Michael Kanellos, "The elements of style," CNET.com, 16 Jul 2001

How does the focus-group testing work. When do you start marrying your ideas with the average person's behavior?

We are mostly interested in where are people using these things, what are the tasks they are trying to accomplish, what are their key frustrations, how much space do they have.

A good example of that is the ThinkLight. That whole idea came out between collaboration between human-factors engineering, industrial designers and marketing. We were trying to figure out what user benefit we could link to our product. It was along the lines of making a better dashboard rather than a better engine.

One of the things we came up with was that often people were trying to use these things in places you wouldn't ordinarily think of, in a dark lecture hall, or maybe in the back seat of a car on a trip in the middle of the night, and you are trying to write a report. Everybody talked about, "Well, you can tilt the screen down and light your keyboard and lift it back up again." But then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a light that would illuminate the keyboard?"

HannaHodge User Experience Architects 1 It is with both sadness and great pride that I must inform you of the end of an era for us at HannaHodge. As of July 2001 we will cease operations. We have used two measures to inform our decision. In March we got the same word from Argus Associates. What is making what appear to be successful user experience and information architecture firms fail? There are enough sites with problems that there should be plenty of work.

Design for Process, Not Products If users feel pushed through a process or can't figure out what to do next, you're skipping steps that matter to them. Don't design Webpages. Design support for users' tasks.

Dear World: Loose Lips Sink More Than Ships Ms. Turkle of M.I.T. says that many Americans equate e-mail with paper mail, which enjoys strong legal, and social, protections against snooping. Even though they know e- mail might not be secure, she said, many people think of it as being like talking with friends in a bar. "You're surrounded by other people but you don't experience those other people as having a microphone at your table," she said. Ms. Turkle also notes that sending and receiving e-mail are very different experiences. Composition occurs in a zone of intimacy, which leads people to write things they might not otherwise risk broadcasting to the world. "The act of composing e-mail occurs within your private mindspace," she said. "The only place where people are quiet and not being bombarded is in front of the machine." But the recipient is often in a completely different state of mind. "A hundred messages come up; the experience of receiving this thing is that you are being bombarded," Ms. Turkle said. This breeds an attitude that no e-mail should be taken too seriously. Instead, the harried recipient thinks, "Oh, cool, I'll pass this on," and with a mouse click sends a piece of correspondence around the world, like a computer virus.