disciplines at some point in [...]

Read the rest of Biting the hand that feeds you

Respond »

10 Aug 2008 0826H

Gap goes back to basics

From BusinessWeek:
“For several years, Gap, under former Disney (DIS) executive Paul Pressler, relied heavily on focus groups and spent little time in the stores. Early on, Gap North American President Marka Hansen encouraged Robinson to have breakfast with store managers at Gap’s flagship on 34th Street in New York City. As he scribbled furiously in [...]

Read the rest of Gap goes back to basics

Respond »

07 Aug 2008 1216H

Research driving UX projects

We’re in the production stream of a project now, and I’m looking back on an affinity diagram I put together after we’d had a group of about four or five users tell us their loves and hates (such strong words, I know) about a particular online service we offer. Hadn’t looked at it in a [...]

Read the rest of Research driving UX projects

Respond »

31 Jul 2008 0822H

Personas for shopping malls?

Why yes. In what is being scored as a landmark event by the NYT (rather late post) at the beginning of July, real estate developers have consulted their targeted users in planning commercial real estate:
Terry Montesi, the company’s chief executive, first hired two female retail consultants: Claudia A. Sagan and J’Amy Owens. But Trademark also [...]

Read the rest of Personas for shopping malls?

Respond »

« Older entries