What do you do?

“I figure out what a web site or application needs to do, and why, and then design how people will perform those tasks.”
Robert Hoekman

“Remember the last time you were yelling at your insert device here? Interaction Designers are being brought in to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Shaun Bergman

“UX folks create the underlying framework and skeleton and logic of a site, and work very closely with the designers, to make it not only beautiful, but usable, too.”
Joanne Weaver

it’s like a normal architect, but instead of buildings, I plan websites.
Jane Mountain

I just pull out my iPhone. Seriously. Works every time!
Uday Gajendar

“I design software and websites that people don’t hate.”
Michael Micheletti

“I make computers more human so that humans can act less like computers.”
Michael Williamson

Find more social introductions in this IxDA thread      

A few posts ago I argued that users should not be the only ones profiled by persona archetypes.

Philip wrote an interesting comment. He has been designing telephone voice interfaces (“press the # sign..”) for more than ten years, and has in fact used personas for his applications. Look for his experience based advice in his comment.

Amazon: Voice user interface (look inside – Google Books)

Here it is!
Googling a bit further I found exactly what I was talking about. In a four years old discussion thread on IxDA, Ben Hunt describes his process, with the “conversation” between the user persona and the site persona.

I have a pet SP called Pierre, who’s a concierge in a high-class hotel. There are several aspects of Pierre’s style that I find really useful in designing web sites, including:

His brevity: he only communicates the minimum information required to communicate what needs to be communicated.

His low demand: he only asks for the minimum of input and information; he makes up the rest through intelligence, memory, note-taking and experience.

His modesty: he doesn’t draw glory to himself; his satisfaction comes solely from helping his clients achieve their goals.

His proactivity: he’s always anticipating what customers may want next even before they’ve thought of it themselves.

Good stuff. Another point coming across in both the voice and site parts mentioned here, is that the application (or site) persona would be able to act as a proxy for the sometimes abstract brand values.

(more…)

Quite often you need something you don’t want to own. A projector for a Kill Bill marathon night. An XBox. A munk costume (don’t ask). A bike.

You ask friends, and most often they don’t want to admit that they have it, or they don’t answer their phones, which of course you shouldn’t take personally.

Rent-alore is Ebay for renting, and so far most of the items are in Copenhagen, so get ready for financial crisis and rent out your stuff.

Projector, 1100 Lumens 20 DKK / day

Monk costume, one size 20 DKK / day

Xbox and two games 19 DKK / day

Pilen bike 10 DKK / day

Bonus tip: A user lets you rent his bike for 10 DKK a day. It’s a 4000 kroner bike, meaning you would have spent the full amount after 400 days. If you’re careful, that’s exactly how long you get to keep your bike before it gets stolen, so make sure you return it before that happens.

Almost every day I wonder why I haven’t seen this app before – in my operating system or anywhere: An app that makes sure only one sound source is played at a time: The most recent.

You could imagine a preference panel with tweaks such as prioritizing sound sources, ignoring banner ads, or maybe iTunes would be paused instead of muted. But the basics sketched above would make my sound experience so much better.

So, does it exist? If not, please steal the idea.

Alex, the new voice in Leopard is amazingly natural. But who uses the text-to-speech feature on a daily basis? Me, never. A shame, though, to let such a cool technology alone in the dark (or whatever lightening they have where they use it). I would use it if

• It was a feature in Safari on my iPhone
• I could pause it when reading aloud on my desktop

Yesterday, when listening to an email from the guy across from my desk, I realised it actually breathes. Complementing the illusion of a professional speaker person reading aloud, it has built-in lung capacity, and it’s quite convincing. Listen (wait for the idiot to finish typing):

In fact, when Alex speaks a long passage, you’ll even hear him breathe. Apple built human lung capacity and human sentence parsing into its speech synthesizer, so Alex would sound more like us when he speaks. The synthesizer inserts a breath based on a variety of factors: appropriateness, the structure of the text being read, the time since the last breath, and the time until Alex finishes speaking.

Apple: Voice over in depth

Steffen found this cool mix of Ruby, Shazam, packet sniffing and last.fm. He then wrote some proof of concept Python scripts to run locally on a jailbreaked iPhone. We agreed it would be pretty neat to rebuild one of my Now Playing screens into a Last.fm one and use that for the project.

So here’s how it works

And here it is, working (the first two songs are demos of the nowplaying screen)

Over the air scrobbling and displaying from Morten Just on Vimeo.