Years ago, Alan Cooper pioneered the concept of personas, which are basically fictitious people who represent the customer. They are stand-ins that are used to create empathy for the real people. They are created by amalgamating different characteristics of potential customers into one pretend person. Personas are very useful for…
You have to hand it to Google. They innovate. They come out with stuff that is new and different. I like that about them. It makes me want to use and buy their products. Google Wave is a great example. What is Google Wave? I imagined the conversation when they…
This is just unbelieveable. Look at this Gateway Netbook from Verizon. First of all, $99! Are you kidding me? That is ridiculously cheap. It’s got the same power as my EeePC that I bought for $350 and I carry with me all the time. Plus it’s lighter! Second, it comes…
Katie lost her flip phone. We just upgraded it last month and we didn’t purchase the insurance. d’Oh! Some kid picked it up and started calling all his friends saying, “Dude! I just got a new phone, this is my new number!” Katie was disappointed in the lack of goodness…
Last night, I helped out a company called CVSDude with some UX stuff. An interesting question came up: What does “Dude” mean in the United States? Words have enormous power to frame what something is or isn’t. To evoke imagery or emotions, words are often the most overlooked part of…
Watch this video. 1944 knew how to entertain. You gotta see it to the end. Ethan asked if it was special effects.
I got this email the other day from Google. Hi, We wanted to let you know about some exciting changes to your Google paid storage plan. While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs…
It took me a looooong time to get Office 2010 beta 2 installed. Uninstalling 2010b1 was a disaster. I had to manually remove hundreds of registry keys to kill the thing. Finally, I got the new version installed. This is a very interesting release. Microsoft has spent quite a bit…
Still using the HTC Touch Pro 2. I don’t hate it although there are some significant flaws, like the placement of the “sleep” button. It’s exactly in the most annoying place. Anyway, Microsoft has been threatening to release a 6.5 upgrade ROM for my device, but no dice yet. Meanwhile,…
About 80% of my spam falls into 4 categories. Drugs. Makes sense, they spend alot of money on marketing and are complete scumbags. Diploma. This is mostly ONLINE diplomas, which I assume are just scams. More scumbags. Russian. Sometimes I translate the email and see they are actually lawyers in…
I forgot to post this. I took this picture with my new phone (HTC Touch Pro 2) on my first day of work. The rainbow actually ends at the office building at Adchemy! Is that a good sign or what?
Here is a list of awesome movies that you might not have appreciated their kickass awesomeness. They are all redonkulously good. The Last Dragon. Greatest movie ever made. I dare you to watch it and not love it. In the final scene if you don’t jump for joy, there is…
Popeye is one of my top 10 greatest movies ever made. It’s the attention the detail and subtlety that makes it so good. There are deep emotional and intellectual subjects tackled even though the movie has a simple root. From the role of taxes in a society to poverty to…
I have an addiction to answering questions. I can’t stop myself. I want to (have to) help. I used to use Experts-Exchange.com alot. However, they have no UX section and once I stopped using jQuery, I didn’t find it that compelling. I tried StackOverflow, but I got locked out of…