Noise Between Stations

Interface Design

  • Wearable prototypes

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    1 min read

    My wife is making a new dress for a party next month. Here’s a pic of her prototype. I love that her process resembles the basic design process: considering the desired experience, some research, investing in some materials/tools, building a prototype, testing it, marking it up, re-cutting it, testing it again, and is ready to…

  • The unhidden value in Netflix

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    1 min read

    Karl, in The hidden value in Netflix, points out that Netflix has… 345 Million movie ratings… Netflix gains a valuable resource that is hard to duplicate, that is almost the dictionary definition of a “strategic resource”, or a resource that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. Now Netflix is going beyond recommendations in using…

  • If you like coffee you might also like…

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    1 min read

    I was talking to a manager at one of the big ecommerce websites recently and she predicted that collaborative filtering is reaching the apex of usefulness. The below recommendation from Fresh Direct had me laughing at their clever suggestion. Are customer behavior and needs just as much if not more important than purchasing patterns in…

  • Information Esthetics lecture series in NYC

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    1 min read

    A group calling themselves Information Esthetics have formed to examine “making data meaningful” with an expansive view on how that happens. They plan a promising lecture series including folks like Judith Donath and Bill Buxton which will be right around the corner from my office and cost a whopping $3. Bless them.

  • Flickr tag: cardreader

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    1 min read

    NYC Subway metrocard slots Mike Lee sparked my interest in observing how many different ways designers tell us to insert a card into a machine. It’s interesting 1) because there are so many different ways, and 2) because many are confusing in that fascinating why-did-they-do-it-that-way? way. If you’d like to contribute, just add the tag…

  • Remember Quokka?

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    1 min read

    I just discovered the work of Mark Allen Nakamura who designed some of the old Quokka Sports site, still one of the most daring and bold layouts to appear on a mainstream site.

  • Interaction design talk in NYC

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    David Heller will be giving a free talk at the Parsons Design Lab this Thursday: What is Interaction Design (IxD)? Placing IxD in the context of Product Design and User Experience (UX) Design 7pm Parsons Design Lab 55 W. 13th St., 9th Floor NYC

  • Wider is better

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    1 min read

    Someday in the not-too-distant future I will start pestering you all with urges to start leveraging auditory interfaces. But first I’ll pester you with the potential for horizontal scrolling. It seems quite useful on-screen, and those who are doing it now benefit from the novelty factor. One example is the current version of Ftrain.com, as…

  • Widgetopia

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    1 min read

    I knew Christina was moving Widgetopia to Drupal, but I didn’t realize the community had already jumped onboard and was contributing widgets. This is turning into the definitive gallery space.

  • History

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  • Equifax Opt-Out Language

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    1 min read

    Privacy Policy and Opt Out: By clicking below you may exercise your right to instruct us not to provide your non-public personal information to non-affiliated third parties, except as permitted by law. [checkbox checked by default] I choose to opt out. Huh? They must not have had my 7th grade teacher who warned us against…

  • OSAF’s Vista

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    1 min read

    Andy Hertzfeld, of the original Macintosh team, writes about the prototype of Vista: a prototype for OSAF’s Networked Personal Information Manager. As a view into a development process that must integrate many different modules into one flexible interface it’s a must read. I’m also glad to see he landed somewhere that has a good chance…

  • Hyperlinking the Action Words

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    1 min read

    On an independent record label (forgot which)… On Gleanings…

  • Lisa/Macintosh Evolution

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    Here’s some wonderful sketches of the Macintosh interface evolution that span back to the Lisa prototypes. Those system 6 and 7 screen shots get me all misty-eyed…I used to live and breathe Macintosh in those days. Funny that the Lisa had multitasking and protected memory in 1984, I wonder how that was left out of…

  • Moving the Back Button

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    1 min read

    Using the Help Viewer in Mac OS X I wondered in frustrated amazement that they didn’t include a back button to return to the search results list of documents. In fact, it is there, they just moved it from the top left to the bottom right… Which is the right place for it. The two…