Why would you order your pens and inks from anybody else? Thank you Alex and Randall at Goulet Pens.  

    WorkFlowy is an online outliner with a delightful and addictive user experience. Workflowy’s central concept is a single, hierarchically organized list for all your brain-dumping needs. The magic of WorkFlowy is the mix of focusing, filtering through tags and searches, and expanding/collapsing to tame the complexity. WorkFlowy is very similar to TaskPaper, except that TaskPaper…

Alan Cooper , one of my user-centered design gurus, was the first to teach me that often, products that have been inspired by a specific need of a specific group of people end up being broadly successful (the rolling suitcase is a famous example). I’ve always loved this concept. I love it even more when…

The crew of Information Week visited Google recently and got an exclusive sneak preview of the redesign of the Google Docs editors that was launched today. They concluded that Google Docs is now ready to Take Microsoft Office Head On. (You can find much more information and cool videos on Information Week’s special page on…

In Getting Real, Jason Fried writes: “design for yourself.” The first time I read it, I cringed. People who design using themselves as the only audience—this is how a lot of bad software is created. But then I thought more about it, and realized that Jason was just stating a truth. You may well disagree…

I’ve just arrived in the city of “Lost Wages” (Southwest airline humor) for the IA Summit. I’ve been here only one hour and I already love it! Pure wild entertainment without the annoying burden of culture and history. Visit Paris without having to go to the Louvre! Visit Rome without the interminable Vatican Museums! I…

Ceci n’est pas fromage.

I’m back from New York City where I attended BarCampNYC2, the unconference where everybody is invited, everybody presents, nobody wears shoes, the rules change at least twice a day, people understand what you do for a living, and you get to spend the night in a Microsoft conference room. Barcamp is highly equalitarian: not for…

Every year, the brightest and most influential gather in Monterey for TED. The theme of this year’s TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, was The Future We Will Create…. Google Video has a set of video recordings of some amazing 2006 TED conference talks. Al Gore was there and you can feel his…

A few days ago, while reading a book on a traditional user-centered design (UCD) methodology I caught myself thinking: “This is sooo engineering!.” It was solid UCD, but it felt old fashion. It made me realize how radically my concept of usability has changed in just a few years. It made me also realize that…

In Italy, professional sports are played once a week, with few exceptions. Among the sports, soccer is The Game. On Sundays, people watch the game. The rest of the week they talk about the game, argue about the game, read about the game, fantasize about the game, and plan for the next one. Each soccer…

According to Wikipedia, the 35-year old Southwest Airlines is the third larger airline in the world for passenger carried. Fortune magazine defined Southwest "the most successful airline in history." Yet, I didn’t understand what a big deal Southwest was until I flew with them for the first time. Overcoming my fear of flying Southwest started…

Yesterday Husband and I went to the Whitney Museum in NYC. In this period the Whitney is having the 2006 Biennial, which is titled Day for Night in homage to François Truffaut’s movie La Nuit américaine. Some of the pieces were outrageous (a large virginal white canvas with piece of dirty chewing gum splattered on…

A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing…

Scott Cook opened CHI 2006 with a plenary on fostering innovation. Live-blogging notes have been posted on the CHI Blog. Here are my notes, which are not a word-by-word report on the talk but more of an annotated reconstruction (quote at your own risk). Creating Game-changing Invention The brief –  Innovation happens at the junction…

Today is the first day of CHI 2006 in Montréal, Québec and my first time at a CHI conference. First impression – Who would have imagined that so many people are into Human-Computer Interaction! (In practical terms, this means that there no way to get to the coffee and food without hurting somebody or faking…

What’s a girl got to do when she has too many things to accomplish and too little time? Creating a to do list, of course! But not any simple, paper-based to do list. We are too geeky and our world is too complicated for old fashion to do lists (you know the drill: the lists…

Solitary designers, lonely geniuses, and isolated creative teams: it’s time for you to think about social interaction for your user interfaces. No, I am not talking about social software, user-created content, or Web 2.0. I am talking about any old-fashion user interface: because for us human beings any interaction is a social interaction–even when we…