Making digital human: Archive

The home page is dead. Long live the home page.

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, the homepage has been the point of focus for website design, a front door of sorts through which visitors unlock all of the goodness within that we’ve built for them. And quite a bit of web design is done accordingly: get the homepage design right, the theory goes, and the rest of the site will follow. But as we continue diving headlong into a...

Jul 20th

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Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

For years, technology innovation has been drawing audiences away from broadcast media, siphoning attention off into a land of free and non-monetizable content. But the advent of the iPad holds the promise to redefine how the world produces and consumes media, and may just bring us all back under the wings of the major media houses. Through parallel storytelling, shared experiences, and new social...

Jun 10th

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Building trust through experience quality

While in the field doing in-home research, we recently passed a new house on the market for US $2 million. From the street, it wasn’t possible to see if the structure was sound or the quality of the construction was good - but what we did notice was the house number stickers on the mailbox. They were the cheap stick-on type from a local hardware store, with each digit slightly askew. And...

May 5th

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Apr 21st

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Apr 19th

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Apr 14th

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Apr 11th

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Apr 8th

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“We added a new feature to the Twitter web site that allows you to attach...”

– Twitter doing privacy right.

Apr 8th

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Apr 7th

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If You Need to Explain It, We Should All Agree,... →

“Placelessness is a huge problem. With a paper magazine, newspaper, or book, you know where you are and how much remains based on the pages in your hands.” - Daring Fireball Completely agreed with Gruber on this one. This is something that continues to show up in digital interactions. If the user doesn’t have a mental picture of the dimensions of the thing they’re trying...

Apr 7th

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“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes...”

– Don Norman in Interactions Magazine: Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf

Mar 16th

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SXSW: Zero Waste: The Future of Green

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Sunday March 14, 2010 Sol Design Lab Sol Design Lab has created solar-powered ‘gas pumps’ in the Austin area, which are 50’s gas pumps that have been retrofitted with solar panels on the top, and outlets below. First electric vehicle 100 years ago got 100 mph, we’re at 30 mph today, there’s a lot of potential here. One of their key...

Mar 14th

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SXSW: Banking 2.0: Financial Services Driven by...

Live from SXSW in Austin, TX, Saturday March 13, 2010 Presenters collectively have more followers than the top 10 banks combined. People are coming together to invest better than the pros on Wall Street. Making products that are relevant to what people want. Transparency into what is going on with one’s finances, no more black boxes. Anytime, anywhere. The paradigm has changed: ...

Mar 13th

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3 tags

SXSW: Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies &...

Live from SXSW in Austin TX, Saturday March 13, 2010 Presenting: Robert Fabricant, frogdesign Growing appreciation of the need for awareness of health issues; people don’t work very logically. Mobile technologies can provide awareness around our own understanding of situations and decisions of health considerations. Four people in frog talking about this: Robert, Fabio (“Design for...

Mar 13th

1 note

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Mar 8th

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Mar 5th

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“Importing outsiders with fresh eyes and ideas, and giving them a free hand, is...”

– From sneakers to smartphones: The man behind MS Windows Phone design Interesting piece on how Microsoft went outside of their existing Windows mobile team to get a fresh perspective on the UI design (although he has actually been at Microsoft since June of 2007). He was also part of the Tech Lab...

Mar 5th

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“and she won’t even have to mess with a router.”

– Blog: Josh Lewis » The iPad and the Importance of Focus Nice piece on the users that will drive iPad adoption

Mar 2nd

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Some stats on iPhone and Android users →

Android 73% male, iPod touch 65% 17-and-under, 50% of iPhone users don’t pay for apps in a given month

Mar 1st

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Feb 28th

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Feb 25th

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Feb 23rd

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Shifting allegiances on the web →

Interesting take on how quickly allegiances can shift on the web, where there’s relatively less switching cost, and cool hunting is always looking for the site less traveled: The other night I was driving my 17-year-old daughter, Grace, and her friend Tessa to a concert. A song came on the radio, and Tessa laughed. “I think I first heard that song on MySpace,” she said,...

Feb 20th

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Feb 13th

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1 tag

Honest and engaging corporate blogs (Part 2)

(See part one of this article) Blogs are one of those “simple, yet so complex” online marketing tools. On one hand, if you can talk clearly and captivatingly with your customers about issues they care about, blogs can go a long way toward making long-lasting connections that build your business. You don’t need an outline, nor a proposal. Just write and make it real. On the other...

Feb 11th

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Winning the battle of 140,000+ apps

There you are, putting the final touches on an amazing iPhone application. It’s useful, straightforward, and appealing - and a dead-on match for the magical confluence of your business goals and your users’ wants, needs, and desires. And then you submit it to the iTunes app store, where it disappears into the void among the thousands of IQ tests, flashlights, and fart apps. So how can...

Feb 9th

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Honest and engaging corporate blogs

Among other social media activities, executives at large corporations increasingly feel pressured to have a blog to communicate with customers and partners - but what does that mean? Blogs are informal journals of a sort, and have over the years become a popular way for people to engage in conversations with others in their industry or sphere of influence. But exactly how to have a conversation...

Feb 4th

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Jan 26th

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The artist behind our 2010 calendar, @electrobudista, is uploading his calendar images to Flickr http://bit.ly/5w3kf8 - check them out!

Jan 25th

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RT @janepyle: Boarding Pass/Fail http://bit.ly/5gX8nz Interesting collection of redesign ideas for boarding passes. It’s really needed.

Jan 15th

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Amazon EC2 Spot Instances →

Buy unused processor time in the cloud as long as your bid is below the going market rate, and then get first dibs on processors when market for CPU cycles heats up. Great for delayed-processing … how long until a desktop app uses it for offline facial recognition? Very cool concept.

Dec 17th

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Now available: Create with Context launches Windspire Me, an iPhone app to measure wind and promote wind energy http://bit.ly/7YJzVl

Nov 26th

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