shawn.me

Category: user experience

  • Are iPhone apps the new CD-ROMs?

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    Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they…

  • Why does YouTube bother with ratings?

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    I’ve worked on a few online video sites in my career, and on every one of those projects we confronted the question of whether to have ratings. In this web 2.0 world, the answer seems obvious on the surface: Of course, you have to let your users rate the videos! Kyte, for example, added ratings…

  • Sign o’ the times

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    I received my weekly BayCHI job bank email today, which has always contained at least twenty or thirty postings.  Today, however, it was so thin that I mistook the email for some other kind of announcement, and I scrolled right past the one(!) job posting it contained: Senior User Experience Designer at H&R Block –…

  • twitter is a game

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    On many occasions and even in a recent post, I’ve said that I just don’t get twitter. I was certain I didn’t want to tune in to the minutiae of my friends’ lives, and I was not interested in sharing mine. A few short weeks later, I’ve totally changed my tune, and I can say…

  • My Favorite Web Services

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    As a user experience guy, one of the things I do for my job is try out every new web service that comes along. Most of them don’t really stick, and some I avoid simply because of god-awful naming. I’m talking about you, Frrvrr. Seriously, the Web 2.0 Company Name Generator could have done way…

  • Amazon Wants to be My Wingman

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    Today I ordered a book called Information Dashboard Design from Amazon.com – my latest in a series of work-related purchases. Of course, whenever you buy anything from Amazon, they generously suggest other books you might be interested in… Amazon seems to recognize that guys who habitually purchase books on information design and software engineering need…

  • I don’t want to talk to my car

    I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for cars that feature voice recognition technology. Like this clever one for Ford’s SYNC: Or this one for the Ford Focus: I enjoy these commercials, but I’m not buying what they’re selling. SYNC might be cool, and it could even save my life by automatically dialing 911 after…

  • marketing ux

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    Driving into the city on I-80 today, I saw a billboard for BAJobs.com touting the website’s “better interface”. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen User Experience (UX) highlighted so prominently to sell a website. Does this mean the market recognizes the narrowing distinction between websites and software? Does it mean UX is leaving…

  • title anyone?

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    From the booking process on the Singapore Airlines web site. I only wish I’d seen this in time for Tracy and I to travel as Earl and Countess or perhaps simply Professors Smith and Cohen.

  • planet metadata: creating an “infosphere”

    This week at TheFeature.com, Howard Rheingold writes about Microsoft’s A.U.R.A. research project: “Smith pointed me toward another example in his kitchen that he had discovered himself when he first started clicking around – Kellogg’s Cracklin’ Oat Bran. One of the top links for that breakfast cereal revealed that a mislabeled early batch had failed to…