User Experience
Rewinding IBM.com February 7, 2008
Back during the paleolithic Web era of 1995-1999, I held down my first full-time Web job at IBM. Most of my work from that era has been lost in a string of hard drive crashes, but my old cohort Ed...
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Michael Wesch videos October 27, 2007
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Wesch (of The Machine is Us/ing Us fame) give a talk at the IDEA conference in New York, where he debuted two new videos that are now available online:...
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Textmap August 24, 2007
Textmap is an experimental "entity search engine" with some nifty data visualization features for putting news stories in context. In addition to the kinds of things you might expect - like topic maps, and graphs showing the frequency of stories...
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Frank Lloyd Wright interview June 7, 2007
Jason Fried of 37 Signals points us to this vintage video clip of Mike Wallace interviewing Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1957, at the age of 90, Frank Lloyd Wright was in New York to supervise construction of his final masterpiece...
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Designing Audiences May 30, 2007
Last night I popped by the AIGA's Designing Audiences panel, an exploration of the changing role of designers in an increasingly user-generated world. A few notes: Host Ze Frank (of The Show fame) moderated the discussion, starting with his own...
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MobileCampNYC May 20, 2007
Rarely have I felt so technologically inadequate as I did at yesterday's MobileCampNYC, an "unconference" about emerging mobile technologies at Pace University's downtown conference center. Hiding my humble Motorola flip-phone in my jacket pocket, I waded through a roomful of...
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See you in Vegas? March 21, 2007
For anyone out there planning to attend the IA Summit in Las Vegas this weekend, I'll be giving a presentation Saturday morning entitled The Web That Wasn't: What if the Web had turned out differently? In the years leading up...
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Left-wing widgetry February 27, 2007
Recently spotted on Kayak.com:...
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Wikiasari December 26, 2006
Next year Wikia (Jimbo Wales' for-profit outfit) will release a new Wikified search engine dubbed Wikiasari that purports to take a more human-centered approach to filtering search results by, among other things, giving a higher ranking to sites already dubbed...
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Hep me, I've been monetized December 19, 2006
On a 40-minute US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Richmond last night, I experienced what may be a new low in the annals of craven marketeering. After liftoff, the cabin video monitors descended, not to show the usual crappy inflight...
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The $100 GUI December 15, 2006
Pentagram has released a preview of the user interface for Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative, featuring the work of a design team led by Lisa Strausfield. It's difficult to evaluate the design without a better sense of how...
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Gamer Theory December 12, 2006
The Institute for the Future of the Book has published Internet theorist MacKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory (a.k.a. G4M3R 7H30RY) in a new experimental online format. It's an interesting foray - not to mention a remarkable contortion of Wordpress -...
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Craigslist Meets the Capitalists December 11, 2006
The New York Times describes a meeting between "delightfully communist" Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and a Wall Street audience of bewildered investment bankers trying to wrap their heads around the idea of a company with no interest in maximizing its...
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Smithsonian Photo Initiative August 27, 2006
The Smithsonian has launched its new Smithsonian Photo Initiative, featuring a collection of 1800 images by 100 photographers gathered together in an online exhibit called "Enter the Frame," with an experimental interface that's heavy on tags and light on conventional...
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Photosynth August 14, 2006
Tim Gasperak pointed me to Photosynth, a provocative research prototype out of Microsoft Live Labs. The interface strikes me as flickr-meets-David Hockney-meets-Jaron Lanier. While the research site is short on any real technical details, it does offer a general description...
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IA Summit Redux April 25, 2006
For anyone who missed last month's IA Summit, nform and Boxes and Arrows are sponsoring a series of teleconferences featuring selected presentations from the Summit. I'm on the docket to recap my session on Stone Age Information Architecture this Thursday...
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Pandora March 15, 2006
Whit pointed me to Pandora, a new music recommendation service with a compelling twist. While most recommendation engines rely on some variation of collaborative filtering - the familiar "people who liked this also liked this" approach - Pandora takes an...
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Gestural interfaces February 14, 2006
Now this is pretty slick, a demo of a gestural interface prototype from NYU's Jeff Han. The first minute or so is kind of "eh," with what seems like a fairly simplistic screensavery thing. But then it gets interesting, with...
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Rolling with Walt February 2, 2006
A nice hit for my client Rollyo in today's Wall Street Journal, courtesy of Walt Mossberg: Rollyo stands for "Roll Your Own Search Engine." While it uses Yahoo's search technology, it allows you to target a query by limiting the...
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Vancouver bound January 11, 2006
The ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit just accepted my session proposal, so I'll be venturing up to Vancouver from March 23-27 to give a presentation entitled "Stone Age Information Architecture." Here's a rough sketch of what I plan to cover: Stone...
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Swarmsketch December 8, 2005
Swarmsketch is a fascinating experiment in harnessing the "collective consciousness" of the Web to create collaborative drawings. Each drawing is composed of up to 1000 individual strokes, each contributed by a different user; users can also vote on the weighting...
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A note on the notes November 28, 2005
For the book I'm writing, I have been wrangling a few hundred references to articles, books and assorted Web documents, along with piles of stray notes. Trying to get a handle on this bibliographic sprawl, I have finally come to...
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Processing May 13, 2005
Media Lab alums Ben Fry and Casey Reas have introduced Processing 1.0, an open source graphical computing envionrment "developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain." The beta release features prototype...
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Visual ideologies May 3, 2005
Can visual thinking patterns reveal anything about our political dispositions? A group of designers created the Visual Ideology project to investigate how preferences for certain kinds of images might reflect our political leanings. The researchers pose the question this way:...
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Designing users April 21, 2005
In the product design world, one of the truisms that gets bandied around all the time goes something like this: designers are not users; users are not designers. "Don't listen to what users say," says Nielsen; "watch what they do."...
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Job titles of tomorrow April 17, 2005
Recently spotted at the Office Depot:...
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Musicplasma January 5, 2005
Musicplasma creates visualizations of collaborative filtering data about musical artists. While these kinds of hyperbolic treemaps are hardly a new idea, I think the execution works pretty well here; unlike most of those cloying Brain-style interfaces, I can actually envision...
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Konfabulator January 5, 2005
Finally, Konfabulator for Windows....
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Figuring on flickr December 25, 2004
flickr has sparked some good new writing lately - by Gene and Salon's Katharine Mieszkowski, among others - but the most cogent analysis to date comes from Nadav, in which he correctly deduces that flickr is not a YASNS, but...
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Longhand search December 6, 2004
U.Mass researchers have developed a new search tool for handwritten documents. The use of OCR'd text mapped to facsimile images reminds me of Olive's Activepaper tool, now in use at the British Library Newspaper Archive (via ">Battelle)...
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Richard Anderson October 21, 2004
My old teacher and Bay Area UX impresario Richard Anderson has started a blog. Looks like early going so far, but I expect Richard might have plenty interesting to say....
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Google desktop search October 14, 2004
I'm sure this will get blogged ad infinitum, but Google has just launched their new desktop search tool....
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Y! goes RSS September 28, 2004
It's a big day for RSS, as Yahoo! rolls out the long-awaited new My Yahoo!, which lets users add any RSS/Atom feed to the usual mix of syndicated Y! content. While the RSS feature has been in public beta as...
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August 7, 2004
The Science of Word Recognition (via kottke)...
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Why you don't meet too many Marxist UE consultants July 21, 2004
from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception: Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today...
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Plugged July 15, 2004
Doing some competitive homework for a new project, I've been loading up my browser with toolbars, plugins and sundry bells and baubles ... leaving me with this unholy contraption: What's here: Google toolbar MSN toolbar Y! toolbar A9 toolbar Pluck...
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Calvino's heuristics July 14, 2004
Before we had Nielsen, Norman et al. trying to codify principles for user experience design, Italo Calvino gave us Six Memos for the Next Millenium (his last published work before his death in 1985). I read the book about 15...
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Plog this July 11, 2004
Just noticed that Amazon is beta-testing its new "plog" service, incorporating blog features directly into the home page. If you’re a registered user, Amazon now displays blog entries in the center column, pre-populated with recommendations from the “Amazon NewReleaseBot." They've...
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Magic Lantern Slides June 25, 2004
Another eye-opening historical image collection, this one from UC-Berkeley: Magic Lantern slides. These hand-colored glass slides, precursors to film transparencies, enjoyed a brief heyday in the early 20th century. I love the spectral quality of these images, with their handmade...
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Scirus June 21, 2004
Scirus is a new specialty search engine for scientific research, that lets users trawl through a few million science-related Web sites (mostly of the .edu variety) along with scholarly journal databases like MEDLINE, ScienceDirect and BioMed. This is a good...
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Da Vinci code May 30, 2004
Matt Webb has started posting an RSS feed of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks. It's a neat experiment, but seeing the great Leonardo reduced to raw ASCII feels somehow deflating; without the original visual context of the manuscript, it seems like...
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Gone West May 29, 2004
For the past few months, I've been working with the California Digital Library on "Documenting the American West," a new online collection of primary source materials (like photos, letters and manuscripts) drawn from disparate locations in California, Colorado, the Library...
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May 24, 2004
The Truth About Federated Searching (via iaslash)...
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The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House April 22, 2004
A pithy ALA article on the perils of project management: Many project managers believe a project has a beginning and an end. Everything that happens within those parameters can be dealt with by a methodology and a good framework of...
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Newsmap April 13, 2004
Newsmap visualizes the flow of headlines through Google News (and surely owes a nod to Map of the Market). (via blackbeltjones)...
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Hyper Writing Machine April 5, 2004
An imaginary authoring machine from Italy, 1919. (via Heckler & Coch)...
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Situating Shirky March 31, 2004
While I’ve been known to take exception with Clay Shirky in the past, I found myself agreeing with almost every word of his latest essay, Situated Software. Drawing on his recent experience directing student projects at ITP, Shirky muses on...
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GUIdebook March 19, 2004
Nadav points us to GUIdebook, "a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing as many Graphical User Interfaces as possible." For instance, Windows 1.0: And the late (though not-much-lamented) OS/2 Warp:...
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Defending the lurker March 16, 2004
For most anyone who participates in online discussion lists, the term "lurker" usually carries a negative connotation. Conventional wisdom seems to hold the quiet lurker as deadweight, an intellectual parasite who consumes without giving anything back. I've always had a...
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Reader responses March 11, 2004
Several folks posted commentary on my Deep Web article over the past few days, including: Ray Kurzweil John Battelle Waileia Rawbrick Library Autonomous Zone Disinformation Peter Suber Marc Almendarez Slashdot I'm sure I've probably missed someone here (if so, feel...
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In search of the Deep Web March 9, 2004
Salon is running my article In Search of the Deep Web, in which I take a look at the expansion of search engines into the recesses of the dynamic Web. When I started writing the piece about three weeks ago,...
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Search Tuna March 8, 2004
Steve Toub pointed me to Search Tuna, a new search engine that brokers queries across multiple search engines, then mails you the results. From the site blurbage: Search Tuna "swims deep" into the web, analyzes what it discovers, and emails...
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The secret life of flow charts February 18, 2004
Daniel Dennett, quoted in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works: A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by precribing a function without saying how it...
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meta-mumbo-jumbo January 26, 2004
A good article untangling the various flavors of "metamodels" like controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies et al. (via antenna)...
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Personas 1.0? January 23, 2004
Peter is doing some worthwhile digging into the heritage of user-centered design, focusing lately on the work of 1950s designer Henry Dreyfuss, who may just be the father of personas: > Peterme on Designing for People...
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Or-what? January 22, 2004
Hot on the heels of its fizzled Friendster bid, Google is making its foray into social networking before the buzzword-bubble bursts, with the newly stealth-launched (and desperately-in-need-of-a-naming-consultant) Orkut. CNET: Google spawns social networking service...
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January 17, 2004
New Methods for Designing Experiences (via NBS)...
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Visualizing social networks January 15, 2004
Clay Shirky points to a nifty academic paper on Visualizing Social Networks. (via M2M)...
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The database of intentions January 12, 2004
Just stumbled across John Battelle's new Searchblog, in which the former Wired and Industry Standard honcho expounds on the search wars, and pre-hypes his book-in-progress, tentatively entitled The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google - complete with...
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Remail December 10, 2003
Lots of discussion in the ID world about Remail, IBM's new research prototype for a next-generation email client. Several folks have compared Remail favorably to Outlook 2003, but I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as Remail is a research...
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Knowledge Navigator November 19, 2003
Jon Udell has unearthed a copy of Apple's semi-legendary Knowledge Navigator movie, produced in part by Clement Mok....
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Flex-o-matic November 18, 2003
Macromedia announces Flex (previously code-named Royale), which looks to be their attempt at blunting Microsoft Avalon with a J2EE- and XML-based presentation server framework. Not coincidentally, it comes endorsed out of the gate by IBM. Flex consists of a presentation...
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Avalon October 28, 2003
In other Longhorn news, I came across several tidbits about Avalon, Microsoft's new XML-based UI framework that looks to be the long-rumored Flash-killer. I'm still getting up to speed, but here a few things I've picked up so far: simple...
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Aero October 28, 2003
Infovis has posted a few snapshots of Aero, the "life immersion" component of Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation Windows UI. This so-called Carousel View seems to pick right up on Microsoft VP of R&D Rick Rashid's social networks shpiel at ETCON a...
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Search inside October 23, 2003
Nadav points out Amazon's new "Search Inside" feature, whereby you can now do full-text searching within selected books in their catalog. Nifty. Nadav also asks the entirely reasonable question of why the Library of Congress isn't already doing this? As...
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"Ars combinatoria" October 20, 2003
Geert Lovink on German philosopher-engineer Werner Künzel, in his 1992 essay The Archeology of Computer Assemblage: Künzel practices ‘Ars Combinatoria’ in his own unique way: he proves that there is a promising future to thinking in rhizomatic bifurcations, applied at...
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A heretic's history of PCs October 14, 2003
Ted Nelson, Way out of the Box: The usual story about Xerox PARC, that they were trying to make the computer understandable to the average man, was a crock. They imitated paper and familiar office machines because that was what...
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Union card? October 2, 2003
Victor wonders: [I]s there a reason we haven't moved to a project-based model of employment like the movie industry uses, employing those who are just right for a particular product ... Would it be helpful to put a more flexible...
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Cataloging Cultural Objects October 1, 2003
Cataloging Cultural Objects was designed specifically for those communities engaged in describing and documenting works of art, cultural artifacts, and their visual surrogates: museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians, or anyone who documents cultural objects and their images....
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Macromedia Central beta September 25, 2003
Macromedia has just released the first public beta of Central, a new browser-less environment for Flash-based applications. I spent the better part of this year working with Macromedia on Central, consulting on the overall UI framework and a series of...
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Veen on standards September 19, 2003
Veen on the Business value of Web standards (via antenna)...
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Concept car phones September 17, 2003
Nokia mobile phone prototypes. (via kottke)...
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Power to the edge September 15, 2003
Ray Ozzie points out Power to the Edge, a new book about the effects of peer-to-peer communications on large organizations. Open-sourced in its entirety, this insightful, forward-looking piece of analysis comes from a surprising source: The Department of Defense. From...
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Hypertext 03 August 27, 2003
Matt is blogging the Hypertext 03 conference in Nottingham. Worth a read: his notes on Ted Nelson's keynote. fwiw, I recently posted a few notes on Nelson's Computer Lib here....
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Shameless profiteering August 26, 2003
Just playing around with Google AdSense, thus the text ads on the right. While I have no high hopes of earning more than a few micro-cents from this, I'm interested in seeing what kind of ads Google seems to think...
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Hypertext theorist George Landow (also August 20, 2003
Hypertext theorist George Landow (also my former prof) on the devolution of authorship: In reducing the autonomy of the text, hypertext reduces the autonomy of the author. Lack of textual autonomy, like lack of textual centredness, immediately reverberates through conceptions...
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Ambrose Bierce redux August 19, 2003
Former Suckster and all-around weisenheimer Greg Knauss returns to the scene with The Devil's Dictionary 2.0. My favorite so far: social software, noun Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. “I’m having...
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Mike Kuniavsky hops on the August 19, 2003
Mike Kuniavsky hops on the blog train with the inscrutably titled Orange Cone, announcing his intention to write about smart personal technology, smart furniture, the social economic and political implications thereof, and, of course, "me."...
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Semioticians at the gate August 13, 2003
Having been a lit major at the only college in the country that offered an undergraduate degree in Semiotics, I've always felt vaguely guilty about my own near-total ignorance of the subject. In college, we tended to write off the...
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Photoshop 1, Botox 0 August 12, 2003
Before-and-after images of retouched women . And if that wasn't impressive, check out this shoe (via caterina)...
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Michael Buckland August 7, 2003
Lena Shelton pointed me to the work of Michael Buckland, a professor of information management at the Berkeley SIMS program. Browsing through his bibliography, I came across several intriguing - if admittedly pointy-headed-sounding - pieces like: What is a "document"?...
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Clement Mok on the sorry state of things August 5, 2003
From Designers: Time for a Change: [T]he design profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing more substantial than his or her personal charisma and taste...
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Ted Nelson, in rare form July 27, 2003
Doing some research over at the SF Public Library yesterday, I came across a rare first edition of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib. Long out of print since its 1974 publication, the book is now so hard to come by that...
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go gabe July 16, 2003
Friend and fomer colleague Gabe Zentall has published a handy collection of UI widgets in Illustrator format (via antenna)....
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lies, damned lies, and statistics July 15, 2003
a couple of eye-openers from the latest Harper's Index: Amount the Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general: $1,100,000,000,000 Ratio of this amount to the rest of the world's military budgets combined:...
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Peter pointed me to Scott July 2, 2003
Peter pointed me to Scott McCloud's latest opus, "The Right Number," an intriguing-looking experiment at a graphic novel authored entirely in Flash....
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Clay Shirky: A group is July 1, 2003
Clay Shirky: A group is its own worst enemy...
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"Flash unplugged," plugged June 26, 2003
Tomorrow (Fri) I'll be joining Macromedia's Dave Calaprice and Michael Williams at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to talk about Macromedia Central....
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A koan June 24, 2003
Ray Ozzie asks: "When I'm at McDonalds, am I in a multi-instance location?" (via Matt Webb)...
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Haystack June 23, 2003
Never short on hubris, the kids at MIT have released a new environment called Haystack, billing itself as the world's first "universal information client": Haystack is a tool designed to let every individual manage all of their information in the...
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The poetics of Powerpoint May 15, 2003
Edward Tufte sets his sights on "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint," in which he argues that our growing reliance on presentation-ware leads to a weakening of verbal and spatial reasoning skills, and "almost always corrupt statistical analysis" (via Ed)....
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Comix-ware May 5, 2003
kevin pointed me to iComic: as far as I know, the world's first dedicated comic strip browser....
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Dispatches from the other front April 23, 2003
I came across this list of SARS blogs, several of them emanating from mainland China, where a few intrepid bloggers seem to be circumventing the official Beijing party line with man-on-the-street reports of what it's really like to be living...
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Macromedia Central: Next Big Thing, or Pointcast redux? March 26, 2003
For about as long as there have been Web browsers, it seems, people have been predicting their imminent demise. The phrase "beyond the browser" has become such a catchphrase on the conference-and-trade-rag circuit as to have become almost an inside...
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my ASIS shpiel March 24, 2003
the sociobiology of information architecture...
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Steven Johnson feels the need February 22, 2003
Steven Johnson feels the need to clarify his position that we're not ants, responding to a discussion on Joi Ito's site about whether weblogs constitute a form of emergent intelligence. the argument goes something like this: just as ant colonies...
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government job February 12, 2003
Chris Rusay and I worked together last year on a project for the Province of British Columbia (who, operating as they do in government time, haven't quite gotten around to launching it yet). Chris has just published an article on...
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one to watch February 11, 2003
Kevin Lynch, Macromedia's chief software architect, has started a blog....
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the "expert" trap January 16, 2003
challis has posted an interesting analysis of his survey on ux job titles. I am actually kind of pleased to see all this variation in job titles; this should be a ray of hope for generalists (like me) who still...
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tell it, ted January 8, 2003
a feisty little rant from Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer and, according to Tim Berners-Lee, progenitor of the World Wide Web. from I Don't Buy In: The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES! What we have instead is the vacuous victory...
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sticking a fork in the zeitgeist December 15, 2002
There's no surer sign that a media trendline must have run its course than when it winds up in one of those interminable magazine year-end lists. But as big media zeitgeist-gazing exercises go, today's NYT Magazine issue on "The Year...
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smart mobs, flocking, and Googling UPC codes - an evening with Howard Rheingold December 11, 2002
Last night, I went to see Howard Rheingold speak at BayCHI, promoting his new book Smart Mobs. What I already knew about Howard Rheingold: that he was a certifiable eminence gris from back when people still used words like “Digerati”...
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who needs a $200M Office of Total Information Awareness ... December 5, 2002
... when we can get aerial photos of John Poindexter's house, free of charge? (via steven johnson)....
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the "tyranny" of the browser? November 25, 2002
I wouldn't go quite that far - perhaps "hegemony" would be a better word (though "tyranny of the browser" does have that certain guru-soundbite ring going for it). still, I do agree with much of what Nielsen has to say...
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just launched November 21, 2002
new media centers, a recent pro bono collaboration with my partner (and, not coincidentally, nmc board member) jennifer....
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information entropy November 7, 2002
the estimable blackbeltjones points us to alan moore on information and entropy, penned in the wake of 9/11. i've been a slavish fan of moore ever since he started producing genre-bending comic book pieces like swamp thing and watchmen back...
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cat, out of bag November 4, 2002
Ever since we fielded that eleventh-hour call from Rob Burgess' office on the eve of DevCon a few days ago, we've been on the receiving end of an unexpected little PR putsch. It turned out Burgess wanted to demo our...
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on type October 30, 2002
nadav points us to this excellent reference on the evolution of type....
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reach out and touch someone's packet? October 29, 2002
I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone started working on a protocol for IP-based remote touch sensing. Virtual touch is of course well-trodden turf for sci-fi/fantasy writers. But never mind all those VR geek body glove...
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floys ahoy September 4, 2002
floys are simple artificial life forms ("alifes" in AI geekspeak) that demonstrate the basic principle of emergent intelligence: that complex "mass mind" behaviors can sprout when a group of individual entities follow relatively simple behavioral rules (via howard bloom)....
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more grist for the buzzword mill August 28, 2002
semantic web-heads, take note: iaslash has published excerpts from an article on ontologies vs. taxonomies, an Online magazine piece in which Katherine Harris splits a few philosophical hairs between the CS world view and the LIS world view. I have...
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social networks - believing the hype August 23, 2002
There's been no shortage of high-minded blather lately about social networks as being the new new thing in the software world. Rick Rashid talked about Microsoft's vision for a at ETCON; Peter Morville, Peter Merholz, Howard Rheingold and other smart...
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Flash-ing back to Thebes August 19, 2002
Portland's Second Story turns out another of their consistently impressive pieces in the Theban Mapping Project, an interactive archeological atlas that melds data, maps and documentary video into an immersive learning experience. an effective - and appropriate - use of...
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milton's mantra August 13, 2002
good advice from milton glaser in "this is what i have learned":...
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undoing the desktop July 31, 2002
nadav thinks the new iTunes exemplifies a PC application that escapes the basic desktop/file/folder metaphor that has dominated PC computing for the past, oh, 30 years. he also points to this old Wired article on Lifestreams, David Gelernter's blue-sky idea...
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Aula is a new community July 25, 2002
Aula is a new community blog project based out of Helsinki, powered by about 400 brainy Finns who seem to write better English than most Americans I've worked with. Smart writing, meaty links, and a snazzy little design template that...
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aiga notes July 18, 2002
I came this close to going to the AIGA Experience Design forum in Las Vegas last weekend, but ultimately decided I really needed a weekend at home after a month of family visits and traveling. fortunately, erin malone has written...
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Prototyping Hollywood-style June 26, 2002
Katherine Jones turns out to be one of the brainiac designers behind all those futurama interface concepts in Minority Report. After trading a few emails, Kat was kind enough to share some of her early prototype sketches with me, which...
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demoware on a Spielberg budget June 22, 2002
interface geeks, get thee hence to see Minority Report - possibly the closest thing I have seen to interface porn. the movie offers a steady diet of whizzy "interface of the future" concepts - none of which, it must be...
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being Ted Nelson? June 13, 2002
after missing the opportunity to see Ted Nelson the other night, I've been poking around looking into what the man's been up to for the past, oh, thirty years - ever since he first dreamed up this whole wacky idea...
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wish i'd known... June 10, 2002
... about this little soiree at the exploratorium on Social Networks, Planetary Visualization and Dynamic InfoScapes, if only for the chance to see two of my favorite greybeard polymaths - Ted Nelson and James Burke - hawking their latest demo-ware....
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being jakob nielsen June 8, 2002
davezilla pays a timely tribute (via elegant hack)....
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herr doctor is in June 4, 2002
so today was Day One for me over at Macromedia - and who should I cross paths with in a meeting but the good Doctor himself. much more than that I suppose I shouldn't really be mouthing on about just...
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i'd like to thank the academy March 26, 2002
meeta asks, when did CHI decide to go Oscars on us? i'm wondering, will Don Norman go strapless this year?...
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compression, decompression, and "engineering subversion" September 25, 2001
compression, decompression, and "engineering subversion" last night i went to see will wright, creator of simcity and the sims, giving a talk at berkeley as part of their art, technology and culture colloquium series. not knowing much about wright, and...
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Lou chimes in Lou Rosenfeld, August 8, 2001
Lou chimes in Lou Rosenfeld, oft-credited as the godfather of the IA discipline, has just hopped on the blog train with Bloug. should make for a good read. a few months back, i did an interview with Lou for the...
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google killer? Teoma is a July 25, 2001
google killer? Teoma is a new web search enging being touted as the next big thing beyond Google. here's the hook: whereas Google ranks sites based on (among other things) the # of links appearing on other sites, Teoma takes...
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steve krug interview June 27, 2001
via good experience, webword has an interview with Steve Krug, the famously low-profile usability guru and author of don't make me think.nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but a friendly little discussion on usability metrics and low-budget approaches to usability engineering. worth...
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CNET has a good primer June 21, 2001
CNET has a good primer on the science of color....
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NetWindows is a neat little May 21, 2001
NetWindows is a neat little piece of DHTML trickery. Billed as "a DHTML framework for component and code reuse," NetWindows lets you create windowed application environments within a Web browser. Interesting and kinda cool, though i'm not entirely sure what...
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Ed Chi and co. over May 15, 2001
Ed Chi and co. over at Xerox PARC have been doing some interesting research on the information foraging on the Web - complete with a catchy tagline, "the scent of information" - an ecological approach to studying how users look...
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from deutschland, a cutesy but May 14, 2001
from deutschland, a cutesy but engaging little flash site by wm team....
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via nadav, a collection of May 8, 2001
via nadav, a collection of hobo signs. my favorite: "Talk religion, get food."...
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via jennifer, INCA is an May 4, 2001
via jennifer, INCA is an excellent little magazine about the theory and practice of design research....
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via christina, a nifty interactive April 25, 2001
via christina, a nifty interactive treatment of the Book of Mormon....
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well worth a look, nadav's April 11, 2001
well worth a look, nadav's entry to the 5K awards, poetry meets javascript in Interface is...
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via uxblog, my former IBM March 26, 2001
via uxblog, my former IBM cohort Paul Smith debunks a few popular myths about UI design....
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via jennifer, vischeck is a March 8, 2001
via jennifer, vischeck is a nifty little tool for simulating how web pages look to people with color blindness....
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the truth about user testing December 20, 2000
the truth about user testing via captain cursor...
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more on the dotcom graveyard August 23, 2000
more on the dotcom graveyard beat ... bryan boyer has written a heartfelt personal eulogy for deepleap, the web app company he cofounded last year. it's a genuinely written piece, refreshingly devoid of anger, nostalgia or self-pity... just a straight...
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further navel-gazing on the blog July 19, 2000
further navel-gazing on the blog phenom so, it seems i'm not alone in harboring a few latent doubts about the whole blog phenomenon. the good folks at a list apart have just published a piercing - if rather ardently one-sided...
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matt newell pointed me to July 17, 2000
matt newell pointed me to the dialectizer, a joke translator that converts web pages into "dialectized" versions in various faux dialects like swedish chef, cockney, and moron. ok, so it's a stale joke - even by stupid web trick standards...
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GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
New Paperback Edition
“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
—Los Angeles Times
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