Last Thursday I attended the monthly SwissCHI meeting. That evening's topic was "Prototyping of Rich Internet Applications" – Andreas Binggeli, Marc Blume and Yuan-Yuan Sun presented their Master's thesis (from their MASHCID studies). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, paper prototypes compared really well to more elaborate prototypes done in Axure RP Pro or realized using Ajax-y [...]

November 8 saw this year's worldwide No. 1 usability event – the World Usability Day, conceived by the international Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and carried out in 23 countries by local UPA chapters or other interested parties. I took part in the event in Hamburg, Germany, which attracted over 300 people from industry, administration, and [...]

There's a great slide show by Jan Miksovsky on dialogs and how the users perceive them … inspiring!http://www.slideshare.net/blider/designing-around-dialogs

Today, I watched the video of Steve Wozniak, the hardware engineer of the Apple I and II and one of the founders of Apple (Computers) Inc., giving a speech at Google HQ in Mountain View. It was an eye-opening experience – the enthusiasm, fascination, and dedication "Woz" brought across. But see for yourself …

Switzerland is very beautiful. You've got the tremendous landscape – the distant Alps, the blue lakes, green meadows. And Switzerland is very prosperous. I've stopped counting the number of extremely expensive cars I've seen these last weeks (Aston-Martins, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, Lamborghinis). Zürich especially "breathes" money and stability. The quality of service is impressive – [...]

In August 2006, AOL Germany launched the AOL Phone Box, an AOL-branded ADSL 2+ modem / router with integrated 4-port Ethernet switch and VoIP telephony functionality. When we started working on the AOL Phone Box project more than a year ago, the AOL Germany world looked quite a bit different: AOL was one of Germany's [...]

You'll all have heard about it – Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. (no more "Apple Computers Inc.") has demonstrated the upcoming iPhone, to be released in June 07 in the US (in Q4 in Europe, in Asia probably 2008). The iPhone features just one button ("Home"), a giant touch-sensitive screen with "Multi touch" abilities and [...]

Just a quick note on a user experience that was just the way it should be: Last week I bought a musical device, a Fireware audio interface. A MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn) 828mkII. Actually, it’s not much of an instrument but rather a computer extension. It is used to connect external audio sources [...]

Just stumbled across a phantastic prototype video (the BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype) by the Digital Graphics Project at the University of Toronto that’s illustrating some cool new interaction techniques for desktop object manipulation. It’s building on the idea of Piles (that’s an older concept Apple still holds the patent on) and using gestures to [...]

Amongst the few convictions I hold, this is a pretty central one:
You can respect your customers, treat them well – and still do good business.