Category: Reviews
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Logic and Emotion
Design is often characterized as a collaboration between two entirely different modes of thought — logical thinking and emotional thinking. In the various fields of design for interactive products, I think these different modes may be starting to manifest in the job titles we give ourselves. Catriona Cornett publishes a fun and insightful, and cleverly…
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Adversarial Design, Part 3: Arguing the Unarguable
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Debating the merits of competing design ideas is fun and, as I’ve argued in parts one and two, can be extremely productive. But some design disputes are, I think, unanswerable. And it’s important to realize when a debate has crossed over from something you can resolve to something you will never reach any definitive conclusion…
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Adversarial Design, Part 2: Testing by Discussing
You can’t really validate or invalidate a design idea just by looking at it and declaring it a success or failure because of some best practice or design heuristic that usually works. You’re just talking about theories. Ultimately, no design disputes can be settled convincingly without making a model and testing it out. But a…
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Voter Intent / User Behavior
In Minnesota, they are currently recounting the ballots in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. As part of the process, they are re-analyzing thousands of ballots that were discarded during the initial optical-scan machine count due to problems with the ballots themselves — usually stray marks and incompletely-filled-in dots. Usually, a human…
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How Bad is Bad?
John Gruber invites public ridicule to the UI design of this file renaming application. And yes, it certainly looks terrible, like a stereotypical case study in haphazard, bloated, bad UI design. But is the UI design really that bad? I’m not so sure. As someone who has had to do all manner of complex and…
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Vote: The Machinery of Democracy
This is a website Behavior made for the Smithsonian’s American Museum of National History during the 2004 Presidential election campaign. It is the web companion for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy, an exhibition of artifacts from America’s long and colorful history of voting technologies. It was a fascinating physical exhibition. And I’m still proud of…