Category: Interface Design
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Scrubbing the iPhone Scrubber
Apple discarded the iPod’s signature feature, the scroll wheel, in the iPhone and iPod touch. But the new scrubber bar is almost useless — it’s impossible to move the playhead any less than a few minutes per hop. So I thought I’d fix it.
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Georges Seurat Dot Com
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It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times: “The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to…
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The User Experience Flip Mode
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One basic assumption of good experience design is that people fundamentally don’t like change. They can’t deal with it, it’s too risky, and changes will all too often lead to failures. But the human mind’s capacity to adapt to change, sometimes rapidly and seamlessly, can be astonishing.
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Inside the Airstream
Peggy and I went upstate last weekend for our friend M.River’s birthday party. We gathered at Kate’s Lazy Meadow Motel in lovely Mt. Tremper, New York, owned and operated by Kate Pierson from the B-52’s. We stayed in one of her four (soon to be six) fully-functional vintage Airstream trailers.
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“Not Unpleasant” is Not Enough
An article in the New York Times the other day discusses a study that suggests that there are differences between men and women in how pleasant or unpleasant they find certain normal everyday activities. Apparently, for example, men find spending time with their parents far more pleasant then women do, while men disproportionally dislike home…
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The Big IDEA (Conference 2007)
I want to go to the IDEA Conference, which starts in two weeks here in New York. Conferences generally come in two categories. Conferences to meet people who do exactly what you do, and where you learn about how to do what you do better. Conferences to meet people you can do business with, and…
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Back to Mac, Part 1: Why I am Leaving Windows and Getting a Mac
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As I was subtly hinting at in my last couple of posts, I have changed my Windowy ways. I have switched (back) to Mac. Finally. This is the first in an ad hoc series of articles documenting my experiences with this transition, looking at it from many perspectives: personal and cultural observations, usability and user…
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My Aging Fleet
I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient: Mobile Phone: 2002 iPod (3G): 2003 Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003…
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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…