Good experience: An article on customer experience research seems to echo my ealier statement about using simple methods to test and analyze the customer experience. The example given is that of Hallmark founder Joyce C. Hall conducting research in 1915, which was obviously successful. From the text…

bq.. Here’s what Joyce didn’t do:

• Create tasks for customers. “You want to find a ‘Happy 20th

Anniversary’ card that isn’t too sentimental. Ready? Go.”

• Ask abstract, focus group-style questions: “If you could design

any sort of greeting card, what would it be?”

• Rely on surveys or a statistical sample. “In surveys of 500 card

buyers, they rated ‘funny’ second out of five criteria.

• Use a complicated framework. “The analysis of the customers’

mental model yields a semi-continuous persona in this ontological

ethnographic visualization.”

Jessica’s mom, who hasn’t paid a penny of child support for around 12 years, called today to let me know that she saw a nice car in the newspaper - in case I was planning on buying one for Jess.

Hey, thanks for the tip.

There’s a long, but interesting thread discussing software development outsourcing on Joel Spolky’s site

My guess is that everyone’s already seen Drew Cope’s Drum Machine, but I hadn’t. Neato.

Eric Meyer thinks that Weblogs are broken, in that they show the most recent entries first, and of course that’s not how we read books, so we should switch things around to read “normally”

Two thoughts on that,

A. We don’t read weblogs the same way as anything else, so different is not by definition wrong.

B. Even if it is wrong, changing it now is a bad idea. I was all confused reading his blog, then I realized that he actually had switched the order of his entries around. Like watching Memento backwards.

I just now caught up on my RSS feeds after a brief vacation.

And I’m confused, so I’m going to make a few random statements/observations that today feel absolutely right on - sort of. Talk to me again tomorrow and we’ll see where we are.

1. As bad as web browsers are at being a usable application platform, we’ll be using them for quite a long time to come.

2. Web site accessibility can be a happy byproduct of standards-compliant design, but very few web developers give a shit.

3. 90% of a web site’s usability problems can be solved by a small team of experienced developers and a couple hours watching people use it.

4. The best web sites start with content and/or tools, then design around them. No need for “layout grids.” If you have a Template System™ without any actual content, you’ve done something wrong.

5. Flash is cool, I just can’t seem to figure out what to do with/about it.

6. No one cares what you call yourself - Web Developer, Web Designer, Interaction Designer, yada yada yada. Stop worrying about it.

7. Wikis rock, if only I could get people to actually use one.

8. My favorite quote comes from someone answering the question, “Why do all CSS websites look the same?” His answer: “I don’t know, why do all books look the same?”

How T.M. and I sometimes tend to think alike is beyond me, but it happens. Earlier posts by said Mr. Camp are particularly relevant.

First, the bit about cell phone conversations being annoying. fucking annoying is how I believe he put it. He, and Mr. Nielsen are spot on about that. A similar observation I made recently is that people on airplanes or in airport terminals tend to talk to each other quietly and only when absolutely necessary. Yet many of these same people will squawk away incessantly on their cell phones about who-cares-what–and loudly. Please note that I hate that.

Also, theology-wise his questions on the Church’s role in the exploration of things were also touched upon in the previously-mentioned D.F.W’s Compact History of Infinity. W/r/t the fact that Aristotle’s doctrine, that is of infinity as an abstract fiction and the province of God alone, became Church dogma, thereby stifling centuries of mathematical achievements by the Greeks and delaying real progress in that area until nearly the 18th century.

And I’ll assume that the gay vacation link was some sort of snipurl anomaly and leave it at that.

Jessica and I, sitting on the plane en route from West Palm Beach to Cincinnati. I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More. A Compact History of Infinity while she thumbs through the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine. There’s a story there. Not sure how it reads, but I can’t wait to see how it ends.

I like to think that I have a sense for what upcoming films are going to be dogs. Or I used to, anyway. I was wrong about School of Rock and it looks as if I may have been wrong about Hellboy. I might have had a different outlook had I realized that Ron Perlman stars as Hellboy. Reminds me that I haven’t seen City of Lost Children in a long time.

Off to Netflix to update my Queue.