Drink beer instead of speculating stocks

A Random Walk Down Wall Street says that one joke making rounds on the internet in 2001 went:

Tip of the Week

If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all of the beer and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79.

My advice to you . . . start drinking heavily.

And apparently, by fall of 2002, the $1,000 put into Nortel stock was worth only $3. Today? I'm using their VPN software for logging in to the intranet at work and I think the stock price is around $17, down from $1280.50 or something like that in the year 2000.

Go Bags

Is it the wannabe ethnographer curiosity in me or the gearhead lusting for goodies? Cool article from lifehacker shows people's "Go Bags" described as "the lifeline satchel that holds everything you need to operate on-the-go."

Go Bags Part 1

Go Bags Part 2

Had to post the Macbook Pro bag, natch!

Links

I feel kinda lame posting linkdumps but there have been some cool articles and I have no time.

Web Worker Payoff: Information Architect
"More commonly referred to by titles such as information architect, interaction or user experience designer or usability engineer, the job had average pay in 2006 of $82,400, according to a survey by The Information Architecture Institute."

Thin clients: The time is now
"…technological advances are finally getting ready to give the desktop PC the old heave-ho, at least in larger corporate environments. Their replacement? The thin client: a dumb, network-connected terminal capable of delivering a desktop-like experience without all that costly, energy-draining hardware on the desk."

Names in User Experience You Should Know
Also includes an up-and-coming list. They must have misspelled my name as "Other."

Links

Cellular carriers in the USA are so evil and I tire of their tyranny…

So nice to see design boundaries being fundamentally reworked in design-stagnant industries like the motorcycle industry

Porsche opens door to 100 apprentices… gosh, this is the stuff of dreams! I wish many more companies would do this.

Links

Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process
"Creating a User Experience (UX) process can be a very rewarding journey; it can also be a nightmare if approached from the wrong angle. Initiating a culture-shift, overhauling existing processes, evangelizing, strategizing, and educating is an enormous undertaking. Often it’s a lonely path the UX advocate walks, especially if you are the only one who is driving that change from within the company. But that path is ripe with opportunities to improve your company’s product creation process, as well as the product itself."

Thanks for the good quote selection to Navneet Nair on his post which I basically copied.

7 User Experience Lessons We Can Learn from the iPhone
Cool article and cool use of SlideShare integration into a blog post.

The Lab Within the Lab
Janice, the first, and I think solo, UX/usability lab professional at Flying Lab Software (a small game company) introduces herself. I always wanted to know if UX could work well with game companies and how my skillset might fit in. I wanted to chat with the Rockstar table during a career fair and ask my prof in a game studies course but I guess this will do for now. I'd be really interested in reading more about how her work goes.

Philips Is For Sure Cool

In the BusinessWeek article Case Study: Philips' Norelco, it's demonstrated that Philips is a cool company that knows how to focus on the user. I always suspected Philips to be a cool company to design for (I keep a list of companies where I think it would be cool to do design work) .

The article has 4 headings: The Problem, a call for solutions; The Research, contextual inquiry (watch them!); Prototyping, where engineers, designers, and business strategists dream and build; Marketing, product positioning based on user needs and worldviews. Awesome! Staying empathetic, collaboratively working through solutions, sticking close to the data.

And yes, Chinese men aren't usually very hairy. Philips will consider launching a double-headed razor for China instead of triple-headed razor. Kinda funny.

The Internet is Full of Design Knowledge and Literature

I re-discovered this blog/site called Core77. Browsing through it I remember why I deleted it from my feed reader a while ago: there is just too much stuff that is really broadly spread across the huge domain of design. I was more interested in design research and user-centered design than industrial and graphic design and all that other good stuff.

Anyway, I noticed tucked away in Core77 is a really neat directory of design firms and consultants. Core77 Design Directory. As of right now, 6427 firms are listed and 1389 are labeled as Interaction Design. Sweetness. I'm going to enjoy browsing through them a bit at a time. I'm really surprised at how many are in San Francisco. I really think I should have tried to tour as many of these operations as possible. I've always wanted to get to know more about design firms and the work they do but I never knew how to find them. Good thing someone else is keeping a directory!

Another thing I noticed on the Core77 homepage is the BusinessWeek Online logo and I'm guessing that means Core77 is owned by or on the payroll of BusinessWeek. BusinessWeek has a cool running "column" on Business Innovation and Design. Front page of this section looks unbelievably interesting. Looks like all those late nights of wandering on the web for more design knowledge are starting to pay off. I'm just disappointed that it takes me so long to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Technology Is Not The Answer

Article at Popular Mechanics website talks about how the US government spent 15 years and almost $500M dollars on military tech but apparently the soldiers don't really like it! Wow.

A soldier is quoted saying "There are a lot of things I'd never use in my position. It seems like a lot of excessive stuff."

From general feature and technology bloat to details like lack of consideration in equipment lag times, this could be a good example of techno-centric development that forgets to address the critical question of the user's experience and helping the soldiers actually work better instead of just working differently (and blowing R&D money).

Design Documents vs. HTML Prototyping

Garret Dimon wrote a fascinating article called Just Build It: HTML Prototyping and Agile Development over at Digital Web Magazine.

In the article, he makes the point that while design documents definitely have their place, prototyping in HTML or even AJAX-y stuff is worth considering under various conditions. It's filled with interesting stuff and reminds me to really find some time to get cranking on trying to advance in CSS and respectably wield JavaScript soon. And I had been hankering to learn more about design documents after reading a bunch of books touting their importance!

Sadly enough, I don't feel like there is a lot of good literature on how to make good HTML prototypes or design documents. Looks like it will come from interacting with other designers and getting the right experience.

Side note: I'm totally digging the writing style that Dimon's article uses where every small section has a heading. I am seeing it more and more on the web and in Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars" it's notably prolific and handy. It sort of reminds me of scientific papers with many headings.

Jerk!

Jerk!
Originally uploaded by ericpan.

A funny example of error prevention via pub signage.

The first sign "DO NOT EXIT" is at about eye level, followed by "UNLESS EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE" right below it and then at waist-level "JERK!"

This is the inside view of the main entrance to UCSD's Porter's Pub (I've always entered through there at least). There is a "back entrance" that they were using as the only entrance on Sungod where they had a guy standing and carding at the door instead of the usual carding at the bar.

Some people ran up to it expecting to exit through it and then after about 1 second ran the other way.