We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space. You can imagine how the designers pictured it – the user placing the device on … Continue reading
Woah there! You’ve found yourself on an old article. Take note of the date before reading. Do you remember when you stopped paying per minute for your dial-up modem connection? Suddenly using the web became a real part of your … Continue reading
A while back I blogged about how Google was missing a trick with the name “froogle”. In short, its an in-joke that a lot of people just didn’t get (a pun combining “Google” with “frugal”), and didn’t even realise that … Continue reading
Word of mouth happens when customers become really passionate about your product or brand. The thing about passion is that is has two ends: very happy, and very angry. Here’s the story of my last two points of contact with … Continue reading
I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my aging laptop the other day and after scanning my machine for a few minutes it gave me this wonderful feedback screen: [Blue speech bubbles added for emphasis] Great stuff. Even though it … Continue reading
I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Web 2.0 darlings 37signals. I used to read their ‘design not found‘ articles fairly avidly and even bought their excellent book ‘Defensive Design for the Web‘. Their sense of aesthetics is … Continue reading
. Another great deal from Three.
After all the beta testing – how did this one slip through the net? When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you … Continue reading
If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not – check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing … Continue reading
In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You … Continue reading