Noise Between Stations

Michael has the best blackout story I’ve heard yet. The best blackout idea I’ve heard yet was from a waiter who said, ‘We should do this every year.’ Yes, every Earth Day. If we could plan for it, there’d be no commuters trapped on trains, and we’d keep power going to essential places. But all [...]

“Hey Kathryn. Hello? What’s wrong?”“My website doesn’t smell good.”Brad had stopped by for his morning cup to go (large, French roast, black). I thinks he likes me, but he never asks me out. “Oh, come now. I’m sure your website smells fine.”“That’s not what Mr. Nahzah says. He looked at the home page and couldn’t [...]

Steve Krug last night was his usual humble, humorous self with more than enough advanced common sense to please everyone. He spoke of kayaks (unexpected user behavior that’s not all that bad, like rolling over in a kayak), boxfish, and a missing chapter from the book: Why Your Website Should Be a Mensch. Indeed. The [...]

Where I’ll be tonight: Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug on Web Design Tishman Auditorium The New School, 66 West 12th Street Wednesday, Aug 27th 6 to 8:30 PM To RSVP for this event, please email rsvp@usableproducts.com Please bring photo ID.

I just started working with a designer who created a site for the Dalai Lama. I hope some of that holiness rubs off.

Alan Cooper, in his new column The Origin of Personas, claims to have developed personas as an original idea. While he qualifies his words (“introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool”, ” the history of Cooper personas” (stress mine)), he cites the first published mention of them was 1998′s The Inmates [...]

Challis points out Welchia, a noble virus that repairs damage done by the Blaster virus. Now all we need is a noble virus that infiltrates web servers and fixes crappy navigation.

Quick, take a look at the unconventional Oracle home page before they roll out the new one.

Marc Rettig, fountain of wisdom, elaborates and links to a couple docs about using big analog tools with teams.

Last Winter the online journal IT & Society quietly published an entire issue on web navigation. It’s somewhat ironic that the issue is one page of abstracts that link to PDFs :-) Still, there’s probably goodness there; I’ll be starting with David R. Danielson’s Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation.

Owen found a Make It Bigger excerpt, and I love this part: ‘I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow responsible [...]

OK, is it me, or does this mobile phone look like a Zippo? Makes one think about how to combine various things we keep in our pockets. And how about this Porsche SUV and this Hyundai SUV?

Tanya’s revealing of her technique for setting facets for her blog was the catalyst that reminded me of a comment Peterme made regarding facets: ‘The system can never know which particular strategy a given user wants to employ — so why not avail them of them all?‘ I don’t think he really means all facets [...]