Wildly Appropriate

dan klyn's blog on information architecture and such

Is UX Design For Luxury Retail A Euphamism?

3 hours ago

I'm going to start building a list of so-called or self-styled luxury experiences online in order to determine if my hunch about "user experience design for luxury retail" being a euphamism for design that's grossly myopic and largely un-usable. The first member of this list is 20ltd.com. Others I'll add in short order include:

Who am I missing? How far off the mark am I with this postulate about ux design for luxury retailing = awful?

 

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HCI In The Movies and On TV

1 day ago

spacer I remember the dismay of my viewing companion(s) when I saw Minority Report for the first time. I kept wanting to freeze-frame and slow-frame-advance during the sequences where Tom Cruise's character is manipulating video surveilance footage using hand gestures and a wall-sized viewscreen. To this day my mental picture of that film has everything to do with user interface, and almost nothing to do with the plot or the characters. If you're similarly afflicted, you'll enjoy Michael Schmitz' fairly exhaustive roundup and writeup of UIs in film and television. In regards to the Futurama episode the image above was nabbed from, Schmitz reports that:

The scene shows a group of people talking about a person called “Fry” and the computer listened and assisted by downloading a movie about this person and opening the owners calendar on Friday and ordering some french fries.
Priceless! I need to BT this episode, pronto... Also, somebody should create an RSS feed with Netflix links to each and every film and tv series mentioned in this article...

Link via BoingBoing

 

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Toread: The Future Of RSS (per R/W Web)

1 day ago

Just a quick note to self here... Read/Write Web has a new article on the future of RSS that I need to dig into. But not right now.

 

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Who's Got The Scoop On MySpace Analytics

1 day ago

As with most things MySpace, the more I dig into the question of how a "regular joe" (that is, somebody that's not in an advertising relationship with MySpace) goes about tracking who's viewing a MySpace profile page ... the more filth and rottenness I discover. Here's something that says it's a tool for doing MySpace tracking that's quite likely a spyware mule. Okay... Softpedia says it's not spyware. And here's another tracking service with the stink of AdSense Farming all over it. What's a legitimate outfit like mine s'posed to do with all this? The images on our page are not used on any other site, so there's logfile stuff we can do to try and sessionize use of these images and to discover referrers. But I want more. I want user environment variables. And myspace friend IDs. And of course, I want absolute unique visits.

Earlier today I bumped into a bit of server trickery from Knowingart that I'd like to try out:

because Myspace censors HTML, (a good reason not to use it) you’ll need to get fancy if you want to take your tracking a step further. Code a script that looks like an image to Myspace, but actually it’s a PHP script with a .jpg extension.

Example: www.knowingart.com/whatever.jpg could be a PHP script that outputs a .jpg image. But before the script displays the image, you can capture some useful server “environment” info.
What else should I be aware of in terms of best practices for web analytics in MySpaceland? Will the Knowingart trick make the MySpace gods angry? A comment left on a blog I've been following of late was dead-on about the effects of spending alot of time and effort on things in the MySpaceOsphere: "I bet the guy who put this together took a long, long shower afterward"....

Update: Some links about this matter

  • GA thread on using GA in MySpace (it no workie)

 

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Hugh MacLeod on Lovemarks, Saatchi

7 days ago

Last fall I meanly subjected my students at SI to a presentation on and discussion of the book Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts. Their responses to this material were quite in line with "the Hughtrain" ina post titled Advertising 2.0 Does Not Exist:

I find both Saatchi's "Lovemarks" and its sequel, "The Lovemarks Effect" [links here] utterly unreadable. Together they form a shallow and vapid tragicomedy, of sorts. Which is a pity, because on another level I quite agree with Saatchi CEO, Kevin Roberts central Lovemarks thesis, i.e. that Love is what drives our new marketing realities. And he obviously an extremely smart and capable guy. But what started out as a great idea from a lone individual has been utterly butchered by the grim realities of his employer's already-existing business model.

I never noticed that there's a sequel to Lovemarks. Hugh points out an unfortunate resonance from its dustjacket photo:

Have you also noticed how on the cover of "The Love Marks Effect", there's a picture of all these small metal cookie cutters, shaped like love hearts? What are you saying, Guys? "Cookie Cutter Love"? I know. Unfortunate. Sad. Comic. All that.
Hugh MacLeod. Thinking so I don't have to.

 

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User Centered Political Campaign Design

13 days ago

The thing about the UX community's having developed this amazing set of tools for effective and persuasive transmissions and transactions and stuff .... turns out these tools can be used for evil. for example....

 

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Adobe Apollo - Everything You Need 2 Know

15 days ago

Niall Kennedy has an utterly readable and hype-free dissertation on the new widget/app framework from Adobe which dropped a few days ago. I'll boldly state that this is required reading... so go read it!

 

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MySpace Pogrom vs. Other Ppl's Widgets

16 days ago

On the eve of our launching some spectacular video playback and put-this-on-your-page goodness for my client's big debut on MySpace, reports from the NYT about MySpace killing non-MySpace players and widgets and such is spiking my blood pressure a little... I've whined in the past about MySpace crippling the functionality of Flash-based gee-gaws and widgets and media players. But where in the past it's been a situation where some arcane workarounds can get you close to where you wanted to be ... this new wave of anti-widget action is more like a genocidal pogrom. Is this the end of MySpace as we know it?

"Every attempt everyone has ever made to try to dictate what a person’s Internet experience will be has ended up coming up empty," he [Fred Wilson] said. "You have to accept the fact that you are never going to be the be-all and end-all of everyone’s experience. They are one click away from everyone else on the Web."
Anybody have a recent example of some MySpace bling whose twinkle's been dimmed by the latest anti-widget pogrom?

 

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You Know You're Famous When

22 days ago

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Homeboy writes and speaks about search engines... proof there's a groupie for every occasion (if not two... with beer...).

 

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Today's Inspriation

22 days ago

Via Scott at Q:

People don’t want to just buy a product; they want to buy into an idea.

Products and services are becoming more and more similar. It’s increasingly easy for one company to copy another’s advantage. The ability to differentiate can mean the difference between a company thriving and merely surviving. In order to stand out an organisation needs something more substantial than ‘vision’, something deeper than ‘brand’. It needs a core purpose: a big idea.

A big idea has to be radical: conveying a sense that things can be done in a new way, that the world can be changed. It has to be social: appealing to the hearts and minds of people, it has to been seen to be true and relevant. Finally it has to be tangible: detectable in every thing an organisation does – in its communications, behaviour and products.

- Wolff Olins
I'm not sure where Scott grabbed this from. Good stuff tho...

 

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My name is Dan Klyn, and I'm an information architect.

I work with amazing people at a nonprofit company called Flannel in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I also teach IA in the library science programs at the University of Michigan and at Wayne State University.


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