Tag Archives | usability

Yahoo! Homepage Redeisgn: Reduced Clutter

Posted on October 28, 2008 in website design

Yahoo! is doing a major homepage redesign, and here’s a screen cap I came across. Notice how clean and simplified it looks — with very clear sections for different types of user tasks and functionality, and minimal content — it really prioritizes what’s important, and cuts out the clutter. IMHO, this gives Google a competitive [...]

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Myspace, A Place For CAPTCHAs

Posted on August 14, 2008 in social media, usability

Using MySpace these days, you come across more CAPTCHAs than you do content. It’s frustrating “solving” these all the time, and sometimes downright ridiculous. In the words of my former boss, Harley Manning, “You can’t annoy someone into liking your brand.”

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Twitter Gets A Can Of Site Downtime Whoopassss

Posted on June 26, 2008 in customer experience, social media

Twitter, the ever-popular microblogging service, has had major site outages and bugs lately. And the usually enthusiastic Twitter user-base is growing frustrated 140-characters at a time. So if Twitter doesn’t recover soon, they may never recover at all. This site is becoming a great example for companies of how important basic service features are, like [...]

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Some Thoughts on MySpace’s Redesign

Posted on June 18, 2008 in social media, usability

MySpace is rolling out their new re-design, as of yesterday, which the brilliant folks at Adaptive Path played a large part in. I’m always impressed by their work, but I was surprised by the screenshots of the redesign I saw on Valleywag who notes: “When Fox Interactive began interviewing Web designers for the job last [...]

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ETC Lessons: Themed Entertainment Principals

Posted on February 15, 2008 in design, gaming

Rummaging through old course notes I took during grad school at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, I came across this simple list of “themed entertainment principals.” Whether its a video game, or virtual world you’re building, these three design principals are ones to follow: Know your story. From the dramatic arc you create, to the [...]

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