February 2004

I was in the paper store with James the other day and as I started picking out neutral shades he joked, ‘What, are you afraid of color?‘ Well, yes, a little. I have a hard time picking palettes from scratch, I just have no training there. The blue he picked out made me happy. When…

The woman who sits next to me at work does a lot of shopping online, and is constantly having customer service problems that she tries – often in vain – to resolve over the phone. We imagine a consulting service dedicating to improving fucked up customer service, or F.U.C.S. It would include sophisticated methods like…

From today’s MUG: The Justice Department is demanding patient records from, among other hospitals, Columbia-Presbyterian, Cornell, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, for hundreds of women who have had abortions in those hospitals since last November. Since the passage of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Justice Department wants to know more about what abortions are being…

Ben’s got a new website with portfolio. We were both early IAs at Razorfish, moving in and out of projects, him continuing my work on bikeshop.com and me taking over on Avaya. He’s finishing up his masters in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon; whoever ends up hiring him will have one great designer.

Period.‘ Jeff Dachis – in the March Fast Company – comes to terms with what went wrong at Razorfish. His passion was inspiring, he had amazing optimism and drive, but it wasn’t enough. ‘It’s hard to describe loving 2,100 employees so much you’ll do anything. You’ll buy $1 million of stock on the open market,…

George Packer’s excellent A Democratic World in the New Yorker reveals why the American Democratic party hasn’t yet had a coherent point of view on foreign affairs and what they must do to get there. Juicy excerpts: the Afghan girl was telling [Senator Joseph Biden], “Don¹t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here.…

There are surprisingly few user-centered design presentations out there, so Matt’s Alien Cowboy is a welcome addition, nicely customizing the big ideas for a techie audience. Thanks Matt!

One thing they don’t teach you in school is, what to do at a conference… Important work happens away from the auditorium: that’s the first lesson… And Huang, who cannot have been much older than I, was already talking about his responsibility for the direction people were taking in the field, for not leading people…

My new article on B&A: Managing the Complexity of Content Management: ‘…Because of the high planning, purchasing, and design costs, there is a need to effectively manage the complexity of CMS projects. I’ve seen some organizations do this well and others not so well. Here are ten lessons in managing complexity gleaned from real-world, successful…

Pardon me if I’m not answering email, etc.

Illy’s offering a special deal on the FrancisFrancis! X5 if you sign up for a year’s worth of coffee deliveries. The coffee probably costs a premium, but hey, it is Illy. The X5 that usually retails for $450 is only $175, so if you remember to cancel the shipments after a year (isn’t that always…

What’s good about telemarketer’s calls is that they are so annoying, they become the prototypical example of bad marketing. I can now use the term “telemarketing wrath” as an analogy of when marketing goes too far, and even marketers will cringe in disgust. Same goes for Jakob Nielson: he becomes a handy reference for a…

At the IA Support Group last night we reviewed the Tufte-Byrne-Norman Powerpoint debate. One good point that was brought up was the life of “decks” beyond presentation and documentation, that people in corporate cultures communicate with Powerpoint, using it as a mental shortcut instead of Word and emailing decks around. Tufte’s perfectionism is too slow…

The Autofill work that James is doing is a perfect example of how interaction design, information architecture, and programming can (and need to) all come together to make an interface work really well. He told me last night he has it working with a pull-down menu now. James, publish that code! :)