Category: Business
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Designing the Bottle: Opening the Wine, Unboxing the Brand
In a recent interview, Michael Beirut noted that wine labels are one of the purest branding experiences: All wine bottles contain the same basic product (wine), so if you don’t know anything about a particular bottle of wine the graphic design of the label and the shape of the bottle are quite often the only…
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User vs. You
There’s a huge debate going on in the UX community about the use of the word “user”. Some argue that the word demeans the people we are trying to help, that it distances us from them, and that it makes us unable to truly empathize with their wants and needs. Words like “people” and “humans”…
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Moleskin Reward: One Million Dollars
I lost a small Moleskine notebook about six months ago (graphpaper, of course). I’ve since replaced it, but the reward for its return is the same as for my current book: One Million Dollars. How many other Moleskine owners have the same reward?
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Would Starbucks tell Dunkin’?
We recently stopped for coffee at an urban intersection where a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts sat on opposite corners, facing off in a classic retail rivalry like Macy’s & Gimbels. Deciding to avoid Starbuckian yuppiness (okay, we drink there all the time), we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts. But something seemed wrong… the DD…
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My First Podcast
A few months ago during an intermission at the 2007 IA Summit, Christina Wodtke and Bill Wetherell accosted me in the hallway of the Las Vegas Flamingo hotel. The next thing I knew, Christina was interviewing me for a new series of Boxes and Arrows podcasts. The 16-minute interview has just been published, and I’ve…
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Muddling Through eBay
The online auction site eBay recently redesigned their site, and (as it usually has in the past) the new design is being subjected to some pretty harsh critique. When critics bash eBay’s design, they usually focus on the site’s general visual design, or on the information design of individual pages. Even I have in the…