Spotted: Elevator

December 30, 2009
Elevator sign

Perhaps it only goes down, Alice in Wonderland style.

This is the view through the doorway after the Oakland airport security screening. I encountered it while traveling this week and it gave me a chuckle. Only after I walked past the sign, halfway to the far escalator and then turned left, could I finally see an [...]

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Case Study: Yahoo Entertainment

December 7, 2009
Yahoo Entertainment case study

Project: Redesign this very old page:

Background: This project was defined by its constraints. The biggest constraint was that the page, once launched, could not require ANY human effort to update it daily, meaning it could use only pre-existing content feeds and formats. Additionally, we could not build any new feeds or modify the existing [...]

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Thanksgiving

November 25, 2009

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I have many things to be thankful for this year. I would like to take a moment here to give special thanks for something that was new this year, something that enhanced my career, inspired creative and critical thinking about designed experiences, and that contributed to the birth of this blog—the [...]

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Design Exercise: The New Yahoo.com

November 12, 2009
Thumbnail image for Design Exercise: The New Yahoo.com

Microsoft launched a preview of the new MSN homepage redesign last week. This redesign reminds me in some ways of the recent Yahoo.com redesign. Both homepages are cleaner, with fewer links on the page. Both offer a way to configure the page to view personal content like email and Facebook.
I did not have the [...]

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The Price of Baggage Fees

November 3, 2009
The Price of Baggage Fees

Two weekends ago I flew up to the Bay Area on Virgin America. I’ve flown VA quite a few times in the past, but I guess it had been a while since the last flight because I had no idea they had started charging baggage fees. At the airport my family was suddenly hit with [...]

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The Future of Digital Reading (Core77 1hr Design Challenge)

October 20, 2009
sketches of the future of digital reading

Last week I submitted an entry for the Core77 1hr+ Design Challenge: The Future of Digital Reading. This is the first time I’ve ever participated in one of these challenges. I was intrigued by the premise of the exercise and by the juicy research results presented by Portigal Consulting. The task was to familiarize myself [...]

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Search Suggestion Shortcuts

October 18, 2009
Search suggestion shortcuts

Or, What Wolfram Alpha Does Completely Wrong
In my last post, Three Types of Searches, I proposed that there are three distinct behaviors of search, and that each behavior has its own optimal results formatting. Understanding these different search behaviors and thinking specifically about existing search tools and implementations of search suggestions has led me to [...]

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Three Types of Searches

October 4, 2009
3 types of searches

I seem to have had the same discussion over and over lately here at Yahoo about site search. Yahoo has (or had, anyway) a high-profile web search technology and design team. So when we discuss these site-specific searches, talk always seems to circle back to the question, “How much should this site’s search resemble—or maybe [...]

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Wee-wee Watering

September 19, 2009
Dust bin in Bangalore, India

Back in April I took a business trip to the fascinating Indian city of Bengaluru, which is both very like and very unlike big cities in the US. One of the many things I found interesting was the empty decorative fountains littered around the central city — carcasses of a British city aesthetic that did [...]

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Silly user.

September 15, 2009
elevator stop switch

This red switch used to be a great feature of the elevator in my condo building. You used to be able to flip it to “Stop” once the doors were open, and it would hold the elevator stopped and the doors open until you flipped it back to “Run.” I used this switch a lot. [...]

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