I wasn’t in New York on 9/11. I don’t have the stories of a Dan Saffer and Jeffrey Zeldman.
But I was there with now my ex-girlfriend before and after, and vividly remember each experience.
We had visited the World Trade Center in November 2000 as part of a vacation.
I remember how vast the place was: looking up and not being able to see the top of the buildings. Ironically one of the photos we took looks a lot like the hoax photo that floats around periodically. We walked around the shopping center underneath the towers.
I still have the full size station map of the New York Subway system framed, on the wall. It’s pre-9/11, so it’s missing a few lines and has a few stations that no longer exist.
We went back a few years later, and I remember how sad visiting Ground Zero was.
It just a big empty hole in the ground. It was a very solemn space, people peering through the chain link fences to a what was a construction site.
We went at the start of the Iraq War, and the scenes of National Guard patrolling JFK with semi-automatic rifles drawn was a common sight then. The city seemed on edge, wondering what risks the war would bring.
That day I was driving to work when I heard the news.
By the time I turned on the radio, the towers were down. I had to pull over for a few minutes just to realize the seriousness of it all.
We had to solve issues at work like “how do we stop at the timed transactions that depend on shipments” and “what do we do about deliveries to Manhattan?” Not the problems that some of my friends had — one friend’s father works in the reinsurance industry, and lost friends — but still situations nonetheless.
I ended up helping with a message board that I helped run during that time, because most of the people on the board lived in New York City. They had a hard time getting information out because WTC had a lot of main trunk lines going through it. They were a news source in a time that needed.
Looking back, I don’t think we have learned enough. We focus way too much on our own tragedies.
We should remember 9/11 but we also should remember their are vents that affect the lives of many more people. Our evening news is too often concerned with the person who was killed down the street when we forget about the 200 who died in bombings in other countries.
We need to put 9/11 in perspective so it can find it’s proper place in world history.
The longer we think we are the center are the world, the more risk we are to repeat 9/11.
This is what I’m greeted with at Vancouver International Airport using my iPhone. (San Francisco International Airport isn’t much better — their new system may be worse.)
Can you find the Agree button?
Can you read any of the text?
Can we please spend the hour or so to create a mobile friendly sign in screen for WiFi?
I’ll do the programming and design myself.
According to a report in Bloomberg Yelp is scaling back on the sales resources devoted to selling Yelp Deals.
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“Rather than offer more and more deals of inherently declining quality to more and more folks over time, we want to make sure we’re only providing good, quality opportunities,” Vince Sollitto, vice president of corporate communications, said in an interview. “While we think the deals business is a good one, it has never been a core focus of our offering.”
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Here’s an anecdote in a Bloomberg piece that sums up some of what’s going on with merchants and all the sales calls they’re receiving:
Merchants say that participating in the deals often leads to unsolicited calls from other coupon sites. After Kiebpoli Calnek ran a Yelp Deal advertising 50 percent off an aerial performance class in July, she began receiving calls from representatives of Groupon, LivingSocial and other deal sites every day.
“They send me e-mails, they call me, they call me again,” said Calnek, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. “I told them, ‘I’m burnt out from this deal. I have 500 new clients. Why would I want to do another one?’”
Are we hitting a wall in daily deal sites?
How believable is the pagerank algorithm if the primary results are always Google destinations?
A Google screenshot.
Why would I want to click on Google’s reviews? There’s less of them.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Representatives of some large websites–including Yelp, TripAdvisor and WebMD–have complained that Google is attempting to draw more traffic to its new local-business, shopping and health sites, among others, by linking to Google pages above its natural search results. They say that practice gives Google an unfair advantage and siphons away Web traffic and ad dollars.
Google’s Maslan said that when “someone searches for a place on Google, we still provide the usual web results linking to great sites; we simply organize those results around places to make it much faster to find what you’re looking for.”
He added that “at the end of the day, users come first. If we fail our users, competition is just a click away.”
Note to Google: You’re failing the users.
Google is like the yellow pages: you get listed no matter what. Google has made a ton of money off of indexing and ranking content (by selling the equivalent of yellow pages display ads). If AT&T all of a sudden decided to open a bunch of restaurants and started leaving off listings of other restaurants, someone would complain.
Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we’ve heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages. Rating and review counts reflect only those that’ve been written by fellow Google users, and as part of our continued commitment to helping you find what you want on the web, we’re continuing to provide links to other review sites so you can get a comprehensive view of locations across the globe.
Sure, it’s their product, but this doesn’t serve the user at all what Google does best — find relevant content on the web. This paragraph is a complete contradiction.
What it really appears is they used “other’s people content” to build a skeleton, and now are trying to grow their own user generated content (with lacklaster results, as the screenshot above proved). This undermines their credibility.
Google has to decide if they’re a search engine/portal or a destination site. If they’re a search engine/portal, they should stay out of the review business.
The title isn’t the title of the article, but should be. Every UX designer (and probably everyone who works for your company) must read this article:
Warren Buffett talks about building a moat around your business to make it untouchable. The strongest moat you can build is one based on strong relationships. Low prices can always be beaten. Stunning design ages quickly and can easily be copied. Impeccable uptime can be matched, and your features copied. However, a good customer relationship is unique, and loyal customers are hard to steal.
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Great experiences are about getting everything right; it goes well beyond fancy sign-up forms, cute mails and game-ified tutorials. Sure, all those things help, but the customer experience has to be comprehensive. Quality is fractal. Your customers will judge your company based on all of the experiences they have with it, not just those dripping with CSS3 effects. Using a touchpoint matrix such as the one above will help ensure that you’re considering all of the experiences your customers will have.
It’s almost never about price, because it’s so hard to change to a competitor (especially in SaaS software environments). If you start making decisions that are contradict what the customers want, you’ll lose them.
Every touch point is important — from features you build to unparalleled customer service.
Pearn Kandola’s chief researcher, a kindly and upbeat psychologist named Stuart Duff, was shocked at the findings. He assumed it would be the quants, the introverts and the shy types who would thrive in a virtual work situation. After all, they’re the ones who keep their heads burrowed in cubicles at work. Turns out it’s the extoverts among us who are better suited to going Bedouin. “The penny really dropped for us,” he says.
Duff and his researcher colleagues found that it’s the employees who chase socialization who thrive in the land of virtual work. The office gabbers. Those who are life of the break-room party. Left on their own, these types of workers are the ones who work closely with clients, chum around with colleagues, and talk it up with bosses. They stay connected no matter where they are. It comes naturally to them.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
