experiment

'Samurai Girl' to help launch new experiment from Diet Coke and Mentos team

Can the team from EepyBird.com, which brought us the " The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments," duplicate their success with Post-it notes?

Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe, are the performance artists behind EepyBird. The pair will unveil their new "Sticky Note Experiment" Friday at the ComicCon Conference in San Diego.

As an example of how far Web-video fame can take you, the clip of the "Sticky Note Experiment" will debut not on the Web but on cable television. On September 5, the video will appear on ABC Family's Samurai Girl

Voltz and … Read more

Experience Music Project embraces iPods

I had a charter family membership Seattle's Experience Music Project or EMP, which opened in 2000. But after a couple years, I gave it up. The exhibits didn't change enough to warrant a lot of repeat visits, our periodic out-of-town guests had all been at least once, and the promise of early alerts about live shows at the museum never seemed to come through. (The one show I really wanted to see, the Television reunion in 2001, was sold out before I was ever informed about it.)

With a teenaged niece in town and my daughter just getting … Read more

Good user experience comes from good employee experience

Creating good User Experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good Employee Experiences (EX - I'm trademarking that!). That's the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest's success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. "You have to treat your employees like customers," he told Fortune in 2001. "When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us."...

[W]hen … Read more

Adobe guru to improve Windows interface

It looks like Mark Hamburg, an Adobe Systems Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a better user interface.

And given the dramatic user interface differences between earlier and later Adobe projects that Hamburg worked on, that raises some very intriguing possibilities.

Microsoft and Adobe Systems confirmed Hamburg's move on Monday, but at the time, Microsoft wouldn't share details beyond saying Hamburg would work on "user experience" for the company. However, Chicago photographer and Photoshop consultant Jeff Schewe, who caught a plane to California to attend Hamburg's going-away party, … Read more

Org Chart 2.0: Built for User Experience Systems

I believe we are about to see the birth of a new business organization - one that is optimized for complex systems of problems and solutions, rather than based on silos focused on specific functions, and which treats user experience as a core organizational axis rather than a meddlesome add-on. Call it Org Chart 2.0.

Today's companies are largely structured with Org Chart 1.0: silos of knowledge and product offerings (segmented by customer type, price point, technology, etc.). We have had this structure for decades, even centuries, and there are good reasons for it: it helps drive … Read more

Cheap = good

Isn't it interesting that in the latest airline quality rankings the top three spots were taken by low-cost carriers? JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran ranked the best while overall the industry had its worst ratings in twenty years.

Just goes to show that providing a leading user experience does not have to mean premium price. All three are relative start-ups compared to the likes of United and American, and they have been able to structure themselves (and therefore their) costs based on lessons learned from the older airlines.

Nevertheless, with issues like number of passengers bumped per flight, amount of … Read more

Five things I love/hate about the iPhone

I've had my iPhone for a week now and am amazed by how much it has changed the way I use a mobile device. My Blackberry was all work: I used it for email and to read stories on Arsenal. (Yes, that counts as work these days.) The iPhone is much different. There is so much to do with it. I find that I use it far more, but for less drudgery and more fun.

A bit like how I use my Mac.

I thought I'd compile a list of the five best things about the iPhone, and the five worst. It's not a perfect device by any means. It's interesting to see that some of the iPhone's greatest strengths pave the way for its greatest weaknesses.

But first, the good:

The typing on the iPhone is lightning fast. I never would have guessed this, but it's true. I was pretty fast on my Blackberry 8700 and then 8800, but I'm at least 25 percent faster on the iPhone. I worried about the lack of tactile feedback, but the iPhone gives visual feedback (the key you're about to hit enlarges to meet your finger) which is arguably superior. In addition, it's very, very smart about correcting misspellings. Often I'll keep typing, even when I know I made a mistake, because I know the iPhone's software will correct my mistake for me. It usually does.… Read more

Innovation 1-on-1: Brooks Protzmann, Dell

This installment of thoughts on innovation comes from Brooks Protzmann. Brooks is the Manager of Visual Identity and the Brand Experience team as part of the Experience Design Group at Dell Inc. in Austin, Texas. He is responsible for the product-focused touch points of the customer's experience when engaging with the Dell brand, products, and services. His functional responsibilities include design strategy, visual identity, packaging, user interfaces, and information design. The Experience Design Group covers the entire Dell customer journey with integrated Industrial Design, Usability & Human Factors, and Customer Experience.

Prior to joining Dell Inc., Brooks was Director … Read more

BlackBerry takes a lickin', and dies

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I've been very busy with a lot of traveling that hasn't left many brain cells free to do blogging. Thanks to Tim for holding down the fort in my absence. Now, on to business...

Recently my BlackBerry got run over by a car. You can see the results here, it's not pretty. Actually, I think it held up pretty well considering it got hit on a busy street. It's rather a mystery how it got there, as I hadn't been anywhere near where it was found.

A kindly … Read more