A good essay by usability guru Don Norman, it talks about the way some designs talk to their users. It also concludes with an interesting look at the way users can by mystified by an interface or unexpected result.
Later, as I thought back about that morning shower, I realized I had been communicating with the designers. "Grab here," the bar was telling me. "Put the soap on me," the wire rack soap dish screamed. "Here are your towels," said the horizontal bars at the rear wall, at the end of the tub, conveniently stocked with towels. "Thank you, yes, and no, not for the soap," I was replying. I even spoke some of these comments aloud. To whom was I speaking? An observer would have thought me deranged, for there was no one in the room. Fortunately, I usually shower without an observer, but I was having a conversation with the designers, considering their suggestions, accepting some and rejecting others. The designers may not have been there to listen, but their statements clearly required an answer.
Monthly Archive for November, 2004
Another concept that has been coming soon for sooo many years, electronic paper is (still) getting closer to actually happening…
The transistors used in the backplanes of laptop and desktop flat panel screens are built from amorphous silicon. Fabricating thin films of transistors from amorphous silicon requires processing temperatures of 300 degrees Celsius, and that kind of heat will melt most flexible plastic substrates. That's why traditional flat panel displays are made of glass that's as brittle as fine china. The key then was finding a low-temperature semiconductor. Rather than panic, the Philips researchers went organic.
the feature is a little techie as you can see…
This is a pretty cool flash movie foretelling a possible future. A future in which traditional news media is pushed aside by amature news (blogging), where google put microsoft out of business by becoming ubiquitous.
very nice indeed…
Seems a lot of people who rushed out yesterday to buy half-life2 (along with halo2, probably one of the most anticipated games of 2004) are not allowed to play the game yet.
Valve, the games producers put in a special anti-piracy protection which forces people to register online before they can play the game. Unfortunately they underestimated how many people would want to register on the first day…and subsequently all their servers crashed from over-population
oh dear, guess the only way around it is to use the emulator which has already been used to put the game into the newsgroups.
Some cool pictures of Japanese product design through the ages…interesting to see the ubiquitous innovations (such as the red record button) get invented and subsequently copied…
Apparently AOL is set to re-release a version of Netscape to include new firefox features, they also plan to bring out a new AOL Browser based on IE…catering for both ends of the market.
Wonder if microsoft will keep their 'we cant see you so it doesnt matter' stance?
Wired has an interesting interview with Wilco the chicago based band who fell-out with their middlemen and decided to go it alone…through the web.
After being dropped from Reprise Records in 2001 over creative conflicts surrounding Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the Chicago-based band committed what some thought would be suicide — they streamed it online for free.
It seems that this was a rather successful tactic…
A little place in California known as Pleasanton is bent on making life unpleasent for anyone going faster than they say you should.
They have just installed 'clever' traffic lights which detect whether a motorist is speeding and turn red for a certain amount of time to punish them.
Seems to me, this is one of those devices thought up by a bycylist. Not only dangerous (when someone is going too fast it really isnt a good idea to put a lot of cross traffic infront of him) it is also gonna really help the pollution levels as people who slow down for no reason also have to speed up (most likly to the speed they were doing before).
This is a pretty obvious idea, most people in the know realise that certain jobs require certain CV's. Since these CV's are rarely read carefully and are ususally just glanced over to decide whether they are ripe for interview or not, it makes sense to be able to change the design of a CV easily.
So why not write the content in XML, allowing you to produce a plain text email version, formatted doc version, stylish css webpage or a swanky looking pdf.
The XML Résumé Library is a system that does this. Although their examples could do with the touch of a designer…
Seems the BPI is getting all hot under the collar about companies advertising on p2p programs with built in banner ads (eugh). They are berating the companies for indirectly endorsing people to download their music without paying.
At the moment eDonkey is enjoying the benefits of having some very well-known faces advert on its network.
"Many big brands have leveraged the opportunity, including perhaps two of the biggest brands in the world - Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush," said chief executive Sam Yagan.
Seems the whole world is against them…wonder why that is?
A new(ish) startup called Intellectual Ventures has a unique and very cynical business plan…to patent intellectual property…and thats it.
They envisage a future where anyone who wants to use an idea or technique in their hardware or software must pay them money for a license to use their patent without being sued.
yum, bet this will really encourage creativity…
Interesting notes from the trial of Jeremy Jaynes recently reccomended a jail term of 9 years for spamming.
Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes' pitches. In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out.
But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said.
"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.
Hot on the heels of the very popular boyfriend's arm pillow is the new girlfreind's lap pillow…seems to me they missed out on the obvious, but still…
You can tell these guys know about marketing, just look at the title they used (& I ripped-off) for the page.
They look at the firefox marketing campaign, specifically in-terms of a new form of marketing. The open-source campaign, or as they put it anything-but-the-other-guy. Seems pretty successful…
Their community-generated Spread Firefox (SFX) campaign, launched less than two months ago, is already one of the watershed campaigns in interactive marketing history. It's helped generate over a million downloads per day since Firefox went out of beta on Tuesday; registered over 25,000 volunteer marketers; encouraged about 100,000 Web sites to display promotional buttons and banners; generated wall-to-wall coverage in the blogosphere and mainstream media; and raised a quarter of a million dollars for a full-page ad in The New York Times.
Opera have just released the latest version of their browser to beat IE. It has pretty much all of the features of firefox, and a couple more such as a trashcan (for retrieving closed tabs) and a startbar showing your 10 most visited sites.
Unfortunatly, it also has a dirty great ad banner along the top unless you register/crack it. shame…
Feature Spotlight Here (by the firefox faithful forevergeek)