Leavin’ on a jet plane? I was cruising through the applications, and found one from Trip Advisor called Local Picks (note to Trip Advisor: how about a better, more interesting name, yo). Trip Advisor is the tame version of Yelp!, and orientated around travel. Need to find a hotel? It’s there. Need to find a restaurants with a lot of reviews? It’s probably there.

That’s the cool thing about this application — it’s using already available information from it’s review database to present users with a great guide just like it’s website. I even found my favorite restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia (of course, it got a great review)!

I’m sure this is a direct ripoff from their Facebook application, but it would interesting if they tailored their application more towards the MySpace crowd; this application is a bit too adultish, and it would probably be well-served by adding a few categories, like most bizarre restaurant or most hip restaurant. It’s not very fun right now.

If they ever can get users to adopt the application, there are a ton of monetization opportunities, considering their advertising base — it currently has less than 1,000 installs. It’s probably not hip enough for MySpace, and Yelp! might do better.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 3
• Stability: 2
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

This is a bit off topic, because it’s of the dead trees variety, but this headline came across: Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs.

The timing isn’t as good as hopped, considering we’re in this thing called a recession, but this happened because a lot of newspapers treated their web properties like their print properties. Sure, the web have some very real expenses — those servers don’t come cheap, and there is that pesky thing called electricity — but it’s much less expensive than paying people to run the presses, a lot less expensive than cutting down a bunch of trees, and don’t get me started on the costs of dropping off one of those newspapers at everyone’s doorstep.

So by charging more, sites like Craigslist.org and Move.com ate them alive.

I like print!

I love print!

But print, as quick as it as happened, is dead as in George Carlin dead.

Companies keep on charging us the same for a digital product as they do for a product that has manufactured (software distributors like Adobe, publishers like the Wall Street Journal). At one point or another, we’re all going to wise up, yo.

They should take a page out of the ESPN’s book. ESPN is one of the most profitable entertainment entities on the planet, and they know how to play in multiple mediums better than anyone on the planet.

ESPN.com is an amazing (and the leading sports site), ESPN the network has about 20 or so properties it seems, and the print magazine has all but killed Sports Illustrated, because they are covering the whole media package.

I pay more for their Insider product than for their magazine, because I get the magazine for free as part of their Insider service. $4.95 a month, and more often than not, I read much more of their Insider content online. They have none of the legacy costs, and they’re able to leverage much more of their content (have you tried fitting a video clip on a newspaper page?), and get a higher CPM from their advertisers.

I imagine there isn’t a single newspaper executive that has thought of any of this, especially the management over at the Tribune, a company that owns many outlets of both video and print content, yet integrate none of that.

Use Rich Media With A Purpose

This is not a criticism — this is actually a compliment. Ted.com does an amazing job making Flash relevant with this page design, using large images are very prominent business and social leaders to create a very visual experience. Select an option on the left (say, technology), and the page reshuffles like a tag cloud to present new speakers. They could have built this using DHTML — the page still would have been fairly heavy — but it’s really aimed at an audience that already has a fat pipe to serve up this content.

Content can be ordered and sized by different faceted filters (woo hoo!), and if the visualization mode is too much for you, you can resort to a list view (how Web 1.0). You can even view the number of comments and times each was emailed to friends.

Another tip: it would be even cooler if the boxes could be dragged around and re-ordered to see certain topics large.

I was stuck on an airplane most of Thursday evening, so I cranked up the iPod Touch to watch “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.” To this day, it astounds me how funny and usable the interface is for the guide in the movie.

How many of us have conceptualize our designs this way? How many chicken scratches and doodles actually grow up to become a real product? Here are the paper sketches that were the beginnings of Twitter from Jack Dorsey’s Flickr.

Great article. Concise. Wish I had written it.

Some of us work for in-house UX groups and others work for agencies. Having been both an “innie” and an “outie,” I can vouch for the fact that I learned a lot more during my experience working for an agency. Here are the pros and cons.

Pros:

1) The variety of projects makes the work interesting and keeps you on your toes. You never work on one project at one time. You juggle multiple. You learn the nuances of many different kinds of technology and use models.

2) You sharpen your ability to think strategically in your design approach as well as selling your ideas. Since you are presenting your work to new stakeholders on a regular basis, you must justify design decisions with usability goals, business objectives, and/or metric indicators. Everything you put out there has to be polished and your best work. It’s like being a new employee every couple week and you have to prove yourself to a new set of bosses.

3) You learn to work and adapt with many different organizations and teams. Every organization has a different working style and organizational structure. That affects communication and approvals. This requires that you are quick on your feet, since you’ll be constantly drilled by clients. Even when they love what you do, they still drill you.

4) You become a walking encyclopedia of the best on the web. Because of the variety of projects you are exposed to, regular research and analysis are part of the job, even when you are not on the job.

5) Shorter time lines means quicker decisions and launches. After working at an agency, I get impatient at how slow decisions are made and how long it takes in-house groups to develop.

Cons:

1) Lots of pressure to always deliver the best work. When large companies pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they expect you to bring your A game and think outside the box EVERYTIME, so the pressure is intense.

2) A shorter time line and finite budget creates pressure to be extremely efficient. Agencies make their money by being billable, therefore most of your time should be billable. There’s little down time to try out different ideas. Also, when companies hire an agency, they need it done yesterday, so you’re expected to be super creative at breakneck speed.

3) Pay is not as good as working for a large corporation with an in-house group.
I no longer work for an agency, because now I can charge more working for myself. However, I think the experience is valuable. I’m so glad that I did it. Best learning experience I ever had.

She’s is a Business Analyst/User Experience Consultant in San Diego, CA. Ha has worked for Hasbro, NPR Music, Fisher Price, KCRW Media Player which received an Honorable Mentions from the Webby for Best Practices. Ha has also designed games and Business Process Applications.

Welcome aboard! If anyone else wants to contribute, let me know at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

Want to save the world? You can do it one friend at a time with an application called Causes. You can join an already established cause, or start your own. Helping get friends to join the cause raises its ranking within all of the causes, and the ranking system that shows not only what you have done, but what others have done within the last day, week, month and all time.

More importantly, you can donate to a cause, and the application shows how much money has been donated to particular causes, and add content via videos and comments about that cause. You can also edit the content that is contained within your user profile, and encourage your friends to donate. Because of this, some of the causes have already raised thousands of dollars.

The usability of this application is the best I have seen so far out of the applications — the amount of detail in the application for this outstrips applications by some of the professional companies that are part of the MySpace platform. The only knock against it was the first time I visited the application, it was broken from stability issues.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 3
• Monetization Opportunities: 4