I've been looking at portal interfaces lately as I'm working on building a vertical portal for a major "finanancial and news group." The best click-this-symbol-and-have-this-box-open-in-a-new-window icon, but far, isn't even on a portal. It's on http://www.peterme.com, a fav weblog of mine:

Interesting that some, like Excite, choose to provide a Windows-like minimize function instead that acts like the Mac windowshade. I guess a pop-up is better used for frequently viewed info that you might want even when you're performing other tasks, like a calendar. Whereas less important information, or less frequently viewed information, can be hidden and revealed as needed.

The other buttons, edit and close, are usually well represented with "edit" and "x", the latter usually a stolen Windows close box.

Don't really know what the Epicentric icons mean! Maybe "edit, pop-up, and close" respectively.

I think everyone, especially Unitarians who make it a point to explore the world's wisdom, filter out what doesn't work for us and remember the rest, integrating the best of what's left into our world view. The bad stuff also makes an emotional impression on us and we remember it because we want to keep it out of our world view. If it's really bad, we want to spare others from it as well. That can be seen as helping others or unwanted proselytizing, based on your frame of reference (Unitarian, Jehovah's Witness, Atheist, etc).

The situation is really more complicated than we might think, not just a matter of "believe what you believe, and let others do the same" since we all want the world to be a certain way and are generally pissed off when others don't realize we're right!

• People will relate to different customers differently depending on their position at the company (e.g. varying levels of tech support will deal with end users with various experience). There is danger in generalizing from this point of view.
• The term user can be too elastic, stretching to fit your needs. That's why you should develop and design for personas rather than for "users".
• Fallacy of focus groups: being the victim of a problem doesn't necessarily give you the power to solve that problem.
• Designing for many audiences is futile, make one audience ecstatic. To do this, you can design for a persona.
• Personas help avoid idiosyncracies in individuals.
• Programing is defined by cases at the edge of the paradigm, whereas is defined at the center.
• Generalizations like "power user" and "computer literate" do not apply to most people.
• You can develop an "anti-persona" (Cooper calls it a "negative persona") to specify who you're not designing for.

1. I didn't give her credit, and
2. I didn't give others credit

• "Contextualize" means simply to put in context, but can take on sophisticated implications depending on the kind of context you're referring to.
• "Socialize" (heard from Anderson Consulting) refers to the sharing of ideas, to talk about and spread a concept. It's the initial process that can lead to cultural memory, or memes.

Expedia:

Some key points and terms I liked:

• User's number one desire is to not feel stupid
• "Dancing bear functionality" describes the amazement people feel when watching formerly unknown functionality, even if the functions appear clumsy or barely usable
• Software experts pride themselves on their ability to handle high "cognitive friction" (the result of
• A "wet dog" is something that is very unpleasant yet you still carry it around only out of irrational love
• "Domain knowledge" is in-depth experience in a particular field
• The frequency of use of a feature is inversely proportional to the amount of information needed to control it. The easier it is, the more people will use it.
• Software apartheid - otherwise normal people are forbidden from entering the job market and participating in society because they cannot use computers affectively. This is the fault of difficult to use software.
• The knowlefge gained from building a prototype is more valuable than the code it's made up of. Trying to use this half-baked code in the real product is building on a shaky foundation - don't be afraid to throw it away.
• Larry Keeley's "Product tripod" - viability (business goal) balanced with capability (technology goal). Desirability (design goal) must come first and dictate the other two. Desirability can result in loyalty, which in the long term can be stronger than need. Example of high loyalty: Apple Computer. Example of low loyalty: Novell networking. MBAs don't learn this importance of design.
• Computers used to be more expensive than labor, so it was smart economic practice to hire people to cope with obscure technology. Now the equation is reversed: talented labor is expensive and computers are cheap, so difficult software ends up costing companies a lot of money.

A friend is considering rolling these out at an ad agency figuring the higher initial cost of an Airport over conventional Ethernet wiring will pay for itself by saving the need for extra cable pulls and redoing installations due to construction (more common in Manhattan than in office parks).

But I wonder if you'd shoot yourself in the foot. What's the range, 150 ft? Is that enough to roam from the top northwest corner of your office to the bottom southeast corner? Will people keep computing as they're walking down the halls? Will the connection weird out when they get in the elevator? What if you're saving a document as you walk out of range, does it corrupt the sucker? If you walk out of range and back in does it re-establish the connection in a seamless way? Will the RF cause cancer?

I don't care, I want one - in creamsicle orange.

The below are called "maps" but only so people know what they will get when they click on the "site map" link. They resemble outlines more than maps. Each is a good representative of the company from which it was birthed: Apple's is clear and informative; Macromedia's is clear with a more current design sense; Netscape's is a poor imitation only tolerable on a black and white monitor.

This first-of-its-kind auction-style product empowers independent professionals, contractors, consultants, freelancers and micro-business owners to market their skills and experience directly to employers for short and long-term assignments.

Here's how it works. You describe your skills, your experience, and your target opportunity - where you're willing to work, what kind of company you'd like to work for, what kinds of projects you're interested in and your desired rate. Then you launch your auction. As the bids start rolling in from employers, you select only those companies and opportunities you're interested in. The freedom to choose is in your hands.

I hope we'd go in the other direction: new networking opportunities emerging from online communities at vertical portals; tight knit groups of people in a common field offering personal referrals to each other, all made easier with technology (that's how I found my job, on a listserv!). For example, the computer book publishing community is getting there in the form of Studio B.

Regarding the ungrammatically slogan, the "Think Grammatic" folks overlook the fact that the grammitically incorrect slogan is one way of being different, of not conforming to rules and instead going with what "feels right."

And now that people have greater access to them there must be a growing aura of cynicism around them, given the fluffy, hype-ridden nature of press releases these days.

olla podrida   \AH-luh-puh-DREE-duh  or  OY-uh-puh-DREE-duh\   (noun)
  1 : a rich highly seasoned stew of meat and vegetables usually
  including sausage and chickpeas that is slowly simmered and is a
  traditional Spanish and Latin-American dish
 *2 : hodgepodge

I propose a hypothetical auditory display based that follows this vertical metaphor. The form of this auditory display is a cascade: the direction and rate of information between the web and the desktop is aurally presented as rising and falling "streams" of information. Clearly, trying to simulate a waterfall-like sound would go against the principles discussed earlier, so short mid-frequency (~500Hz) pulses can be generated. These pulses are spatialized using 3D sound processing technology, so that when information is being download to the useršs desktop, the pulses appear to originate from a point above the desktop display (and vice-versa for uploading). The position of consecutive pulses fall sequentially closer to the computer, to give the impression that data is falling from above and landing in the useršs information space. This is consistent with the visual desktop metaphor of pages loading from top to bottom. Direction (uploading or downloading) is displayed by the perception of sound sources moving away from or towards the desktop along a vertical axis. Rate of information flow is a time-based function: the rate of change in the position of sound pulses. Communication lags can be differentiated by spatial location. For example, if the pulse rate decreases as the signals approach the desktop level, this is an indication that there is a local problem (busy CPU). If the pulses are relatively slow all the way down one can assume that the lag is caused by high network traffic.

OD folks acknowledge the role of technology in an organization, they are primarily concerned with the "social subsystem."

In a good, short introduction to the topic, Organizational Development - A process of learning and changing, W. Warner Burke makes these points:

Organizational Development is a process of fundamental change in an organization's culture

where culture is defined by Edgar Schlien as:

basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously...They come to be taken for granted because they solve problems repeatedly and reliably.

and development is defined by Ackoff as:

an increase in capacity and potential, not an increase in attainment...It has less to do with how much one has than with how much one can do with whatever one has.

So an organization practices its old ways and may even keep growing but cannot develop without change in its culture. How does an organization know when they need developing?

• "Perhaps the clearest sign is when the same kinds of problems keep occurring."
• "When a variety of techniques is used to increase productivity, for example, and none seems to work."
• "When morale among employees is low and the cause can be attributed to no single factor."