Web

16 Jan 2009 1307H

Circuit City throws in the towel

Sad to hear. While at Sears online services, round 2, we admired the work they’d done there. They did some great things there in my opinion to try and salvage the brand: in-store pickup worked like a charm; the website user experience was top notch. In the end nothing could help solve drastic market conditions [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1815H

E-commerce book wars? Hardly.

I see in today’s news that William J. Lynch, Jr has been hired away from HSN to head up Barnes and Noble’s direct commerce division, this after Borders named a new CEO. Considering that BN.com made $422.9m in 2008, and that Borders.com, in the first seven months it was open made $20.3m, and with BGP [...]

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18 Nov 2008 1350H

Stop reading, start doing

People ask what a good reading list is for our interdiscipline.
But I like to be the contrarian.
I say stop reading.
Take an interaction.
It can be any interaction but preferably human-machine interface.
Take it apart.
Figure out what is the desired path.
Figure out where things can or do go wrong.
Put it back together again.
Take notes.
Figure out how to improve [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1507H

Progressive disclosure redux

The other day I came across the improper and proper use of progressive disclosure.
For those not in the know, progressive disclosure (PD) is a technique we use in interface design, partly to mitigate information overload, to signal that a secondary action is possible, and if selected, information will be solicited from the user. So within [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1447H

Are carousels abused?

Probably. We talk about carousels but no one properly seems to know what are the appropriate contexts around when to use them.
For those not in the know, carousels are a kind of web user interface widget that essentially displays a subset of a larger set of information in a loop, and typically not only shows [...]

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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 instance, [...]

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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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26 Aug 2008 1519H

Something surprising

The other day I watched my four-year-old niece show exactly how conversant she is with the web. She is conversant to the degree that she can input in her own name and password into a site, and knows what the major web conventions are, and can play games with relative ease. Kinda makes you wonder [...]

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14 Aug 2008 1010H

Frivolity, but, hey: Uniqlock

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