Category: User Experience

  • If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go

    Started off Saturday morning with Kick ’08. Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

  • Talking patterns and social design at the IA Summit

    If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program. Here are the basic…

  • I'm speaking on presence and reputation with Ted Nadeau at SxSW

    If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I *do* give a damn about…

  • Notchup invites a cock-up?

    I’m having second thoughts about Notchup.

  • Help me write my book about presence

    I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of…

  • As promised, my pattern library talk

    As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I…

  • For public consumption

    A few people have asked me about when they might be able to see the recording of my brown bag on the Yahoo Pattern Library and so I wanted to post a little update. This got delayed because of a cold that laid me up for all of last week, but I’ve just completed a…

  • Some possible best practices for social design

    Joshua Porter, who specializes in Social Web Design and with whom I’ve debated in the past around the perennially boring topic of “Information Architecture vs. Interaction Design, Which is the Best Discipline EVAR!?!?,” has culled an interesting list of social design best practices from Google’s documentation of its new “OpenSocial” API collection.

  • What can I say about OpenSocial?

    The blog world, along with my slice of the twitter world, is abuzz with attempts to understand, analyze, deconstruct, laud, and excoriate Google’s new OpenSocial initiative.

  • Matt Leacock's Pandemic game poised to infect the world

    Interview with Yahoo! principal interaction designer Matt Leacock about his forthcoming boardgame, Pandemic.

  • Enumerating social media patterns: a work in progress

    At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and…

  • Do pattern libraries really work?

    I wish I could have been at the recent Chicago IxDA Pattern Library conversation, a participatory discussion about using pattern libraries in practice…. Here are my thoughts on the reported conversation.

  • Selling Amazon shorts

    If Apple can sell electronic downloads of songs with no packaging for 99c a pop why can’t Amazon sell short little chapbooks electronically, download only, for 49c? The answer is they can, of course.

  • Ambient info edu revolution

    Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the…

  • When is a pattern not a pattern?

    Going back to Christopher Alexander, the “pattern language” concept started off with a fairly strict, well defined structure. Alexander’s patterns all have a sensitizing example, a context (when to use or apply the pattern), a problem (expressed in terms of conflicting forces), and a solution (a way to balance or reconcile those forces). Application of…

  • RE: Join my network on LinkedIn

    This is a quandary for me….

  • Skin-deep semantics

    Somewhere along the way web developers learned that bold and italics tags (don’t even mention underline) were verboten, careless mingling presentation with semantics and structure, but that emphasis and strong emphasis were cool. Heck, even Dreamweaver and related products now automatically insert em and strong tags in wysiswyg mode when the user clicks buttons labeled…

  • Graphing the social graph graph

    Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook….

  • Weird modal dialog box put up by iTunes

    Thanks, iTunes! Originally uploaded by xian. Not really sure how to respond to this. Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.

  • Getting fired up for IDEA 2007

    I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design. IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea…

  • Looks like Mash is in beta

    Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis. If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation. Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash…