When I think of the places I would like to live, they are often places where the design emerged from the bottom-up instead of places that were subject to top-down urban planning. Places like SoHo, NY or the Marais, Paris epitomize the beauty of bottom-up design. Top-down design often results in ugly, artificial [...]

I think a big component driving the current wave of web services (web 2.0) is far greater attention to user experience and usability. Web apps today are easier, friendlier-looking, snappier, and more-intuitive. However, there are a few usability merits of the first dot-com boom that are now lost in this second wave of [...]

I fascinated by the evolution of the “@___” functionality in Twitter.
When people started using Twitter they saw similarities between the a thread of Tweets and a thread of comments. In a thread of comments, a convention emerged over time that the way to reference “foobar’s” comment in your comment is to write [...]

I attended the ITP Spring Show yesterday. ITP stands for Interactive Telecommunications Program, and I previously wrote about it when a friend of mine gave me a tour of their workspace (a loft in Tisch).
Here’s a few pictures from some of the more photogenic exhibits.
A number of the projects featured cellphones as remote controls, [...]

I stumbled across the Bright Nights display in Union Square Park (map for non-locals to NYC). It was beautiful!
Bright Nights is an interactive visual display on the ground in the middle of Union Square Park. High power projectors are suspended 30 feet in the air pointed down at the ground. Snowflakes, curls, [...]

I’m bullish on the HCI concept of link scent.  I first learned about it when a co-worker of mine at Homestead.com when to User Interface Engineering (UIE) conference in San Francisco and reported back on what he learned.
The idea behind link scent is simple.  Users don’t click on the best link on an interface to [...]

I attended ad:tech today at the Hilton New York. It was very entertaining to watch advertising experts advertise to other advertising experts. The walls, hallways, tables, escalators, food, couches, and even people were saturated in advertising.
The advertising was so dense, that the lack of advertising actually made a booth stand out significantly. For [...]

I miss mechanical feedback on the recent slew of “cutting-edge” consumer electronics (CE) devices I have used. CE designers recently have been using flat buttons with pressure actuators (non-mechanical) instead of mechanical feedback buttons because they are sleeker or sexier, but, for me, they’re just less usable.
For example, I want a volume dial on my [...]

The official Firefox 2.0 release is now available on the Firefox download site, but their public-facing pages won’t list Firefox as available for download until tomorrow according to BetaNews.
I downloaded and installed it. Unfortunately, the upgrade broke my del.icio.us toolbar, which is currently incompatible with FF 2.0. I’m sure that compatibility [...]