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My (Renewed) Love Affair With Amazon: Video and Kindle Books

I remember when people sniffed at the idea of Amazon being more than books. When Jeff Bezos reinvested all his profit into opening up other shops, people said, "Diluting the brand?" and other naive...

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Animated Drawings (and Meta There-upon)

Today I ran across a whole class of items that are oddly similar, in different places: drawings animated, in not your usual way. First, "Notebook," a video of a world in which paper and books are...

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Why Consulting Might Be For You

Last week Greg Raiz and I did a half day version of our workshop on being a design consultant, which we call "Getting Started in Consulting: Being the Best Boss You Ever Had." In this economic climate,...

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Brainstorming Doesn't Necessarily Help

At my last permanent job, an expert on brainstorming techniques came in to give a talk to the design and development managers. See, we had a phase of our dev process we optimistically called...

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CAD is Just a Tool: SolidWorks World 2009

The guest speakers at SolidWorks World 2009 really brought home to me how wonderful a rigorous design process can be - driving the product development, rather than struggling to catch up! There were 3...

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R, for Open Source Data Goodness

After I left The MathWorks, I stopped being able to afford MATLAB for stats, and switched to the open source R. Recently, there have been a few articles on how R is being used at companies like Google...

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So You Need to Do a Usability Test... But the Product So Obviously Sucks.

Most of us in interaction design jobs have been asked to do a usability test on something that we don't think is ready for prime time. You think it needs some design work before it even gets to users....

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CHI 09 Panel: Moving UX Into Strategic Importance

At CHI 2009, I took a lot of notes at the panel "Figuring Out the 'One Thing' That Will Move UX Into a Position of Strategic Importance." This is a rather random summary of it; see a similar topic in...

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Why Failure Isn't Working for Me

A response to a number of posts and talks on failure recently, particularly this one by Michael Krigsman, Five Reasons to Discuss Project Failure, linked from Scott Berkun's blog. Based on Krigsman's...

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In Defense of Hard Skills for Designers

The other day I was in a meeting in which evaluation criteria for developers came up; nice concrete stuff, like writing code that other people can read and modify, putting in comments, resulting bugs,...

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Cheap and Interesting Travel Resources

Since I've been busy vacationing, I haven't been busy blogging much - so I thought maybe I'd update with some references for travel sites and lists I use. A few friends have asked me for tips, so here...

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Recent Consulting Links

A few articles on consulting in the current economic climate, thanks to the Freelancers Union newsletter: The Freelancers' Guide to Getting Paid On Time, or getting paid at all, from the Wall Street...

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Tips and Tidbits from the UI14 Conference

Back to blogging after a long hiatus of work and travel... UI14 in Boston had some good stuff for designers and managers! I heard a lot about techniques for creativity and design generation before...

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My Take on Big Company Suckage

Scott Berkun wrote a good post on Why Big Companies Suck, at popular request on his site. It made me think about my own experiences at small, medium, and large companies over the past 20 years. I'm...

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Fan Video Editing Community and Copyright

In April, I gave a talk at UIUC's HCI department on fan video remix artists, or "vidders," as they are known within the fan media community. To build the talk, I drew on several years of LiveJournal...

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PyCon 2011 - Data, Men, and Me

In the past couple years, I've switched from sending myself to research conferences (like CHI) to more down-and-dirty developery conferences. I'm looking for skills development and tools I can use...

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Combing Through the Infovis Twitter Network Hairball

A month or two ago, Moritz Stefaner posted this image of "infovis" folks on twitter, with nodes sized by number of followers ("in-degree"): I dropped him a note wondering if he'd tried any social...

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A Personal Take on Infovis 2011

I haven't had time to go thru the papers I liked and didn't like yet, but I have been musing on some other aspects of Infovis that I thought I'd recap. To situate this, I usually go every other year to...

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A Kindle Fire Review (from a Media Fan)

I'm a Kindle fan, and an Amazon fan. I really like their media content: I buy Amazon music, Amazon Kindle books, TV shows, Android apps. So when my Kindle Fire came, it was pretty much pre-loaded, and...

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Digging Into NetworkX and D3

For Boston's Predictive Analytics Meetup in February, I gave a short talk on using the python library NetworkX to analyze social network link data, illustrated with some simple D3.js visuals of the...

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