Noise Between Stations

Category: Unfiled

Best sign yet that the digital consulting business is hurting. First some background: We recently lost a new business pitch to another, much smaller company. We really liked the client and it seemed like a tough decision for them. We stayed in touch with them just to see how things were going. Good thing, because the situation with the other consulting company didn’t go well and two months later we have the business.

But the part that shocked me was what happened when the client fired the other digital consulting firm. The firm actually yelled at the client. Here’s a client firing consultants for shoddy work and the consultants completely lose it. After meeting the client myself they seem like the most rational, honorable people I’ve met in awhile. I’m concluding those consultants were really desperate and losing it meant losing approximately 20% of their total business, business that’s not so easy to replace these days.

10/10/2000
New York Times article on usability testing at Fidelity

10/9/2000
Yesterday I read a story in Fast Company about Patagonia, a favorite company of mine. It mentions how they built the walls of their distribution center with compressed straw, which is more eco-friendly than using virgin building materials.

This morning I realized the weather in the Northeast is demonstrating its annual change of summer to autumn in the course of one weekend. So I removed my window air conditioner, an autumn ritual for apartment dwellers in these parts. In the space between the air conditioner and the window sill a bird had built a nest out of straw (landscapers had recently planted new grass around the house and spread straw over the seedlings). There’s a fun parallel; I’m imagining the little birds at Patagonia flitting around with needles in their beaks sewing Baby Aviator Hats.

10/7/2000
I just saw Girlfight, and I wept, a lot. A movie about boxing made me cry, that’s how awesome this film is.

It’s also great to see a Latina lead role, and even better the role was a believable everyday person, so rare in film these days. Reminded me of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

10/7/2000
Talk about syncronicity…this new story in the NY Times about bar codes explores their future potential. Maybe bar coding our flesh isn’t such a bad idea after all.

10/6/2000
jjg correctly points out that IBM is not the owner of the skin tattoo patent I referenced recently. It brings up an interesting branding question, how people view these pages out of context and, at least in my case, figure the domain name implies ownership.

10/5/2000
Smile of the day: Email address of the month awards. Thanks to Chris Pepper for this one.

10/5/2000
The banner ad for BlueLight.com says Shop Martha Stewart Everyday. Are they insane? There’s a point at which a hard sell is too hard.

After following the link I learn they have a section called Martha Stewart Everyday. I actually like that name, but putting the word “shop” in front of it changes everything.

10/4/2000
I just read through two wireless articles last night. The first from Creative Good is a good introduction, albeit with the usual reactionist position on the customer experience (I whole-heatedly agree with most of the findings, but there’s no acknowledgement that things will change. In a 6 months we will have technology that will obsolete some of their statements). They did nail, IMHO, the criteria for successful wireless e-commerce: limited choice, predictable availability, and low data entry requirements.

Much more useful I think is Ray Valdes’s article in the new Web Techniques mag (not online yet). He covers some of the same WAP-bashing ground but provides some technical insight. A particularly astute observation is that WAP binds the user interface with the data transport, so UI improvements can not advance more quickly, as is usually the case. Another key criticism is how all phones have a different size limit for WML decks and each WAP gateway does as well, so the only way to correctly develop for a broad audience of devices is to default to the lowest size. Yuck.

10/4/2000
Metallica is to my generation as Limp Bizkit is to…

The other day in the car I thought I understood the appeal of Limp Bizkit (this had been alluding me for some time). They are to this generation what Metallica was/is to mine. Sure ‘nough today I came across a Limp Bizkit cover of Metallica’s Master of Puppets, I think there’s a progression there.

9/28/2000
Whoa, I just went to go check My Yahoo! and was taken aback: a white background! And kinda slick (for Yahoo) looking layout, but still spartan and fast. Once I signed in I received the familiar grey drab page. Is the white the look of things to come??

9/28/2000
So glad this week is over…dealing with a cold contracted from a 65+ mile bike ride through the rainy hills of New Jersey and way too much work at work. Taking off for North Carolina this weekend for some warmer weather, my cousin’s wedding, spending time with my nephews and niece, and a pig roast. Yeeehaa!

9/28/2000
…and a site exclusively devoted to Wireless Financial Services News. I bet you have no idea what I’m working on these days.

9/28/2000
unstrung – yet another web site devoted to the mobile industry. Surprisingly enough, this one is done pretty well too.

9/28/2000
uidesign.net leaves me wondering why I haven’t found this site earlier. Since I’m currently reading “The Humane Interface” I found this exchange interesting, and this application of user personas to mobile design looks helpful.

9/26/2000