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.

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms What is clear, Cook said, is that the fundamental activity underlying paradigm shifts is directly related to the practice of good business in general. "That means getting the decision makers close to the customer," he said. "That's one of the distinguishing characteristics of HBS, in fact—to drive research and teaching close to practice, close to executives in their day-to-day lives." "The customer is the compass; that's where the learning comes from," Cook concluded. "And don't forget to truly respect surprises."

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms "The biggest business innovations are not technology-based. Major breakthroughs come through a unique mindset or paradigm," said Cook (HBS MBA '76), citing eBay's revolutionary e-commerce model as an example. "There was no inventory, no guarantee that merchandise was authentic, and no easy way to pay for or receive goods—it might take a customer one week to buy a $10 item, and another two to three weeks to receive it," he remarked. "Needless to say, retailers and venture capitalists ignored him, thinking he was either irrelevant or crazy." When Benchmark Capital finally took a chance on the new auction site, eBay's IPO and subsequent stock movement rewarded the investment company with the single largest gain in the history of venture capital. The technology supporting the eBay Web site took its founder, Pierre Omidyar, less than a week to build, Cook continued. "What was significant was the power of this new paradigm or mindset," he said. "People who shift paradigms have the same facts as everyone else, but they see them differently. The end result either revolutionizes the customer experience, or the economics of the business, or both, as was the case with eBay."

Grow Your Site, Keep Your Users | Computerworld News & Features Story Sometimes even false user perceptions must be considered in designing new features. On a home-page redesign in March of last year, eBay produced a page that was "very colorful and looked very graphically intense," yet took less time to load than the older version, says Borns. However, in testing the page with a few thousand users, concerns arose. "We showed them an image of the page—it didn't actually work—and they said, 'This page has so many graphics on it, it's going to take forever to load,' " says Borns. "We knew it loaded faster, but because they thought it wouldn't, we ended up paring it down a little bit."

DaveNet : The power to publish as an individual Weblogs are the anti-newspaper in some ways. Where the editorial process can filter out errors and polish a piece of copy to a fine sheen, too often the machinery turns even the best prose limp, lifeless, sterile and homogenized. A huge part of blogs' appeal lies in their unmediated quality. Blogs tend to be impressionistic, telegraphic, raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often striking an emotional chord.

Innovating For Humans In general, though, software demands constant innovation for two reasons: to differentiate one product from another and to justify upgrades. If an innovation sets your product apart enough to increase its market share, others will imitate it and the differentiation will slowly disappear; to keep your software distinct, you have to constantly innovate. And to keep generating profit from existing customers, you work to improve your product in a way that is compelling enough to make people want to go out and buy it again. Innovation becomes a careful, strategic game in which everyone tries to innovate enough to distinguish their product and justify upgrades, but not so much that they alienate their installed base or step too far away from the familiar.

Stalk Your User (Web Techniques, June 2001) Technology seldom becomes important until it becomes invisible.