Sehnsucht – addictive yearning
It’s rare that I have a chance to do more than skim the headlines of my RSS reader, but there are a few that I check regularly. One of those is Elezea, written by Rian van der Merwe. He writes at the intersection of technology, design, and sociology, so the topics are almost always of interest. Plus, by my standards he’s prolific – there is always something new and interesting to read! At the beginning of the summer I wrote a post about Digital Hoarding, so I was especially interested in his reference to a well-written article about online curation from the New York...
Read MoreDigital hoarding
When we moved from the Philadelphia area to Chicagoland late last year, we moved into a house that’s about half the size of the one we left behind. Our new place is a sweet little Dutch Colonial built in 1924, and it’s been almost completely redone inside and out. But the reality is, I think the 1000+ square feet that we lost in the move must have been storage space! We have some stuff in a storage unit, but our garage and attic are stuffed to the gills. Some of you may be familiar with an A&E television show called Hoarders. It is a fascinating and disturbing show...
Read More2010 in review
Today I received a WordPress.com summary about how this blog did in 2010, and I thought it would be interesting to share: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever. Crunchy numbers A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,200 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s. In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 44 posts. There were 327 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1gb. That’s about 6 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was November 30th with 119 views. The most popular post...
Read MoreThe Daily Grommet
This year I became a member of the Creative Good UX Councils. Creative Good is a small consultancy, and (independent of their consulting work) they also offer a knowledge exchange and networking service that they call The Councils. There are about 450 people involved in total, in about 20 councils with 20-25 people each. The service includes Special Interest Groups (SIGs), a Request for Help infrastructure (RFH), and two in-person events a year tailored to the interests of each Council. They also offer a very compelling value proposition – 5x ROI on the investment, and...
Read MoreLinchpin
In early April 5th, I had the chance to participate in a free webinar with Linchpin author Seth Godin, thanks to Polar Unlimited’s service readitfor.me. Although I haven’t read the book, the webinar gave me a good feel for the book and the author. Here is what was discussed: What is a Linchpin, and why do we need them? Godin believes that in organizations worth doing business with or worth working for, each has at least one person who shows up to make a difference. In a car, the linchpin is a tiny piece of hardware that holds the wheel onto the axle of a vehicle. He has...
Read MoreData visualization
In a paper I co-authored for EPIC 2007, I wrote about a pie chart that I used to depict the research findings from my first ethnographic research study inside SAP in 2005. With the exception of my dissertation research, which I had ‘distilled’ into a 300-page book, I had no experience in presenting complex, qualitative research to an executive audience in the corporate setting. Like a typical consulting engagement, I had about 80-100 hours worth of findings, but less than an hour to make a compelling statement about what I had found. I used the pie chart as a door-opener for...
Read MoreEUI Summit – Day 2
We started the second day of the Summit with another delicious breakfast on the deck of the Sky Hotel. Amazingly, I was hungry, even though I had eaten mounds and mounds of delicious food the night before. Sam Lawrence once again kicked off the day by explaining our agenda. The plan was to do a short demo of the new release (coming out next week), and then break us into four groups to ‘deconstruct the UI’. Basically, they wanted expert eyes focusing on four major areas of the product. The areas of focus for the breakout were: The landing / front page Profiles, and in...
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