User Experience Design Blog

Apr 15, 2008 - Don’t Block YouTube In an interview with F@st Company, Gartner researcher Tom Austin suggests that companies think twice about blocking access to sites like YouTube and MySpace. Instead, Austin suggests companies leverage the social networking media of Web 2.0 to “enhance collaboration and productivity.” Business remains fundamentally about human interactions, and the Internet has skyrocketed the [...]

Apr 8, 2008 - Making Money on the Internet “The internet is a copy machine.” Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, notes on his blog that if the “super-distribution” system of the Internet and its endless free copying of information has undercut the structure of wealth built upon selling precious copies, “how does one make money?” Kelly defines eight categories of [...]

Apr 1, 2008 - Web of Flow On Sunday, Lo?Øc Le Meur wrote on the centralization provided by services mybloglog, friendfeed, and socialthing. However, Le Meur would prefer it if the centralization occurred on his blog, rather than with a third party service. Monday, Stowe Boyd responded to Le Meur’s lamentation to say, “conversation is moving from a very static and [...]

Mar 18, 2008 - Is That A Kiosk In Your Pocket? Electronic Airline Ticketing The next step in electronic ticketing has arrived. While those print-your-own boarding pass kiosks have been around since 1995, and half a dozen airlines in the U.S. now allow passengers to check-in using mobile devices, Continental Airlines has begun testing an electronic boarding pass. The boarding [...]

Mar 11, 2008 - “Sexy Money:” Kleiner Perkins’ $100 million pledge for iPhone Apps Last week, Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins pledged $100 million to fund iPhone software development. Though developers have been writing browser-based iPhone apps since the beginning, and more than that since the SDK release in June, Wired Magazine reports development may move to the mainstream [...]

Mar 4, 2008 - Death of Mobile Apps Michael Mace, former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, writes about the death of mobile applications on his blog. The post contends that given the barriers to platform access put in place by mobile carriers–”shrinking distribution channels”–and the lack of alignment between mobile platforms and vertical markets, the [...]

Feb 26, 2008 - Gender Bias in Tech Products An article in the Boston Globe last week explores gender bias in tech products and how companies are beginning to “feminize” their products. However, “it would be a mistake to think that designing for women simply means adding sparkles”–rather, it requires that companies put “style and functionality on equal footing with [...]

Feb 19, 2008 - 6 Types of Mobile Internet Users Broadband analyst group Point Topic reports six main types of mobile Internet users: Road warriors, gadget joys, MI lifers, mid-market moderates, entertain us and light & easy. Of these, the newest types to be identified are the mid-market moderates–late-adopters waiting for a compelling reason to use mobile Internet, “entertain us”–young [...]

Feb 12, 2008 - Logo Evolution Neatorama posted last week on the evolution of company logos. Along with reproductions of the logos through time are brief histories of the name changes, mergers, and executive decisions that framed each adaptation. Companies included: Adobe, Apple, Canon, IBM, Google, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Nokia, Nortel and Xerox. The post also includes interesting [...]

Feb 5, 2008 - The Usual Suspects: Alertbox, Boxes and Arrows, and UIE User Skills Improving From the Alertbox, Nielsen reports that users are getting better at moving their mouses, clicking on things, and the basics of search. Though users might be fluent on sites they know, they still trip over new sites, new information architectures, and information overload. To help, [...]