KonzeptioNerd

Ha-ha surveillance state

Whenever I travel with Deutsche Bahn, I rest assured that the surveillance state is a logistic feat that humankind will not achieve in my lifetime.

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Bottle business - how user testing might have saved my shirt

If you’re familiar with German meeting rooms, you probably know the single serving Granini juice bottle that are often part of the catering: stubby little glass bottles with wide necks and nubbed bodies. There’s a typical gesture to drinking Granini from those small bottles. Grab the neck with your right hand. Place your thumb firmly [...]

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Miscellaneous Museum

In a recent alterbox-newsletter, Jakob Nielsen excuses England’s King George III for the unevolved information architecture of his coin collection. We learn four things, says Nielsen:

Alphabetical order is usually a bad way to structure items.
For a better structure, you need to understand the underlying dimensions of interest.
New info may cause you to restructure things for [...]

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To name is to create (on Mark Bernstein on Wikis)

Mark Bernstein asks interesting things about Wikis these days, for example: is it possible to link ironically, or lyrically, in a wiki?. Mark argues that “to name is to link” and that “a link to SomePage goes to that page; it can’t easily lead to a commentary or a rebuttal or an alternative or an [...]

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Useful Week, London

I am (well, was) in London for Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week and there’s no Wireless in the conference room. There’s not even electricity. I failed to charge my MacBook during the first night, but even if I had, my batteries wouldn’t last through eight hours of structured note taking. Then again, with airport off, they [...]

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