Author: Victor

Loop: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education

There’s more and more layoffs in the digital consulting industry. I feel grateful that Razorfish only had to layoff 5% of our folks.

The Scient situation particularly makes sense. They grew at a simply unbelievable rate (almost 2,000 employees in 3 years, it took Razorfish over 5 years to get to that point). Any of the major 6 or 7 firms probably had enough money to grow at that rate, but having the money doesn’t make it easy. It’s hard to make that kind of growth sustainable.

Even without the layoffs, I question how long that could’ve gone on. IMHO, growth at that rate makes it impossible for a company to have a coherent culture, and without a strong cultural affiliation with the company, the employer is just another commodity from the employee’s point of view.

The amazing English language. Funny when a word has two meanings that seem incompatible:

neologism   \nee-AH-luh-jih-zum\   (noun)
    *1 : a new word, usage, or expression
     2 : a meaningless word coined by a psychotic

Interesting quote from Jef Raskin, of the early Macintosh interface team: “…even when a better design — if unfamiliar — is shown to developers or experienced users, they tend to reject it.”

Patterns of Hypertext Interesting reading, and could help fill a void in our vocabulary as information architects.

Though he uses the term “pattern language” I think these may fall short of actual patterns. I don’t expect them to be in “Alexandrian” form, but I think they should include the introduction, a discussion of something observed, and a description of the design technique.

I always feel naughty when I find people publishing for free what the ACM charges a buttload for. Love it.

The web design rumor mill starts churning…Peterme just left Epinions, and travels to Ann Arbor, home of Argus Associates. Hmmmmm…

MP3.com Resurrects Online Music Service. Seems by sellling its soul to the music companies mp3.com adopted their fear of distributing digital music too. Now their model rests on the ability to store your CDs on the Internet in the form of mp3s so you can access them anywhere. Woohoo!! Who cares? I can do this now with xdrive or Yahoo Briefcase. Or simply carry my CD around – most of us still have more devices that play CDs than mp3s.

What was appealling about mp3.com before was that mp3s were 1) free, and 2) easy to obtain. We’ve determined that free is illegal, so wouldn’t the next logical step be almost free and still easy to obtain? Emusic comes close, at $.99 per song. The only downside is selection. Hopefully the next incarnation of Napster will cheap, easy, and leverage the distribution power of the Internet.

Christopher Alexander in the NY Times. No revelations here, just interesting voyeristic reading.

We’re doing some e-commerce consulting for a non-profit organization.Their merchant bank informed them that Visa will soon be requiring all online vendors to verify transactions in real-time. Right now what our client does is securely accept credit card information online and store it in a text file, which a human then processes in a batch later on.

Visa’s stance makes sense, as they want to make sure their customers are receiving a certain level of service. But at the same time, this policy represents a huge cost for non-profit groups. They must invest in e-commerce software as well as pay additional transaction and verification fees. Seems like a nice compromise would be to give a discount to non-profit groups.

Reading about fiber optic Internet connections in the
recent tech edition of The New Yorker, I predict two
situations that’ll impact us in the world of interface
design using very high speed connections:

There will never be enough bandwidth to do what we
want. Even when we have virtual reality we’ll desire
enhanced reality.

We won’t be prepared to design for the challenges
of high speed connections. For example, right now we type our
search queries and click “Go”, the response of which
is a slight pause, then an icon
spinning/twirling/sparking in the upper right corner
of our browsers, then a search results page loads
little by little. This seems like sufficient feedback for the user. In the future we’ll click “Go” and
the results page will immediately appear. If the two
pages look alike, we may not even notice the page has
changed the response happened so quickly. We’ll have to be much more careful about
interaction design (what comes to mind in this case is using auditory interfaces to provide feedback. Not unlike on
Star Trek, where little beeps sound with each and every
press of a flat panel button.).

About 3/4 of the way across the Tappan Zee Bridge my car stalled last night. Trying not to panic, I attempted to restart it while rolling, no luck. I coasted a while more and stopped with a hundred yards left to go to the toll booth. Got out and pushed and after a minute another guy parked his car up ahead and helped me push. Nice to know there are still nice people in the world. Thank you, wherever you are.

Just looked through my web log reports and for the first time my paper on Music Censorship is more popular than my blog. Turns out it gets fairly high ranking from Google.

What amazes me now is the quality of writing I was capable of back in college when I wrote that. I think my writing skills have declined now that I spend my time attending meetings and drawing little boxes in Visio.

Shit, I just realized World AIDS Day just pasted and I neglected to black out my blog. I did spend most of the day working hard on a web site that teaches tolerance, so I think that more than makes up for it.

“I can’t hide the emotion I feel upon seeing an unbiased judge apply the law. Chileans are not afraid to judge a dictator.”

I just finished doing some usability testing on a web site that had some disturbing news content from around the U.S. I was bothered by the amount of people who didn’t care much about it because it’s ‘not in my back yard.’ Even in this age of speedy communications and travel people still think horrifying events like hate crimes happening in some other place in the country doesn’t affect them. A search on the Net turns out that people capable of committing biased acts are almost everywhere.