There is no room for gray-area in the American debate. I've been thinking about this quite a bit with the election season approaching, and I'm sure we'll see it in evidence every day soon. It's one of the greatest issues in our society and we may come apart at the seams if we don't rectify the situation soon.Two primary forces are at work:The first is that we wish to avoid … [Read more...]

Last night, I had a dream about new Apple technology. If they haven't already begun design on this, I suggest they should. It was a small tablet that served as my Apple TV remote. All of the media functions were available as well as an onscreen keyboard to speed things up. I was able to flip through media just like my iPhone, and touching it on the pad made it play on the … [Read more...]

Adaptive Path has a provocative piece posted about the iPhone moving into the enterprise. Here's the quote from the CIO of Chiquita Brands:“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s … [Read more...]

Brilliant presentation by Dan Ariely today at our All Hands meeting. I'm fortunate to work at a company that has a number of brilliant people enlisted as fellows. Among them, the inventor of the graphical user interface, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the guy who came up with the original electronic spreadsheet, and many others including Dan.Dan is an … [Read more...]

I just stumbled upon a cool tool and an even cooler set of data...The tool is Twist. Twist is, basically, a way to compare volumes of traffic on Twitter based on words contained in that content. For example, I typed in "cubs" and "white sox" (take that, Sox fans) and it drew up a nice graph of Twitters containing those phrases over time. It's fairly easy to see how this may … [Read more...]

Why is it that an enterprise has such a hard time recognizing Experience Design for what it is, and exercise in Customer Value Management. After all our soapboxing, companies still think of XD as a frivolous expense. I'm going to pitch in on a class about SDLC next week and hope to convey the importance of XD as an integral part of the Development Program, not just as an … [Read more...]

I recently attended a meeting at a client.  It was a brainstorming session to begin thinking about the corporate blog they had decided they needed.  In addition to myself, there were representatives from a leading marketing and metrics company there.While I think that (for this enterprise) community building tools could only help the situation, it was startling to me … [Read more...]

How about a usability blog that has accidentally disabled comments...Back on now.  Sorry.  For a moment, I thought, "Oh!  That's why nobody's commenting..."  Now I'll know for sure how few people read this.  … [Read more...]

So...  We've all Googled ourselves, right?  C'mon...  Admit it.I know I have.  I found a bunch of stuff - some interesting, some not.  I even found another Devin Henkel.  If you look at the bottom of page 1, that's not me grounding out to shortstop.  Funny thing is, the only other Devin Henkel in the world appears to live in the same state as … [Read more...]

Campaign season is upon us.  Just as the presidential race seems to be taking shape on one side of the aisle and is too close to call for sure on the other.  So goes the Hi Def video campaign trail.Blu-Ray is the McCain of the DVD candidates - it has the support and the backing of the major players.  HD-DVD is the Huckabee - has the look and sound of perfect, but … [Read more...]