An article published this morning in the NY Times, titled « To Win Over Users, Gadgets Have to Be Touchable» notes how quickly tactile interfaces have been adopted by consumers, so quickly indeed that they now are frustrated whenever a device does not react, as they would expect, to a swipe or a tap.
Reinventing the Blog
September 21, 2010
In the past weeks, my team has been using a live subject for experiments. Unethical, I know, but how fun! We are basically taking the Pheromone Lab, now almost a venerable blog with a year or so in existence, and seeing how we can push it in a completely different direction: as a blog it was a very nice repository of thoughts and ideas. We knew some people were reading, but it felt like a museum in there.
So we are messing with it. Messing around. Messing it up. Because we think there may be another way: not quite a blog, not quite a forum, not quite a social network either – a place for fun, for inspiration, collaboration and innovation. Some of the interactions idea we are putting in place, such as giving comments first-class citizen status have had a fantastic impact already. The space is alive! Other ideas are not as mature, and sometimes they may be simply bad.
Phero Lab Early Sketch
Even though our work is focused and far from random, we know things will break. Mistakes will be made. That’s OK. I’m incredibly proud of our team dynamics here.
After months of working mostly on super-secret projects, internal or otherwise, advising clients on projects that may (or may not) see the light of day for another 18 months, it feels great to be working on something completely in the open. Like wearing very skimpy clothes after 6 months of winter.
It’s a Montreal thing, I guess…
Previous/Next
Can't Touch This
2010-09-09
Cultural adoption
2010-09-29
The Facebook "like" button, in the wild