Noise Between Stations

I’m psyched that IDEA — a conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds — is happening in New York this year, with a great lineup of presenters like Jake Barton, Alex Wright, and Chenda Fruchter. And from now until September 15th October 3rd you can get 10% off the price of the IDEA [...]

Hip hop culture (at least here in America) has influenced not only our musical preferences but also our language, clothing, movies, and car styling. But you won’t see much of it online. The websites for hip hop artists resemble those for other artists, and the more innovative things are mostly done by us geeky white [...]

If you ever need a little online design inspiration, check out the screens that Michael Angeles captures so lovingly…

I just noticed that Worthwhile magazine dodged a trademark suit bullet and re-emerged as Motto magazine. They had good spirit before, I’m looking forward to checking out this new incarnation.

I was very frustrated at work yesterday thinking through a key business issue with a lot of variables in play, and the emotion was clouding my ability to think about the problem. Approaching the problem creatively was even harder, even though I was aware of this obstacle at the time. And of course this is [...]

A colleague recently complained that furniture company Room & Board has a great website but the buying process stops halfway and must be completed by phone. By coincidence we recently bought a bed from them and I have to admit the order was completed much quicker using the phone compared to a typical online shopping [...]

After successfully launching Smart Experience this Summer with a prototype course, I’m very happy to have a stellar line up of teachers sharing their expertise this September and October. Here’s the class listing, and if you follow these links you’ll get a 10% Noise Between Stations reader discount… Information Architecture 3.0 Oct 16 with Peter [...]

Scanning the Internet-centered design mailing lists these days, I have to wonder if the inward-looking conversations aren’t doing more harm than good. Earlier in my career, mailing lists and blogs were incredibly useful tools for learning my craft. The mass media hasn’t really covered the story of blogs as more than journals and citizen journalism. [...]

Apparently a lot of people are suffering from downtime at Dreamhost lately. I’ve run one site with them and found everything they did frustrating, from the control panel to the uptime to the customer support. I’ve been a Pair.com customer since 1999 and love them. They’re not the cheapest, though when I consider they’ve had [...]

This is another question I hear a lot, especially from managers, is just where to find talent these days. The real straight dope is that you should already be connected and have a wishlist of people you want to hire. But in the cases when that’s not possible I created a list of job sites [...]

I was hanging out with my peeps last week and a couple times Paul used the word awesome, as when we were talking about building tools for customers and he said, “The tools should make them feel capable of awesomeness.” Making people feel capable of awesomeness. That in itself is awesome. So this is my [...]

UX Crank purports to be cranky, but is actually a delightful look at experience design from one of the most intelligent, friendly guys in the Washington D.C. area — Dan Willis, Director of User Experience for the Public Broadcasting Service here in the U.S.A. Onto the RSS reader it must go.

If you haven’t yet heard David Weinberger’s position on authority vs. truth in media — the disclosure of accuracy in mainstream media vs. Wikipedia — you should, it’s one of his best ideas. If you visit the article on “conservativism” at Wikipedia, you’ll see–at least as of this writing–a strong warning at the top, complete [...]

I’ve gotten this question from students and others entering the field a few times, and frankly still ponder it for my own purposes, so I’m going to lay down some thoughts on it here. The question is: I’m very passionate about pursuing design strategy and bridging the gap between developing engaging user experiences (product side) [...]

Given my feelings on the humanitarian, labor, and political problems in China, I’m not too sorry they’re going to take an economic hit on product safety issues. It was just a matter of time.