June 2003

Pieter Desmet is doing some great work in designing for and measuring emotions. I particularly like PrEmo, a visual scale of facial expressions for a user to specify an emotion they’re feeling. James Kalbach, danke f�r den Hypertext-Link. Keywords: marketing, brand, cartoon, face

Java.com is a sprightly little entry by Sun targeted at consumers. In the least we should all be thankful for a coherent way to download the software, which comes in a dizzying array of incomprehensible variations on Sun’s site. And since the site emerged from my colleagues I feel OK poking fun at it’s obvious…

Gothamist is a pretty good read for those, like me, that find Gawker a little too Daily News. Thanks Tanya.

The new Mirra Chair from Herman Miller is said to be a better fit for more body sizes, easier to adjust, more colorful, more green, and less expensive (

Bill Seitz has launched wikilogs, ‘a hosting service which lets you maintain a personal wikilog, or wiki-based weblog‘ and includes his trademark wit, ‘ I’ve done some things to make wikilogs.com a bit more reader-friendly than the average wiki, and I’ll be doing more, but you’ll probably never get that Jason Kotte feeling here. So,…

Lou and I. You’ll notice he opted for the beer sampler, one of which was titled the Polar Bear. Molly and I. We talked for like, 120 seconds, but one could tell she’s a total sweetheart.

Surprisingly tough to find any, much less thoughtful, information on closed card sorts (e.g. testing an existing classification system). Donna Maurer’s Card-Based Classification Evaluation comes to the rescue, complete with pictures for people like me. Bless those nice Boxes and Arrows people. I’m tempted to make three modifications to Donna’s method: 1. Write out the…

Rashmi, the queen of quantitative IA research, has a shiny new firm, ‘The word Uzanto means user in Esperanto. It reflects our commitment to belief in useful, usable and accessible technology for all.‘

Yay! Thanks, Eric, for nursing her back to health.