In the corporate boardroom, Innovation has moved beyond the fad stage and has now become an enterprise mandate. Problem is, ordering your institution to innovate is akin to a gym teacher ordering the class to meditate. (“OK CLASS, TODAY WE’RE GOING TO MEDITATE. BEGIN. ONE. TWO. MEDITATE. THREE. FOUR. MEDITATE. SPOOL! YOU’RE NOT MEDITATING!” Is [...]

A few years back, Blockbuster, the video rental business, launched an amazing new service. Customers could select movies from the company’s web site, which Blockbuster would mail to their home. The customers could take as long as they wanted to watch the videos, returning the DVDs any time without late fees, all for a recurring [...]

Flickr, the online photosharing web site, changed everything for web applications. Flickr was one of the first instances where developers combined elements of Flash and AJAX in a seamless form, along with the HTML page.
What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an [...]

In this podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kane. Sean helped build one of the world’s most successful web applications as the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. Last year, Sean left Netflix to co-found Get Listed, a start-up that is going to revolutionize the job search business.

Moving from a mature organization that understands the role of experience design to a brand-new start-up environment without any of the same infrastructure or support can be a real challenge. A challenge that is not unlike the challenge that many UX practitioners face when trying to bootstrap their user experience efforts in a growing organization.

 

 SpoolCast- Starting a Web Experience from Scratch with Sean Kane [32:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it lead to some very interesting discussion, both at the conference and on blogs and discussion lists everywhere.
I’ve posted the slides above and have synched [...]

Almost every company has to struggle with the balance between customer needs and internal business objectives. In this episode the crew examines the recent situation at Facebook. While trying to please both users and build a business model, the fast moving organization has stepped on many toes.

 

 SpoolCast Crew Episode 7 - The Book of Face [01:18:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over the last 7 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at producing great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to [...]

Slideshare.net’s Slidecast technology is pretty slick.
With very little effort, I easily added the soundtrack to the slides I’d uploaded earlier:

| View | Upload your own

Kudos to Rashmi, Jon, and the folks at Slideshare.
Thanks to Andy Budd at d.Construct 2007 for letting me use the audio.
[Note: the slides don't completely match the audio, as I [...]

A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique.
Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reaction:
A few months back you kindly responded to my inquiry about facilitating a KJ Analysis session. The team did a great job and I was relieved as a couple of [...]

Someone in eBay’s user experience group must’ve rubbed the belly of a magic lamp last quarter, because a wish was definitely granted.