Is the future of design activity-centered? Quite some time back I argued that Information Architecture was the wrong frame in which to approach design. My post got a lot of push-back from the established IA crowd, who claimed that I was either wrong or claimed that my view was just rehashing existing debate. I probably […]

Continue Reading: Activity-Centered Design

You can now check out a free chapter of of my book Designing for the Social Web on the publisher’s web site: Design for Sign-Up: How to Motivate People To Sign Up For Your Web App There is also a one-page version for easier reading/printing, which you can find here: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=1216150 Enjoy!

Continue Reading: Free chapter of Designing for the Social Web available

I’ve submitted two talks to SXSW 2009: Designing for Sign-Up This talk is for anybody who has ever had the problem of getting people to sign up for their web application. I got frustrated trying to find good resources on how to do this effectively that I decided to write it up myself. Managing Your […]

Continue Reading: My Proposals for 2009 SXSW Talks

Robert Scoble has a nice piece on “passionates”, people who are early adopters of technology. He says that companies need to focus on passionates in order to drive their business forward, as non-passionates just don’t care enough to share and promote you. He makes a really good point: it’s better to have 100,000 passionate users […]

Continue Reading: Passionates

In On the Internet, people know if you’re a dog, my friend John Eckman details an interesting situation which underscores the importance of identity and revealing who you are in appropriate places on the Internet. John wrote a great post the other day comparing some newly released features from the travel startup Dopplr with those […]

Continue Reading: Tripit Employee Pretending to be Disgruntled Dopplr User?

Yesterday I wrote an unthoughtful post about an email I received from Slideshare. I analyzed the email as an interface and ended up calling it evil, pointing out that I wanted to find out more about something but had to commit to the invitation in order to do so. At the time, this frustrated the […]

Continue Reading: Can Interfaces be Evil?

Update #2: Jon from Slideshare responds in the comments with excellent help. And in reflecting on this post…I realized it’s silly to call the design (or Slideshare) evil. This isn’t evil…it’s an interface. Update #1: There is indeed a group on Slideshare called Presentation Design Tennis. So the following email is true… I received an […]

Continue Reading: Interface Design Principle: Let people learn more

This Thursday we’re holding the next North Shore Web Geeks Meetup, our monthly meeting for web geeks who live up in the Northeastern Mass/Southern New Hampshire area. This month we’re changing to a new format. So far we’ve been completely unformatted…everyone simply showing up and talking for a while. This has worked out well, but […]

Continue Reading: North Shore Web Geek Meetup this week, now with talks!

Boston.com has a nice story on the growing trend of companies keeping real-time tabs on what their customers say on the Web: Hurry up, the customer has a complaint By using services like Twitter and Google blogsearch, companies can quickly respond to people who vent their frustrations. In some cases, they can actually provide real […]

Continue Reading: Social design: from customer service to innovation

I heard a term the other day that I really liked: co-evolve. It was said in the context of humans and technology…humans and technology co-evolve together. In other words, we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it. And we both change in response to each other. Many times […]

Continue Reading: Co-evolving