10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris is an interesting visualization of the news, but not nessarily a visualizationtool-- the imagergy iscompelling, but not meaningful. Compare to newsmap
where size + attention, and you can slice and dice based on country. Which is a understanding interface, and which is merely colorful?

I love this ad campaign, but it never makes me want to change my bank. Is it a success?



--

Sent from my Treo

Reading OK/Cancel: The User Experience Community is Thinking Too Big all I could think was dudes, can we collectively move on now? How small and petty is the community if we even ask questions like "who owns user experience?" (though admittedly it packs the seats) At the multi-organization panel on the previous question, I joked that fairly often IA has owned it, mostly because they tend to do what nobody else is doing (like neatly organzing pages), and often no one has bothered to think about the overarching experience. Odd, that.

But does the discipline of IA own UX? Nah, it's not possible. In fact, UX doesn't own UX. The best work ever for the "user's experience" is done by multidisciplinary teams and by multidisciplinary team I don't mean a designer and IA and a researcher, I mean the real kind in which programmers and product managers and marketing gets their hands dirty in the brainstorming and visioning and making and playing.

Still worried about the ROI of design? It's done, people-- read businessweek as well as alistapart for a change, and you'll see everyone is already on board! Hass and Standford are adding design to their curriculum, the MFA is the new MBA, and so on and so on.... They are sold on what you do: now you have to actually live up to their expectations. Scared yet?

It's time for all the usual suspects to stop sniping at their neighbor in the next cube, and start making-- making new products, making new relationships, making new learnings, making new markets, making new ways of business.

Don't worry about the professional organizations that are blooming like mushrooms in the rain-- enjoy them, and grab some of the juicy templates and articles that show up on AIGA and AIFIA and so on. Don't bag on the usability people, ask them to find out some new stuff for you to work with, and hey, ask them what they think of blue, anyhow. Design's not so precious a power that you can't ask for someone's two cents.

YOU AREN'T YOUR TITLE, and if IA becomes the standard title, or ID, or IxD or whatever, who cares... let's go design some cool new stuff.

The presentation I gave in Scandinavia reminded me of how exciting things are right now.... not since '99 have we seen so many new interesting applications of data, technology and knowledge. Do you really want to be wasting your time fighting over who gets to choose if it's a drop-down or a radio button when you could be jamming on the next flickr or newsmap?

Please.

On the way back to the hotel yesterday, I saw a couple with rolling luggage trying to hail a taxi. It was embarrassing. They would watch for taxis, and at the moment that the taxi flew by, the woman who wiggle her fingers at the taxi and call "are you free" in a voice that barely reached me, much less the street. The man seemed too embarrassed to even attempt that much. At 5:30, getting a taxi with a strong stance and loud whistle is already difficult.

At my third month of New York living, I feel much the Manhattanite. I enjoy a egg sandwich at a diner for breakfast, a rushed lunch at my desk, a leisurely dinner with friends (and I can recommend places), I buy dollar jewelry in the garment district, shoes in Soho, and pilgrimage to Century 21 for most else, and enjoy wifi in Chelsea market (as well as watcing the weekend tango lessons) and produce in Union Square. I don't carry a subway map anymore (though I would if I could find a wallet sized one).

But I'm still glad to return to California on Tuesday, to my husband, house and car. Not because I don't love New York (because I have fallen quite in love with it) but because you can only live in a suitcase so long.

Redesigning American Business shows why outsourcing shouldn't scare designers....

"Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate. IDEO, ZIBA Design, and other players run workshops to help business people better understand and meet their customers' desires. Companies are creating "chief design officer" slots, and designers are helping corporations build their own innovation centers. The hot design firms in the U.S. today call themselves "design innovators," not "product designers""

Victor explains our new company extremely well in While you were out: changes in the global design industry

"Victor Lombardi, a consultant in New York, resigned his fulltime design management job to co-found The Management Innovation Group, a new breed of management consulting firm. "My partners and I view design as a way of thinking which is applicable far beyond the design of products" he explained. "Our clients want to explore innovative business strategies, ways of collaborating, and ultimately to develop their own innovation capabilities." So while Lombardi's firm thinks like designers, they work with executives to help them explore the options a more creative approach can offer. "It's not easy for people to stretch their thinking to encompass both business- and customer-centric points of view, but ultimately this is what we need to do to create innovative, human-centered organizations." "

Watch for more, slowly but steadily....

Please read Most Hated Advertising Techniques (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). I worked with John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay (when he was at Yahoo) and the data is extraordinary. And convincing.

Thanks for your patience. The slides are back up. This is the latest version, with a bunch of notes I hope will help, so you probably want to download them so you can see the notes field. Enjoy, and I'll try to write an article from it, as I think many of the ideas deserve contemplation.

Hej all-- I've moved my conference slides, because I really don't think they stand up properly without my explanations. If you've seen the talk and are dying to take a second look, email me and I can get them to you.
But I'd really feel better about waiting to spread them across the web like jam until I can either annotate them, or better yet, write the ideas into an article. It was okay on Are's site, because he did fill in some background from the talk, but it's in Norwegian, so not really accessible to the bulk of the world. And I'll be home next week, so it'll be coming. Patience, patience.